Before the Internet existed we communicated by talking over the telephone and through the media, such as newspapers, and before that by telegraph. Having a group meeting usually meant getting together in one place. With the invention of the Internet and Web we are able to easily communicate with people instantly over vast areas. We do this using social software, such as forums, email and MUDs. Designing the social software that allows people to come together in group ‘meetings’ over the web though, has unique challenges from other types of software.
Clay Shirky first published an article titled “Social Software and the Politics of Groups” on March 3rd 2003 that explained the complications that have arisen from having a, many times anonymous, social network. “The thing that makes social software behave differently than other communications tools is that groups are entities in their own right,” he said. Designing software for groups cannot be done in the same way as typical software because behaviors of people interacting with one another cannot be predicted as an individual user. Trust and reputation are concerns that need to be addressed, along with trolling, flaming and off topic conversations.
In order for groups to be successful they need to be able to focus on their topic. Because the Internet has allowed people to express themselves individually, and covet that, the needs of groups are often disrupted by the needs and desires of the individual. Groups that are free and open often fail miserably. Successful groups have used some type of moderation and/or registration.
I’ve participated in a large active focused forum before, and I found that the interaction can be fun and at times exhilarating. But I’ve also found it to be extremely frustrating with people hijacking threads and talking off topic, and trolls causing all sorts off trouble. I remember someone once saying that a forum with paid membership has less of those problems. I tried one of those and found that to be somewhat true, but even those were not immune. While the social software has been getting better and better, we still have a lot to work on, on the way we use it.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Making it easier for people to find information and web pages on the Internet
Not being able to find information you know exists somewhere is a very old problem. Information architects have applied known and well-tried tools from library science to solve this problem on the web, but there is still increasing amount of difficulty searching for and finding the information that you want. There is hope on the horizon: Topic maps are a new tool available to help solve this problem.
Information on the web is organized using metadata. Metadata is currently the foundation of all information retrieval on the Internet. Metadata can be defined as information about a document, an image, etc. It contains the title of a web page or document, description and keywords that define the subject. Often this data is not enough to clearly define the subject so when searches are made the web page may either not show up, or may show up under a closely related subject. One of the main reasons is that the title and description can be ambiguous or not contain enough information, and the keywords, which can be entered by the author, can have too many subjects, or not clearly define the topic.
According to the abstract on Topic Maps vs. Thesauri written by Lars Marius Garshol "topic maps are organized around topics, and each topic is used to represent some real-world thing." In his abstract Garshol explains how metadata works and other library science type of data retrieval systems such as taxonomy and thesauri. So far these 'library science' ways of organizing and categorizing information for data retrieval are not working very well. Garshol goes on to explain how topic maps can solve this problem. “By using topic maps to represent metadata and subject-based classification it is possible to reuse existing classifications and classification techniques, while at the same time describing the world more precisely where desired” he says.
I personally would love to be able to easily search for a subject on the web and have quick accurate hits! As the information overload on the internet increases our search engines are becoming bogged down in irrelevance. A new accurate way of conducting searches are needed. Hopefully topic maps are the answer. I believe that it is also just as equally important for site owners to try to accurately define their site in the metadata and using the tools available. If web pages aren’t defined well then they may miss their target audience.
Information on the web is organized using metadata. Metadata is currently the foundation of all information retrieval on the Internet. Metadata can be defined as information about a document, an image, etc. It contains the title of a web page or document, description and keywords that define the subject. Often this data is not enough to clearly define the subject so when searches are made the web page may either not show up, or may show up under a closely related subject. One of the main reasons is that the title and description can be ambiguous or not contain enough information, and the keywords, which can be entered by the author, can have too many subjects, or not clearly define the topic.
