TAGGING REVISITED

Tagging—that’s what I did when I worked for a drycleaner, many long years ago. I tagged, sorted, and bagged clothing, among other perfectly dreadful tasks. From what I can tell, not much has changed in the dry cleaning business, except that these days my dry cleaner’s cash register thanks me and says goodbye. As for the Internet, so much has changed that it’s a little daunting to keep up with it. Which brings me back to tagging. On the Internet, I tag once again, but it is much more fun than it was at the dry cleaners!

My return to tagging occurred just this past week, as I spent time on a site familiar to many, but new to me: del.icio.us. Wikipedia defines del.icio.us as “a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks." It is now part of Yahoo, and its acquisition by Yahoo remains the highest profile acquisition of its kind. At the risk of stating the obvious, del.icio.us is not the only social bookmarking web service in the land. There are others such as Furl and Shadows, many with a more targeted focus, and most of them unknown to me at this point in time.

del.icio.us, like Furl and Shadows, may be described as a broad folksonomy tool, which to my understanding means that there is a lot of tagging. Unfettered tagging promotes personal refindability and creates value for users. So says Thomas Vander Wal who is credited with coining the word “folksonomy” to describe what was happening on the Web. Wikipedia tells us that “a folksonomy is a user-generated taxonomy used to categorize and retrieve items from the Web, such as Web pages, photographs, links, and other Web content.” Obviously, a folksonomy is not a professionally developed taxonomy with a controlled vocabulary. From what I see on del.icio.us, that would be correct. With the exception of labeling suggestions that del.icio.us users are free to ignore, there’s nothing controlled about the labeling process on the site. Moreover, folksonomy should not be confused with folk taxonomies. True. According to Wikipedia, folk taxonomies are “culturally supplied, intergenerationally transmitted, and relatively stable classification systems that people in a given culture use to make sense of the entire world around them, not just the Internet.” What goes on at del.icio.us does not, at this time, appear to be a classification system for the ages. It seems more like a random cataloguing process that’s done by us, the folks, as George Bush 2 calls us. This process has its hazards. But, if you keep in mind that people like me are still writing down URLs or forgetting sites entirely, it’s a real boon to be able to tag and store web content in one tidy spot, and then share this information with others.

Ok. So what did I tag and why? Well, I tagged sites and articles—ten of them—that I thought might interest technical writers, of course. Have a look at my del.icio.us favorites. You’ll mainly find resources for web design and usability. Writers Write is a resource for all writers, including technical ones. I liked This Is Broken, a site where users can air problems of all kinds—bad experiences on the Web, bad customer service, maybe even bad directions produced by technical writers! I loved librarian.net. The feisty blog author, Jessamyn, has been “putting the rarin’ back in librarian since 1999.” Jessamyn focuses on the intersection between libraries and technology, and I tagged her blog because she said something somewhere in there to allay my worries about Web 2.0 and the seeming hodge-podge that is social bookmarking. In response to the question raised in the video, The Machine is Us/ing Us, and that is, who will organize all the anticipated content on the Web 2.0, our friend, Jessamyn, confidently answered “librarians will.” I was much relieved. While I love the idea of a read/write Web and especially enjoy bookmarking for my personal use, we just can’t organize the Web in this way, can we? Don't we need an electoral college of Web 2.0 to control the masses?

Well, maybe not. Maybe our collective wisdom will allow the cream to rise. Also, as regards to social bookmarking, think of the knowledge that may be shared worldwide by professionals, academics, and students, not so much so on sites like del.icio.us, but in other more scholarly bookmarking communities.

Yes, of course. But just as I am gaining confidence in all of this, The Philadelphia Inquirer publishes an article entitled, Wikipedia pioneer launches a 'better free encyclopedia.' I always wondered about Wikipedia. It's ok for some purposes, but it's no Encyclopedia Britannica. I don't think it's even the Funk and Wagnalis encyclopedia I tried to collect as a kid, diligently buying one volume a week at the supermarket, and hoping I didn't miss any. At any rate, you'll find the full article about Wikipedia among my del.icio.us favorites. Read it, and find out who killed and ate JFK!

FLASH FORWARD

On his website, French designer Mathieu Badimon presents new possibilities for designing in Flash—new now, but these will shortly be les applications du jour. Visit and play with his fascinating and entertaining array of lab experiments to see what’s in store. Liquid form and gravity ball are especially amazing to me, but all of Badimon’s designs demonstrate what can be achieved with Flash and intense scripting.

