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CEO at Econsultancy
06 December 2005 10:52am
What do other people think about the so called "Web 2.0"?
Maybe I'm missing something but it seems to me to be in danger of becoming hyped dotcom-style when there are much more important, and commercially significant, stories still to be told in the mainstream media (e.g. Affiliate Marketing).
The most succinct (and amusing) summary of what Web 2.0 represents that I've seen is this Web 2.0 Checklist:
Ashley
Founder and Editor in Chief at Internet Retailing
06 December 2005 15:31pm
On 10:52:47 6 December 2005 Ashley wrote:
I'm sure that if you're purely thinking of where to spend marketing/acquisition effort, Ashley, then evangelising about web2 ranks high on the list of huffery.As an approach, however, it has a lot to recommend it. For me some of the key principles are:
* think components
* think interoperability (is that a word?).
* think simple toolsets
* think enriched, apparently interactive web interface.
The component-oriented approach keeps development focused, light and rapid, and the 'open to all users' design works against coding yourself into a corner, or unnecessary limitations. Interoperation is vital. In a complex world the biggest pain established business have in moving to etail is their own backend systems. Were these less 'monolithic' and inflexible, more componentlike... well, life would be easier!
The whole AJAX approach to increasing the interaction, richness and responsiveness of web interfaces is also to be welcomed. This makes available options that until recently would have had people reaching for Flash.
Hype or no hype, there are underlying princples here to be adopted by all developers and architects who have to live with the legacy of their own code plus other systems, and don't have the luxury of 'deliver and run'.
Communities and UGC Editor at Associated Northcliffe Digital
06 December 2005 16:19pm
Oh, how cynical you are!
Jeff Jarvis wrote yesterday that "...distribution is not king. Content is not king. Conversation is the kingdom," and I agree with him. Many of the bullet points above - especially tags, feeds, big input boxes, Google Maps mashups, blogs and wikis - all play a part of this. Although I am convinced there are some ways of making money from these features, it is these bullet points, these tools for the conversation, that are part of a bigger commercial picture. Affiliate market that!
Of course, some people in the US are jumping on all sorts of bandwagons and saying that RSS, for example, is going to bring them a whole new audience that they can make money out of, but we have to remember that most still find text messages rilly exciting.
Web 2.0 may not be standalone in it's own right, but if you combine it with the right commercial opportunities I think it could be pretty massive.
Ilana
On 10:52:47 6 December 2005 Ashley wrote:
Managing Director at Progenit
08 December 2005 10:43am
Users love interaction that they control. That's why digitial media works so well.
These technologies and applications are another tool for building that interaction. Macromedia have been talking about this for a while http://www.macromedia.com/resources/business/rich_internet_apps/ is worth reading.
Digital has become a mass-medium - the man in the street likes big icons, big fonts and big input boxes (and yellow fades and blue gradients for that matter :) because it feels more like Sony, Apple and XBOX than the computers, work and the Interweb. (And they can make like Minority Report)
This is why the user experience driven businessed (the ones that actually do it not the ones that say the customer is important but actually think "the little font looks cooler") are on the up.
Go back to your user and business needs and look at where these technologies are part of the answer.
CEO at Segala
12 December 2005 03:52am
On 10:52:47 6 December 2005 Ashley wrote:
What do other people think about the so called "Web 2.0"?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Personally I don’t like the term Web 2.0, or how it’s communicated. I’ve only read technical interpretations that describe ‘tools’ and ‘technologies’, rather than ‘how’ or ‘what’ it does in plain English. So, I’m not surprised Ashley isn’t impressed by it. I much prefer to talk about the Semantic Web; Tim Berners-Lees second greatest vision – the first being the invention of the Web and that messy markup he called HTML in 1990.
One of my proudest moments within the Web world was just been in the same office as Tim Berners-Lee (B-L) last Friday – more about that later when I talk about a real application of some Web 2.0/Semantic Web stuff as covered by E-consultancy’s interview last month. Yet, it’s still hot off the press material.
For those of you who don’t know, B-L invented the Web in 1990 and is responsible for directing the W3C. The W3C isn’t a familiar term to most, but those same people would probably recognise some of the standards it’s responsible for creating, such as the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), Mobile Web Initiative (MWI), CSS, HTML, HTTP, URL, XML and many more.
"The Web was designed as an information space, with the goal that it should be useful not only for human-human communication, but also that machines would be able to participate and help. One of the major obstacles to this has been the fact that most information on the Web is designed for human consumption, and even if it was derived from a database with well defined meanings (in at least some terms) for its columns, that the structure of the data is not evident to a robot browsing the Web. Leaving aside the artificial intelligence problem of training machines to behave like people, the Semantic Web approach instead develops languages for expressing information in a machine process-able form"
-Tim Berners-Lee.
The Semantic Web is a concept that's difficult to describe, but originally the concept of the Web was difficult to convey to people - no-one was very excited about the idea of following a hypertext link. Even when I later joined the Web arena in 1995 people thought I was mad when I talked about providing online booking for hotels and advertising for restaurants – ‘online marketing will never take off’ was one term I’ll never forget!
A Semantic Web is one in which all the information can easily be extracted and processed by computers. This will mean that vast resources of information can be used in a much more efficient manner.