According to the abstract on Topic Maps vs. Thesauri written by Lars Marius Garshol "topic maps are organized around topics, and each topic is used to represent some real-world thing." In his abstract Garshol explains how metadata works and other library science type of data retrieval systems such as taxonomy and thesauri. So far these 'library science' ways of organizing and categorizing information for data retrieval are not working very well. Garshol goes on to explain how topic maps can solve this problem. “By using topic maps to represent metadata and subject-based classification it is possible to reuse existing classifications and classification techniques, while at the same time describing the world more precisely where desired” he says.
I personally would love to be able to easily search for a subject on the web and have quick accurate hits! As the information overload on the internet increases our search engines are becoming bogged down in irrelevance. A new accurate way of conducting searches are needed. Hopefully topic maps are the answer. I believe that it is also just as equally important for site owners to try to accurately define their site in the metadata and using the tools available. If web pages aren’t defined well then they may miss their target audience.
Designing websites with user experience design
When you visit a website the images, text and navigation are the first thing you see, but designing a successful website comprises of a lot more than those visual elements. Websites must be designed with the user experience in mind.
There are several stages of website design and they begin with a strategy. The strategy consists of the goals for the site that come specifically from the people who will use the website. The site owner’s own objectives are then balanced against user needs for the site. The strategy is always the first thing that is developed, before any visuals are created or other stages are planned.
Each stage of the development of a website is dependant on the one before it. According to Jesse James Garrett’s book ‘The Elements of User Experience’ the stages in the development of a website are; The Strategy, Scope, Structure, Skeleton and Surface. If you try to create a website out of sequence, for instance creating the surface visual design before the strategy, you can end up with some awkward problems or poor design.
Garrett says there are two basic types of websites; the informational Hypertext System that contains information and hyperlinks, and the Software Interface that is mainly concerned with tasks (the site is considered as a tool or set of tools that the user utilizes to accomplish tasks). The stages of design for each of these types, depending on which your working on, is basically the same but the scope, structure and skeleton have slightly different needs addressed.
When designing a Software Interface the Scope addresses the functional specifications of the site (a detailed description of the “feature set” of the product). The Scope of the informational Hypertext System addresses the content requirements. The Structure design of the Software Interface looks at the interaction while the Hypertext System focuses on information architecture - the arrangement of content elements on the page. The Skeletal design of each of these types of sites both includes information design, which is how the information is presented so users can understand it. The Software Interface would concentrate on the interface design and user interaction though, while the Hypertext System focuses on navigation design of the site.
I consider the development of a website for the user’s experience extremely important and it should never be overlooked. You take a high risk of losing touch with your audience or prospective customers or clients when you broadcast your own needs and desires on your site without considering how the users will experience the website when they visit it.
There are several stages of website design and they begin with a strategy. The strategy consists of the goals for the site that come specifically from the people who will use the website. The site owner’s own objectives are then balanced against user needs for the site. The strategy is always the first thing that is developed, before any visuals are created or other stages are planned.
Each stage of the development of a website is dependant on the one before it. According to Jesse James Garrett’s book ‘The Elements of User Experience’ the stages in the development of a website are; The Strategy, Scope, Structure, Skeleton and Surface. If you try to create a website out of sequence, for instance creating the surface visual design before the strategy, you can end up with some awkward problems or poor design.
Garrett says there are two basic types of websites; the informational Hypertext System that contains information and hyperlinks, and the Software Interface that is mainly concerned with tasks (the site is considered as a tool or set of tools that the user utilizes to accomplish tasks). The stages of design for each of these types, depending on which your working on, is basically the same but the scope, structure and skeleton have slightly different needs addressed.
When designing a Software Interface the Scope addresses the functional specifications of the site (a detailed description of the “feature set” of the product). The Scope of the informational Hypertext System addresses the content requirements. The Structure design of the Software Interface looks at the interaction while the Hypertext System focuses on information architecture - the arrangement of content elements on the page. The Skeletal design of each of these types of sites both includes information design, which is how the information is presented so users can understand it. The Software Interface would concentrate on the interface design and user interaction though, while the Hypertext System focuses on navigation design of the site.
