Written on April 25, 2008 – 7:12 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Matt Mullenweg
Matt Mullenweg just told the audience at Web 2.0 Expo that Wordpress.com has launched a “(possibly) related functions” option. Mullenweg: “We have over 10 million pageviews a day to permalink pages. After you’ve read the article on a permalink page, you might get lost due to the bad navigation. It isn’t a good experience.” So Mullenweg and his 19 Automattic employees developed a function that suggests possibly related articles from your own blog, and then from some other blogs who have also turned the function on. “It’s like advertising, but with content”, Mullenweg said.
Automattic teamed up with Sphere - the widget service who does the same for the whole blogosphere - and is planning to offer it to the self-hosted Wordpress.org blogs too. Mullenweg believes the service will be successful, as “who hasn’t lost a day due to the YouTube’s related videos?”. I absolutely dig this move by Wordpress - as obvious at it is - since it allow smaller bloggers to get their writings out there. It’s the democratization of the medium and makes sure good quality content doesn’t get lost.
By the way, check out this cool photo blog theme called “Monotone“. It adjusts the page to the color and width of the photo and Mullenweg seemed to be pretty proud of it.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on April 25, 2008 – 11:57 am David Petherick, Next Web WebTipr United Kingdom
Raymond O’Hare, Director, Microsoft Scotland, spoke to David Petherick for The Next Web about how Microsoft are working to enhance Scotland’s future, following the Herald’s ‘Shaping Scotland’s Digital Future’ Debate in Glasgow.
He touches upon education, politics, common standards, collaborating with competitors, and has a word or two for "those currently in power".
Photograph Caption:
24-April-2008, The Teacher Building, Glasgow
At Lectern: Raymond O’Hare, Regional Director, Microsoft Scotland
Seated, L-R Steven Thurlow, Technical Director, Graham Technology
Gordon Thomson, Operations Director, Cisco Scotland & Ireland
Written on April 25, 2008 – 2:50 am Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Do you tag your photos on Flickr? If you are a loyal tagger, you may consider yourself member of a small groups of Flickr users. One that has however, “an outsized influence on the overall Flickr experience”, said Kakul Srivastava, director of product management of Flickr. During the “Next Generation of Tagging: Searching and Discovering a Better User Experience” Web 2.0 Expo session, she discussed enhancing the user experience through tagging and geotagging.
In the practice of tagging, she sees four levels of sophistication, namely:
First there is the “I exist” level. You just tag pictures to make them findable for yourself
The second level is all about making your photographs findable for others. You want those Flickr users to know you exist
Thirdly: wow! You find other people exist too! Let’s interact! So you start annotating your friends by adding tags. We should thank Facebook for this, as they made tagging people normal.
The fourth level of sophistication consists of tagging objects within pictures.
So what’s the results of all this happy taggin’? According to Srivastava, “sly Russian mathematical magic” will take place. That might sound rather abstract, so let me name some examples. Because of extensive tagging, the Flickr algorithm can start clustering tags so that the meaning of a certain tags is disambiguated. Let’s use a classic example here: are you looking for the Hilton in Paris or for a Chihuahua-carrying utterly famous blonde?
Another example of taking tagging to next level is checking hot tags. By doing this, you can see what’s hot and happening, and where. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that last week’s hottest tags in the US was “popemobile“. This has a link with the last advantage Srivastava mentioned: geotagging. 68 million Flickr pics are geotagged, thanks to clustering you can multiply that number four of five. What leaves the Flickr community with a stunning 100,000 places on the world that can be viewed by checking out related Flickr photos.
So where do we go from here? Srivastava polled some people from her team and predicted that tagging objects would become more popular and complex. The metadata is becoming more structured, making it able to look for specifics types of airplanes - to name an example. Also, interaction in tagging is here to stay. But what I consider to be most important consequence of good-tagging behavior is the ability to see what trends are emerging throughout the world. Like the popemobile tag, some tags - or clusters of them - will tell stories, maybe even news. And that’s what makes a structured web really fascinating.
Triggit, launched during the Web 2.0 expo in San Francisco offers extremely simple to use ad management for user blogs. Instead of signing up at all the different ad programs you simply install one JavaScript code snippet which will enable drag & drop advertisements (and other content) into your blog or webpage.
The technology looks very cool and needs to be seen to realize how simple it actually is. Check the video for a demo. In short it means that you install some JavaScript which will enable you to drag and drop ads directly into your sites, WYSIWYG style.
You can actually move Adsense Ads around the page, pick a different background color and resize the ads. Then when you save the ad it’s variables are saved on the Triggit website and the Javascript dynamically inserts the ads in your site when it is reloaded. Very intuitive and easy.
The company presentation was very funny and vibrant and they rightly won the audience vote for most exiting presentation and start-up.
I can easily see this being adopted by both smaller and bigger ads. Quickly inserting an ad somewhere is something we would all be interested in. The prospect of just moving ads around without worrying that you break HTML code sounds great.
Andy Denmark is one of the founders of TripIt and their VP Engineering. Tripit, The online travel assistant that received $5.1M in funding earlier this week, is a service that helps you manage your trips. The main interface for getting information into their service is email. Instead of copy/pasting and submitting to a webbased form you simply forward all your confirmation messages to plans@tripit.com. Their software then analyzes the content of the message and extracts all important information and plots in on an easy to read itinerary.
