The Web 2.0 Blog » 2007

Web 2.0 Basics - Tags

With the Web 2.0 came a new way to organise your information, Tags. In the pre-tag world, data was typically only organised based upon one of its characteristics. This was akin to cataloging where, an article would belong to one and only one category. You can compare this to a library. If, say, you wanted a book on Spain you would look under travel. Within travel you would find all the books covering every country in world. Yes, they may be arranged alphabetically (by author or title depending on where you go) but thats still a bit hit and miss. The other possibility is that a book on Spain could be in a “Spain” category. Now that would allow you find the book fairly quickly once you got to the Spain section as there would only be a small number of books in there. Unfortunately, there would be so many categories, it would be difficult to find the right one. Almost returning us to square one.

So in steps Tags. Tags allow you to categorise information in multiple different ways. Taking our book on Spain as an example, we could tag it with Spain, Travel, Europe and anything else that is relevant. Searching for this book using tags then becomes much easier. You constantly narrow down your results with each tag you add to your search/filter criteria.

One of the key drivers of Tagging in the Web 2.0 world is a phenomenon known as folksonomy. Folksonomy is where tags are assigned by the consumers of the information as opposed to the creators. Traditionally, especially on the internet, there was a clear distinction between the content creators and the content consumers. This line is increasingly blurring and folksonomy, and tagging, is key to that.

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YouTube and Revenue Sharing - Unanswered Questions

A story popped up on the BBC News Website a few days ago stating that the monster of all video sharing sites, YouTube, YouTube Logo was about to roll out a revenue sharing feature. This isn’t a new idea, in fact Revver has been doing it, with some success, for a while. Considering YouTube is comfortably king of the online video market, wyy would they be adopting features from one of their not-quite-as successful rivals? YouTube has built its success on the fact that it is just so easy to upload and share a video through YouTube. The difficulty increased for “Directors”, special users who are allowed to post videos over ten minutes long, and people accepted the additional inconvenience of jumping through those hoops for the benefit. I’m sure people will happily jump through just a few more hoops to get a cut of ad revenue. The benefit vs bother ratio is still favourable.

One aspect of this feature that must not be overlooked is the fact that YouTube is going to have to increase its ad revenue to support sharing. YouTube, despite its high profile buyout, is still not exactly flushed with cash generated through ads. The suggested solution appears to be running short advertisments before each, or selected, video(s). Personally, I have a problem with this. If I’m watching something on YouTube, its not likely to be Pride and Prejudice. its more likely to be of around a minute in length and of questionable quality (in more ways than one). At the moment, there is no site out there that makes it as easy to consume content of that type than YouTube. it’s interface and viewing widgets are very geared to that goal. and one advantage they certainly have over competitors, especially after the Google Acquisition, is speed. I can usually just hit play on a YouTube video and have it stream, without interruption. That is not true of Revver, for example.

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Site Redesign Launched

Hopefully you’ve noticed that the site has changed a bit. I believe it’s what media types call “a bold new look”. Please feel free to take a look around and report any bugs you spot using the “Contact Us” link on your left. A quick word of warning, there are some bugs to iron out, specifically in the ubiquitous designers PITA, thats IE for the uninitiated.

Keep an eye out over the next few days as we refine the design and beat all the bugs into submission. We’ll also be launching a special offer in the next day or so, so stay tuned!

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New Feature - Web 2.0 Basics

We’re on a roll. Another new feature is launching called Web 2.0 Basics. It aims to ease you into the technology, trends, terminology and entities within the Web 2.0 World. Keep your eyes peeled. I hope to get a new article up on a weekly basis within this feature. And, hot off the press, the redesign of the site should be launching TONIGHT! So stay peeled, there will be a special offer coming with it.

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Usability Watch - Google Special

Google Google Logo is rightfully hailed as one of the great masters of user interfaces but some of their design and development practices lead to inconsistencies and poorly thought out decisions. Personally I’m a huge fan of many of Google’s interfaces. Gmail is still years ahead of anything else out there and they still have the most usable search interface around (excluding the point mentioned below). Unfortunately you can’t help but wonder what the Google suite would be like if they had someone with overall responsibility for interface design and consistency. There also seems to be an unwritten rule that no bad words may be said against Google. Unfortunately this really benefits no one. Users get lulled into acceptance and Google rests on their laurels. So I’ve taken it on myself, as part of the new “Usability Watch” feature, to point out some of the strange usability issues that you may come across when using Google’s services.

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We’re Back up!

Apologies for the extended downtime experienced while upgrading out software. The FTP demons were banished and the SQL monsters vanquished. it was a tough fight but we won, eventually.

Coming up over the next few weeks we’ve got a complete redesign of the site and some great new features. Hopefully there wil be more regular updates as well. Not that we’re ever going to turn into one of those sites that just regurgitates the news.

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New Feature - Usability Watch

We’re starting a new feature here on the Web 2.0 Blog, Usability Watch. The basic idea is that whenever I come across a glaring lapse in common sense when it comes to usability, I’ll post it here. I’ve already got a few beauties lined up. Oh, and for the good of us all, I won’t limit this to Web 2.0 applications and sites. Everyone is fair game. And if you’ve got a usability crime, please feel free to let us know!

To get us all warmed up I thought I’d post this victory for stupidity over common sense.

The observant amongst you would have noticed that the style of that message is very Mac Like. And you would be spot on, I am currently using a Mac. So, really, what options does this give me? I can either

Buy a new computer that has Windows on it - or -
Leave the site never to return

Can you guess what I did yet? Its never a good idea to build a service that is bound to an operating system, or browser, especially when people are increasingly accessing the web in new and exciting ways. And, for what its worth, I had never been to, or heard of, zango.com so they have lost a potential customer.

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digg not prepared for its own success?

I ran across this story earlier today and it completely shocked me. It would appear the the huge amount of diggs received by the iPhone story (which now appears to have been dugg down) couldn’t be handled by certain aspects of digg’s UI. The reason this shocked me was that the problems started to come at 10,000 diggs. Now to me, considering the large numbers of users digg has, thats not a huge amount. Of course this little issue was fixed fairly quickly but it begs the question, if the UI has never been tested to this level, what about the stability of the rest of the digg platform?

We’ve seen that digg has the ability to easily bring down other sites, and we’ve also seen that digg itself and slow to a crawl on occasion, early last week being an example. But the question is not of the infrastructure, which can easily be expanded, but more of the software. The nature of digg means that users “swarm” around certain articles, see the highly entertaining digg swarm tool for a great visual interpretation of this mass behaviour. This means its very difficult to perform accurate automated load testing on the scripts themselves. And, it seems obvious now that the digg team have not been able to test the site to the extent it is currently being used. Either in terms of numbers or usage patterns. It must be a scary time, so lets hope it all holds up. And lets all bear in mind that the uniqueness of sites like digg mean they fall out of the realm of standard testing practice, techniques that can be safely applied to other internet sites (i.e. content management systems, shopping sites etc.).

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Information Overload

This post is probably a few days late, but I thought I’d point you in the direction of this post by the To-Done blog on Information Overload (via Lifehacker). Over the last few days I’ve been seriously suffering with information and news overload. With CES, MacWorld and the Detroit Motor Show all cramming themselves into a week, my current feed reader of choice (NewsFire) has been aching for my attention on a constant basis. I find myself opening it up to, and you may want to sit down for this, 600+ items a day, at its peak. Luckily, its died down a bit now that everything is slowing but its still hovering at around the 300 mark. And thats every day. At times, it can feel a bit relentless, so this article really helps.

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