I consider the development of a website for the user’s experience extremely important and it should never be overlooked. You take a high risk of losing touch with your audience or prospective customers or clients when you broadcast your own needs and desires on your site without considering how the users will experience the website when they visit it.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Should 'analog' human beings conform themselves to a digital society?
We are analog beings – flexible, tolerant and compliant - living in a digital – rigid, fixed and intolerant - world that we created. This is the main argument from an excerpt from Don Norman’s book The Invisible Computer that can be found at http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/being_analog.html. Norman explains in depth how adaptable and flexible humans are, and how that does not work well in an inflexible computerized society that values efficiency and accuracy.
While Norman comes to some great conclusions and thought provoking points, I found the core of his reasoning flawed and it was very distracting from trying to glean the points he was making.
Norman goes into great depth to illustrate how humans are flexible, tolerant and intuitive and have evolved that way. Perhaps his greatest flaw is in trying to sum up human beings in a nutshell to serve his point of view. He either has forgotten or doesn’t realize that when you break down a human to its smallest parts all the way down to DNA you have something that is almost mathematical and so precise that the smallest error could cause a person to have a beak or a tail. This doesn’t happen very often. We are basically incredibly complex machines that have the ability to function beyond the mechanical and adapt and evolve. The ability to adapt and evolve is something that is necessary in our survival of the fittest world.
Norman’s main summary and points are still very interesting though. It was painstaking trying to still be open to that with his flawed reasoning, but in the end he does point out the intriguing dilemma our society faces in either adapting computers to think more like humans or trying to adapt people to behave more like computers. I don’t think we should push human beings toward behaving more like computers: We should use computers and tools to enhance ourselves and our greatest natural abilities.
While Norman comes to some great conclusions and thought provoking points, I found the core of his reasoning flawed and it was very distracting from trying to glean the points he was making.
Norman goes into great depth to illustrate how humans are flexible, tolerant and intuitive and have evolved that way. Perhaps his greatest flaw is in trying to sum up human beings in a nutshell to serve his point of view. He either has forgotten or doesn’t realize that when you break down a human to its smallest parts all the way down to DNA you have something that is almost mathematical and so precise that the smallest error could cause a person to have a beak or a tail. This doesn’t happen very often. We are basically incredibly complex machines that have the ability to function beyond the mechanical and adapt and evolve. The ability to adapt and evolve is something that is necessary in our survival of the fittest world.
Norman’s main summary and points are still very interesting though. It was painstaking trying to still be open to that with his flawed reasoning, but in the end he does point out the intriguing dilemma our society faces in either adapting computers to think more like humans or trying to adapt people to behave more like computers. I don’t think we should push human beings toward behaving more like computers: We should use computers and tools to enhance ourselves and our greatest natural abilities.
Saturday, February 13, 2010
The Rudimentary Basics of Internet
It’s easy to sit in front of a computer and point and click, sending and receiving information in less time than a blink of an eye. Most of us take for granted all that happens to transfer that information. Ethan Zuckerman & Andrew McLaughlin have published any easy to read and understand explanation called Introduction to Internet Architecture and Institutions, which can be found here - http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/digitaldemocracy/internetarchitecture.html.
They use easy to understand examples while still providing just enough technical information without overwhelming the reader. This is a great site for someone just wanting to know the basics. I know from experience that there is a lot, in fact books and books, of technical information on this subject, and a person without a degree could easily get lost in it all.
The most important thing to know is that the Internet around the world is run using IP, which stands for Internet Protocol. IP was invented in 1974 by Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn and has not changed substantially since then. A simplified explanation of IP is that it breaks down information into packets and sends it across media to a predetermined destination. When it arrives there the information is rebuilt. IP has been adopted and used around the world and it can be used across any media, including fiber optic, cable, radio waves and as Zuckerman and McLaughlin related even on carrier pigeons. In order for the Internet to work all the networks need to be able to talk and communicate to each other. This is done using IP and because the Internet is a global network of voluntary and interconnected networks, no one can force a new standard to be used.