The simplicity of the site’s appearance certainly belies the complexity behind it. Badimon’s selection of simple shapes and colors are just right, and he combines them expertly to create a game board of sorts, which lends an extra element of play to this exercise. The navigation tabs allow the user to control the orientation of both the game board and the activity within each square, offering all sorts of 3-D angles and a near endless assortment of views. Navigation is easy, even for a non-NetGen user like me. It occurs to me that maybe the NetGen user would find Badimon’s activities to be a little ho-hum, but I remember when telephones were rented from the phone company, and so perhaps I have a different threshold for surprise.

Speaking of surprise, there is a German website for an ad campaign about horses that is well worth checking out, if you are at all interested in innovative uses of Flash Video. The video is dramatic, captivating, and brings the horses up close and personal, as they snort and cavort through diverse landscapes. (Actually, they gallop, but I like to rhyme). Anyway, the site displays in full picture, with the Flash navigation bar remaining wisely hidden throughout the video. I admit, however, to worriedly seeking navigation while the film ran by clicking near the progress bar. "Good move," I thought, as the navigation appeared. Next thought: "Am I old? Does the need to see website navigation right away place me squarely within an older generation of less confident users?" Could be—or perhaps I’m just a control freak. (I think I'll go with that)! In any case, I imagine that many users, especially younger ones, would simply wait for the navigation bar to appear, and it does. So, when you enter this site, remember that there is no need to hunt for navigation. It's coming. Just relax and enjoy this fine work.

Oh yes, the link to the site. It's also coming. Here it is.

WEB 2.0 II

In their March 10-16, 2007 publication, The Economist featured an article on Tim Berners-Lee and his outlook on Web 2.0. Not surprisingly, Berners-Lee is especially "excited about three areas of the web's development: its spread to millions of new users via mobile devices, the growing interest in the technology's social and political impact and the 'semantic' web, in which information is labeled so that it makes sense to machines as well as people." It's definitely worth a click to read the full article!

WEB 2.0 PRIMER

Web 2.0 refers to a process that is occurring within the Web. Some say the Web is growing up, that it is witnessing a maturation process, and they accept Web 2.0 as conventional wisdom. Others have a more “wait and see” attitude at best, or they decry Web 2.0 as nothing more than marketing hype. Still others think that Web 2.0 offers the possibility to change the world.

The word “Web 2.0” was coined by Tim O’Reilly, of O’Reilly Media, Inc. In an article entitled quite simply, What Is Web 2.0, O’Reilly provides a detailed description of Web 2.0 that is interesting, if somewhat complicated for the layperson. If you think about it a bit, though, it’s really not that complicated. Most of us who have been on the Web at all, even those of us who are indifferent or impervious to developments such as Web 2.0, have bumped into it on eBay or Wikipedia. Still, here are the cliff notes!

O’Reilly tells us that Web 2.0 doesn’t have a boundary, but rather, a gravitational core. He envisions Web 2.0 as “a set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles at a varying distance from the core.” His meme map, pictured below, shows what he means. (Click on the image to view or print out a better version).

In O’Reilly’s interpretation of Web 2.0, the Web is positioned as platform and the user positioned to control his or her own data. Companies that demonstrate Web 2.0 qualities are pictured in the green ovals above the orange square, with those closest to the square exhibiting the most Web 2.0 characteristics. The more of the following qualities that a company exhibits, the more Web 2.0-oriented it is:

• Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
• Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
• Trusting users as co-developers
• Harnessing collective intelligence
• Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
• Software above the level of a single device
• Lightweight user interfaces, development models, and business model

Unlike Amazon, a company such as Barnes and Noble, for example, would not be described as Web 2.0-based, even though they sell the same products. Amazon’s trademark is “user engagement,” and they utilize the results from such, that is, the wisdom of the masses, to lead customers to the most popular items first. Barnes and Noble, on the other hand, is smaller, features less user participation, and a search on their site is likely to yield the company’s products first. Their business model is presumably more traditional than Amazon’s.

That some Web 2.0-based companies claim not to possess or be able to describe their business model has been worrisome to some observers who blog on the Web 2.0 phenomenon. Among these bloggers is Mark Evans, who provides a distinctly Canadian perspective on the world of telecom and technology. Others such as Dion Hinchcliff, a self-described Bubble 1.0 survivor, acknowledge that there’s a lot of money to be made and a lot of “stuff” being made for Web 2.0, and wouldn’t we love to cash in, but they’re watching to see if we’re headed for another version of the 90’s dot.com bubble. Then there are those who exhibit open antipathy toward alleged Web 2.0 hype, as found in humorous sites such as EmptyBottle.org.