During his presentation today Andy challenged us to come up with more email centric interfaces like this. The benefits are clear. Almost everyone who uses the web has email. In fact, probably more people have access to email than access to the web.
Right now I use TwitterMail.com to send and receive messages for Twitter. I use email to send most of the photos I make to Flickr and I use email (in the background) to sync appointments with my partners via iCal. I also use email to post blogs now and then and instead of using a notebook I send my notes to an emailaccounts I reserve for just that purpose.
Some people even use email to browse the web:
Tripit.com makes it clear that email is a great interface for services and it is inspiring to hear their ideas about this. I can imagine that email is a great way to work with social networking sites. Instead of manually entering someone’s name and emailaddress into a website why not simply cc connect@linkedin.com when I email them? LinkedIn could parse this message, connect the sender (from address) and receiver (to address) and send us a confirmation after that. The first message could be archived with the account as an easy reminder of how you met. Simply, easy and scalable.
We just watched a videotaped presentation by Jonathan Zittrain who is the Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford Internet Institute. His book titled “The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It” seems like something we all want to read. a few quotes:
Jimbo Wales: “Jonathan Zittrain does what no one has before—he eloquently and subtly pinpoints the magic that makes Wikipedia, and the Internet as a whole, work. The best way to save the Internet is to turn off your laptop until you”ve read this book.”—Jimbo Wales, Founder, Wikipedia
Lawrence Lessig: “This book is fundamental. It will define the debate about the future of the Internet, long after we haven”t stopped it. Absolutely required reading.”—Lawrence Lessig, Professor, Stanford Law School, and author of Free Culture and The Future of Ideas
More information and a complete review as soon as we read it. Or buy it yourself at Amazon.
Written on April 24, 2008 – 5:59 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Web 2.0 Expo took off today with a classic on-the-couch interview. John Battelle from Federated Media Publishing asked Marc Andreessen a couple of questions about his Netscape adventure, the industry landscape and browsers. Andreessen is a famous software engineer and the brains behind Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser, and co-founder of Netscape. When building what turned out the foundation of the Internet - the browser - he and his team didn’t expect the future of the browser would look so bright.
“It’s far better than anybody thought. Many of the early ideas have lasted - like javascript -, which has been amazing. Cookies for example, we made that up during a weekend. When we tried to figure out how we could check whether a visitor had visited the website before, we asked “What about this cookie thing?”. And after a couple of years it became popular and caused discussion whether they’re a big threat to user privacy or not. It was a very rapid implementation of something that lasted really long.”
Andreessen continued with giving some examples, and I have one absolute favorite: the back and forward button. Andreessen: “We just needed something to navigate with and created these two buttons. We expected somebody would figure out something better later. But now everybody uses it, it’s even integrated in applications like iTunes and Mac OSx.”
Generally, Andreessen said that creating the browser was a half-way step. “However, the persistence of the browser has been amazing. For now, there’s no incentive to create a service that is not accessible through a browser, as you’ll take a big chunk out of your possible audience. (..) There’s a whole generation of kids communicating through browsers with services like Facebook. I think it will be another fifteen to twenty years before another step is taken”.
Predicting the future of such an innovating industry is quite a bold move. Yet when we take in consideration that early adopters have moved the largest part of their digital life to the browser, there’s all the reason to be excited about Firefox and co. Not feeling it yet? Have a look at the most used software at the statistics page of our sponsor Wakoopa to see the impressive numbers.
Although there’s always the chance we’re all missing something. Like Andreessen said: “The one thing I’ve learned from that hectic period with Netscape, was that big shifts and revolutionary developments are never foreseen, by anybody and everybody”
Written on April 23, 2008 – 11:31 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Some sessions at the Web 2.0 Expo cover really broad subjects, like the one I’m attending right now: “Global Design Trends“. Instead of covering the whole story, I decided to pick an interesting subject that was part of the discussion.
Moderator Aaron Marcus weared his open cultural communications hat
Erik Hersman represented the continent of Africa and shared some surprising insights. He grew up the son of linguistic missionaries in Africa, bouncing back and forth between Sudan and Kenya until he left to the US for college. He is now an independent strategy consultant who writes about high- and low-tech change in Africa at AfriGadget and White African.
According to Hersman, developers should consider power availability, mobile access, connection possibilities when developing a service. “Obviously”, Hersman said, “There’s more low-hanging fruit in other parts of the world”. Though he concluded that there are opportunities in the continent. So, what factors should you take in account as a designer?
He used a screenshot of professional East-African portal Zunguka to illustrate the differences between western and African design.
For starters, the design of Zunguka is plain, simple and far from fancy. “The site lay-outs in Africa are very basic, as the connections Africans use are generally really slow. Most people log in from internet cafe’s with low-bandwidth connections. You might also notice that users don’t have to specify an e-mail address when signing up. Since this is not a digital identifier in Africa. Instead of that, the service asks for a cell phone number. Mobile phones are the pc’s of Africa.”
Written on April 25, 2008 – 7:12 pm
Written on April 25, 2008 – 11:57 am
Written on April 24, 2008 – 11:54 pm
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