IP uses a number called an IP address to get the information to destinations. We would never be able to remember all those numbers for all the places we visit on the internet, and numbers make it hard for humans to understand, so the Internet uses an addressing system which consists of two types of identifiers: the IP addresses and DNS. DNS stands for the domain name
system. DNS takes the address number and converts and stores it as a recognizable name such a Google. Each of these identifiers is unique.
ICANN, which is short for Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is the overall coordinator of the Internet's systems of unique identifiers, including domain names, IP address, and protocol port and parameter numbers, along with the DNS root name server system. ICANN is a not-for-profit public-benefit corporation with participants from all over the world dedicated to keeping the Internet secure, stable and interoperable. It promotes competition and develops policy on the Internet’s unique identifiers. There are also other organizations such as IETF and W3C that help define and to make the Internet open, easy and accessible to everyone.
The Internet is not so free and easy in all places around the world though. Developing countries have more challenges to face getting on the internet than countries such as the United States. Because they don’t have the numerous lines, connections and service providers they frequently have to re-route their traffic through satellites and other countries. This makes the service slow and very costly. Also because their current service providers may be businesses that could be hurt by competition, this can stand in the way of growth.
According to Zuckerman and McLaughlin “Achieving cooperation among competitors (in developing countries) is a profound challenge. In the United States, ISPs (Internet Service Providers) have their roots in the cooperative academic networks that came together to form the Internet; in other words, the cooperative technical operations and the techies that ran them were later joined by business managers who fought for advantage in the competitive
marketplace. In the US, then, it has proven relatively easy for rival ISPs to remain cooperative at the level of network operations. In countries that are new to the Internet,however, the business-side competitive imperatives have come first, giving little support to the necessary culture of technical cooperation among peers.”
They use easy to understand examples while still providing just enough technical information without overwhelming the reader. This is a great site for someone just wanting to know the basics. I know from experience that there is a lot, in fact books and books, of technical information on this subject, and a person without a degree could easily get lost in it all.
The most important thing to know is that the Internet around the world is run using IP, which stands for Internet Protocol. IP was invented in 1974 by Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn and has not changed substantially since then. A simplified explanation of IP is that it breaks down information into packets and sends it across media to a predetermined destination. When it arrives there the information is rebuilt. IP has been adopted and used around the world and it can be used across any media, including fiber optic, cable, radio waves and as Zuckerman and McLaughlin related even on carrier pigeons. In order for the Internet to work all the networks need to be able to talk and communicate to each other. This is done using IP and because the Internet is a global network of voluntary and interconnected networks, no one can force a new standard to be used.
IP uses a number called an IP address to get the information to destinations. We would never be able to remember all those numbers for all the places we visit on the internet, and numbers make it hard for humans to understand, so the Internet uses an addressing system which consists of two types of identifiers: the IP addresses and DNS. DNS stands for the domain name
system. DNS takes the address number and converts and stores it as a recognizable name such a Google. Each of these identifiers is unique.
ICANN, which is short for Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is the overall coordinator of the Internet's systems of unique identifiers, including domain names, IP address, and protocol port and parameter numbers, along with the DNS root name server system. ICANN is a not-for-profit public-benefit corporation with participants from all over the world dedicated to keeping the Internet secure, stable and interoperable. It promotes competition and develops policy on the Internet’s unique identifiers. There are also other organizations such as IETF and W3C that help define and to make the Internet open, easy and accessible to everyone.
The Internet is not so free and easy in all places around the world though. Developing countries have more challenges to face getting on the internet than countries such as the United States. Because they don’t have the numerous lines, connections and service providers they frequently have to re-route their traffic through satellites and other countries. This makes the service slow and very costly. Also because their current service providers may be businesses that could be hurt by competition, this can stand in the way of growth.
According to Zuckerman and McLaughlin “Achieving cooperation among competitors (in developing countries) is a profound challenge. In the United States, ISPs (Internet Service Providers) have their roots in the cooperative academic networks that came together to form the Internet; in other words, the cooperative technical operations and the techies that ran them were later joined by business managers who fought for advantage in the competitive
marketplace. In the US, then, it has proven relatively easy for rival ISPs to remain cooperative at the level of network operations. In countries that are new to the Internet,however, the business-side competitive imperatives have come first, giving little support to the necessary culture of technical cooperation among peers.”
Friday, February 12, 2010
Smarter people, smarter markets, and the importance for businesses to speak in a human voice
Back in the early days of the Internet, when the dotcoms were booming, a book called the Cluetrain Manifesto was published. With people connecting on the Internet around the world, employees of companies were gaining a voice, sometimes more prominent and influential than the companies they worked for. Also people that shared common interests, often referred to as markets in the business world, were linking together and the markets were becoming smarter than the businesses that hoped to sell to them. In the Cluetrain Manifesto authors Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger and Rick Levine revealed some amazing revelations about how businesses were currently run and how they needed to adjust to keep up with our changing society as affected by the Internet.
One of the most important points, which can be found on their website http://www.cluetrain.com/, is that most corporations “only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal.” This can become insulting to the people of the new linked-together market groups because they are now smarter than that. “To their intended online audiences, companies sound hollow, flat, literally inhuman” the Cluetrain states. It is necessary for corporations to speak in a human voice and sound “real.” The book goes on to explain this phenomenon in depth.
The Cluetrain website lists their 95 Thesis which alone - without reading the book – are very insightful. It also contains a link to read the complete manuscript online.
One of the more laughable insights from this website is that it’s a terrible example of a website and people wouldn’t stand for this format today. You have to read a good portion of the website just to figure out what it’s about. In this day and age most people wouldn’t take the time to do that when they first come to a new site.
The Cluetrain website isn’t really trying to sell the book though (which is still offered for sale, but is also offered free). This website is the original that came out ten years ago and at the time it probably was not their intention to create an atrocious site. Left the way it was when it originally came out, the site is proof of some of the points they are trying to make; today people have become smarter and would not stand for this disorganized and disorderly format in a website.
One of the most important points, which can be found on their website http://www.cluetrain.com/, is that most corporations “only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal.” This can become insulting to the people of the new linked-together market groups because they are now smarter than that. “To their intended online audiences, companies sound hollow, flat, literally inhuman” the Cluetrain states. It is necessary for corporations to speak in a human voice and sound “real.” The book goes on to explain this phenomenon in depth.
The Cluetrain website lists their 95 Thesis which alone - without reading the book – are very insightful. It also contains a link to read the complete manuscript online.
One of the more laughable insights from this website is that it’s a terrible example of a website and people wouldn’t stand for this format today. You have to read a good portion of the website just to figure out what it’s about. In this day and age most people wouldn’t take the time to do that when they first come to a new site.
The Cluetrain website isn’t really trying to sell the book though (which is still offered for sale, but is also offered free). This website is the original that came out ten years ago and at the time it probably was not their intention to create an atrocious site. Left the way it was when it originally came out, the site is proof of some of the points they are trying to make; today people have become smarter and would not stand for this disorganized and disorderly format in a website.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Information Overload
As a society we are suffering from information overload. With the development of media and data storage we have been able to store an immense amount of information. Just one newspaper today carries more information than a person a few centuries ago would have been exposed to in their life time.
It is important to be able to search through all this information and get what we need. In order to do that we need tools which are easy to use and enable us to make productive searches.
The focus has been on generating information but we need to change that focus to receiving and how the information is controlled and filtered so it reaches the people who need it.
It is important to be able to search through all this information and get what we need. In order to do that we need tools which are easy to use and enable us to make productive searches.
The focus has been on generating information but we need to change that focus to receiving and how the information is controlled and filtered so it reaches the people who need it.
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