In his article, What is this thing called Web 2.0?, Kenneth Ronkowitz, Adjunct Instructor at New Jersey Institute of Technology, lists a number of current Web 2.0 applications. His list got me thinking about the implications of Web 2.0 for non-profit organizations (NPOs). Web 2.0, after all, appears to democratize the web in many respects—at least it seems so at this point. According to Thomas L. Friedman, Web 2.0—the technology, culture and business—mashes geography and flattens the world. Indeed! Besides this, another happy reality for NPOs is that many web tools and applications are free or low-cost. Thus, it is not surprising to find a growing number of services and applications targeting the fundraising and social networking needs of non-profit organizations.

Daniel Ben-Horin, founder of CompuMentor, NetSquared, and its subsidiary TechSoup, was quoted by MSNBC in a June 2006 article as follows: “Information technology is moving away from what nonprofits have the least of (money) and toward what we have the most of (people and community). Web 2.0 is a buzzword that may not last, but the social Web will, and what we’re seeing now is just the beginning."

He's right about that. Web 2.0 is the beginning of an adventure--for commerce, for non-profits, for many, if not all of us. The MSNBC article should serve to remind us that there are those who will be left out--the elderly, those without access, those whom non-profits serve. There are those, too, who may be endangered by the ability to more easily express their opinions from dangerous places. In addition, the of growth of Web 2.0 ushers in an era of greater concern about copyright, governance, privacy and numerous other issues that were cited in this blog several posts ago in relation to the Michael Wesch video, The Machine is Us/ing Us. As with many social trends and technological developments, Web 2.0 presents promise as well as problems. It will take time to understand and figure it all out.

VISUAL DESIGN STYLE

In The Devil Wears Prada, Meryl Streep tells her young assistant that she has no style. Ouch! What precisely is Ms. Streep’s character looking for? Rightly or wrongly, she obviously wants to see more flair and visual appeal. For her, there is something missing that enhances desirability. This would seem to be the core issue for any designer or visual design style, whether on the web, in photography, in packaging, and beyond, i.e., how to enhance desirability by appealing to our aesthetic sense and our emotions

Creating desirability varies across media and depends on the purpose and content of the piece. If we compare a few websites, we find differences in design style depending on their purpose and how market-driven they are. On Apple’s website, they open immediately and effectively with "hot news"--a montage of film clips that contains famous "hello's" from the movies to introduce their new iPhone. (By the time you read this, however, it may have been changed to something else, but it was great)! It would seem that the montage was timed to coincide with the 79th Annual Academy Awards, and it worked beautifully on TV in the days leading up to the show and even thereafter. The advertisement is simple, classic, engaging, entertaining and effective, and this seems to be Apple’s trademark design style from their unmistakable and memorable logo to their elegant video, print and web advertisements. We are intrigued and pulled in. Maybe we’ll even buy some of their attractively designed items. Contrast this with Bank of America’s website. Their logo, too, is well-known, uses the American colors, and appears throughout. On their websites, both Apple and Bank of America make good use of redundancy to give context and order to complex information. The websites are readable, uncluttered and useable, but we expect a more sedate image and design style from a bank, and we get it, which is probably intended to give a feeling of stability (even as banks routinely gobble each other up)! The bank’s website is also more task-driven. Many users are simply doing their online banking, not looking for fashion, attractive electronics, or entertainment.

In a bit of a different vein, the U.S. World Wildlife Federation website is also well-known and attractive. It has great deal of text. The text imparts a serious tone, and supplies much information that those attracted to the cause will likely get through. If they don’t, there are other interesting pages to scan or read more thoroughly, including a fun and games page. The panda logo appears on every page, and each is filled with beautiful photos—no video. The WWF design style is simple, serious, and attractive, and their website is very easily navigable and eminently useable. The elegance and sex appeal we get from Apple is not called for here, and would probably be counterproductive. Nonetheless, WWF is certainly marketing itself with their design style, albeit quite differently than Apple or the bank.

By developing and applying a recognizable design style, a company or visual artist makes themselves known, often with few words or no words at all. Thus, they maintain and attract the attention of their existing audience, and by repetition and variations on the theme, they can grow their base--especially if quality products are behind the visuals!