At present, much of the information on the Web is "marked-up" with HTML, which just tells your browser how to display the information, not what the information is. Human users are currently needed to extract sense from the Web, but in the future computers, browsers, search engines and other tools, will be able to interpret and process information contained in the Semantic Web.
Suppose you’re browsing the Web and you find an E-consultancy ‘perfect pitch’ seminar advertised, and you decide to go. Now, there are all sorts of information on that page, which is accessible to you as a human being, but your computer doesn’t know what it means. So you must open a new calendar entry and paste the information in there. Then get your address book and add new entries for the companies involved in the seminar. And then, if you wanted to be complete, find the postcode of the seminar, and program that into your GPS [Global Positioning System] device so you could find it.
It’s very laborious to do all this by hand. What you would like to be able to do is just tell the computer, I’m going to this seminar. If there were a Semantic Web version of the page, it would have labelled information on it that would tell the computer this is an event, and what time and date it is. And it would automatically add your travel to your event book. It would add the companies to your address book, and it would program your GPS to give you directions. It would have the relationships between the event and the various people chairing it. And those companies would have Semantic Web sites, which contained information about how you could contact them.
Your address book can now grow from a closed repository of private data to a view on the company-related data in the world.
The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. The first steps in weaving the Semantic Web into the structure of the existing Web are already under way. In the near future, these developments will usher in significant new functionality as machines become much better able to process and "understand" the data that they merely display at present.
The essential property of the World Wide Web is its universality. The power of a hyperlink is that "anything can link to anything." Web technology, therefore, must not discriminate between the scribbled draft and the polished performance, between commercial and academic information, or among cultures, languages, media and so on.
Information varies along many axes. One of these is the difference between information produced primarily for human consumption and that produced mainly for machines. At one end of the scale we have everything from the five-second TV advert to poetry. At the other end we have databases, programs and sensor output. To date, the Web has developed most rapidly as a medium of documents for people rather than for data and information that can be processed automatically. The Semantic Web aims to make up for this.
At the W3C, we are helping to deliver one element of the Semantic Web through a method called RDF-CL (Resource Description Framework-Content Label). Segala, Vodafone Group, the Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA), Yahoo! and T-Online, have formed what’s called a W3C ‘incubator project’ with the objective of publicly reviewing the method to ensure it meets the needs of content rating and quality labelling universally. This is the content labelling I discussed in an E-consultancy interview recently. However I talked specifically about Segala’s Web accessibility trustmark that enables personalised search for sites that meet individual best practise design techniques without the need for WAI ‘A’, ‘AA’ or ‘AAA’ compliance. For example, a user who needs to resize text may only want sites with that capability to be prominent in search results.
This is the same method that will in my humble opinion, revolutionise the way Web accessibility is perceived and embraced by the commercial industry. The same method is also about to enable search engines and browsers to revolutionise how they annotate or filter search results based on ‘trusted’ sites that have been labelled. That is, imagine that you are searching for a site that must be accessible, child friendly, medically qualified or secure; you may only want to see search results belonging to sites that contain a trustmark, providing you with trust in their claims. Well, that’s it in a nutshell.
If you've reached this far without falling asleep, you’ll probably have a lot of questions! or, are you even more confused now than you were before? If yes, please feel free to email me directly – especially if you would like to get involved in anything we’re doing in the standards world.
Perhaps I provide more examples, tidy this up and produce a white paper.
Cheers
Paul
Segala
CEO at Econsultancy
14 December 2005 17:20pm
Take a look at Protopage - user control, AJAX, RSS. It's got Web 2.0 written all over it. No doubt some 'mashups' in there too somewhere (just trying out the new lingo...)
Ashley
Freelance Web Consultant at architxt.net
16 December 2005 17:31pm
I'm not particularly convinced either.
Whilst I welcome new technologies that will allow us to interact in all sorts of clever ways there will always be demand for the unsophisticated. Google Search will remain a simple affair and the likes of Jakob Nielsen and Webcredible will continue to help websites become more effective/profitable y adopting 'keep it simple' strategies.
I also don't see my father, a man of 71, interacting with websites that behave more like desktop applications. All he is after is information that is easy to read.
Sure, Flickr and Writely rock. But they are hardly revolutionary. They were not around 4 years ago because broadband wasn't as widespread as it is now.
If anything, Web 2.0 is about bandwidth.
CEO at Segala
16 December 2005 18:04pm
Loz,
I agree with what you say. I also think there’s too much talk about the ‘solution’ and not enough talk about the use cases that justify changing anything. I was asked to comment on Web 2.0 by a journalist recently and I didn’t know where to start. I really had to collect my thoughts so I could speak in plain English and not offer the techie lingo offered by others more qualified than me.
What I would like to add however, is that my out-laws didn’t think they would ever play around with a computer until my better half’s sister emigrated to NZ with her family two years ago. Now they do their shopping from Tescos online! Trust me, these are last peole you’d expect to see surfing the electronic waves.
Perhaps they won’t embrace what the future web has to offer, but perhaps the next generation will :)
Safe surfing
Paul
On 17:31:47 16 December 2005 Loz wrote: