As an additional plus, Tracer adds, "Our data shows that those pages that users engage with most are not necessarily those with the most page views." With Tracer, publishers can find out their most sought after information and increase the relevancy of their resources to readers. Creative Commons is already using Tracer to see what readers are highlighting, copying and redistributing.

As well, Creative Commons' Fred Benenson encourages members to consider using the tool. He says, "As a creator and contributor to the commons, you have the right to attribution (all six of our licenses require it), so why not make it easy for your audience to automatically provide it?"

To test Tracer, members can register at Tynt.

Read more:
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/16060#ixzz0MCiF2lSE
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution
http://tracer.tynt.com/features-and-benefits-of-tracer#ixzz0MCg9SuUl
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution No Derivatives

According to a study done by the Sand Hill Group and Neochange, the most critical factor (70% listed it as number 1) for software success and return-on-investment is effective user adoption.

You can have the best software in the world, with the most sophisticated features, analytics and integration, blah blah blah - but if people don't use it, it isn't going to add value. I can't tell you how many RFPs and software selection processes I've been involved with in prior lives that focus almost exclusively on tiny little features that few people will ever use. This study shows that focusing so much on features is missing the boat entirely.

This finding is very interesting for all kinds of applications, particularly enterprise apps but also consumer apps. Features very rarely make someone take to an application or not. Moreover, I doubt most software companies really take user adoption as a holistic approach into account when designing their applications.

If this trend is accurate (and my experience tells me it is), then I think it has very interesting ramifications on how software should be designed, sold and implemented. User adoption is typically something that comes at the end of a cycle. This says it should be one of the most important elements of the entire process. Please share any opinions or war stories that either confirm or refute this conclusion.

"I believe the web is a platform. And that everything we need for an open ad market, or an open data architecture, or frankly most anything else, is available on the "web platform" today."

The reason I like that rough definition is it recognizes that content, media, markets, social apps - and lots of other things - are being built on the Web today. Too often people equate the Web as Platform idea to new software built with AJAX. I won't bring out the rather lame 'Web 2.0 is about people' line, but I will say that the Web is a platform for many more things than just software. Look at the Web innovation happening in libraries, as just one example.

Delving into the Web as Platform... I'm in the middle of exploring mashups - of all forms - and data models. I haven't written much about it yet in R/WW, because I've been busy doing and studying (and working!). But sooner or later an outpouring of blogging will occur on R/WW around these themes :-) In the meantime, I want to highlight a comment left by Ramana Kovi in Fred's post. Ramana made a valiant attempt at categorizing the 'Web as Platform' concept. He is building a DLA platform of his own called ePlatform, so he has probably thought a lot about this. 

Ramana puts Web platform vendors into the following categories:

Core services

1. Authentication system (e.g. SXIP, Passport)
2. Payment System ( e.g. Paypal)
3. Reputation System ( e.g. Opinity)
4. Credit/Risk Management System (Dun & Bradstreet/FICO )
5. ...
6. .....

Data services

1. Product Catalog Services ( e.g. Amazon/iTunes etc)
2. Mapping services ( Google/Yahoo/MSN/Map quest)
3. News services ( Reuters/AP)
4. Ad Network ( Adword)
5. ...
6. ….

3. Communication/Collaboration Services

1. E-Mail
2. Calendar & Messaging
3. Blogs
4. Wikis
5. Social networks
6. ....

I think this is a very useful way of looking at the 'Web as Platform' concept (aka Web 2.0). How about we make an attempt here on my blog to fill out Ramana's categories. I'm going to think about the Data Services in particular. Please add to the above list started by Ramana in the comments below. I'll do an update post in a few days with a complete list, provided I get a good response. I'll be adding things too in the comments (right now I have to get back to my paid work!).

Following is a summary of principles that Yellowikis demonstrated. Be sure to check out the whole series for full details: Part 1 - Introduction; Part 2 - Industry Disruption and The Competition; Part 3 - Demonstrating Web 2.0 Principles.

Principles of Web 2.0 applied by Yellowikis

• Web-based (of course) and uses wiki technology; the same MediaWiki software that powers Wikipedia.
• Any user can both read and write content - adding business listings and editing them. To put it in 'Web 2.0 wanker' terms, it harnesses collective intelligence.
• Requires a significant amount of 'trust' in the users.
• Can be deployed via the Web in countries all over the world (see Emily Chang's interview with Paul Youlten for more details on this aspect).
• Developed and is maintained by a small team (just Paul and his 14-year old daughter - both working part-time).
• Has fast, lightweight and inexpensive development cycles.
• Uses Open Source LAMP technologies (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) - meaning it is very cheap to run.
• The content has no copyright and is freely licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License 1.2.
• Can and will hook into other Web systems, e.g. Google Maps. Indeed if it introduces its own APIs, then it will be able to be remixed by other developers.
• Relies on word-of-mouth and other 'viral' marketing.
• Requires network effects to kick in order to be successful (at least at the scale of disrupting the Yellow Pages industry).
• Yellowikis will get better the more people use it. The Wikipedia is an excellent example of this.

[Full story on ZDNet...]

I intend to do more of these Web 2.0 Case Studies, it's been enjoyable and I've learnt a lot!

"A major problem with this phase of the web that many people seem to miss isn't that companies don't have a business model, it's that they aren't doing a great job of communicating their message and their qualities to users. Look at the survivors from the last boom and what separated them from the rest of the field."

He goes on to mention Amazon and their initial brand as 'the largest bookstore in the world'. He also mentions Apple's brand of quality, simplicity and beauty. Those are both excellent examples.

My thoughts... I think the big Internet companies that have branded well are Google and Yahoo!. Google's brand is based on technical innovation. Their seemingly arrogant and engineer-focused "we're the number 1 technology company and we know it" attitude - that's all part of their allure. Yahoo!'s brand is the mainstream Internet company - taking care of The People, but making sure everyone knows they're technically astute too. They're also morphing into a media-technology company, which is positioning them beautifully in the current and future age of We Media.

I find Microsoft's brand in the Web 2.0 era to be confused. They used to be the number 1 technology company, but in this new world they're more fast followers than innovators. They're at least hard on the heels of Google and Yahoo!, and perhaps that's all they need to be at this point in time (given their huge resources and wealth).

Apple is great brand, no doubt about it, and they're almost above the Web 2.0 world. I once compared them to The Fonz. As well as the aesthetics angle that Scrivs mentioned, I think they have that 'cooler than thou' attitude that transcends the Web 2.0 meme.

Of the smaller companies, I have to hand it to 37Signals - even though personally I don't identify much with their brand. I think Feedburner has built up a great brand, as has Adaptive Path.

Blogging brands are important too. Indeed I joined Scrivs' 9rules network because they value quality individual blogger brands. Web design is one part of that, but much more important is the blogger's 'voice' and the things they represent. After all, RSS hides a lot of the web design branding from readers - so the voice and community aspects of a blog must shine through in its words.

Branding in Web 2.0 is just as important as it was in 1.0 and in the 80's even. RSS has thrown up more challenges and has made the 'voice' of a blog or company far more important than it used to be. I see that as a good thing, because media and communications have become more personalized and - yes - human.

"As content and software services merge into common XML-based objects, the lines between publishing and technology services are shifting rapidly. Salesforce.com is an increasingly sophisticated example of how premium content and network-based software services can blend into a single valuable package without I.T. expertise or involvement required. At Shore we call these rapidly evolving packages of Web services "payloads" - digital objects that are a blend of content and technology sent by content providers into a user's orbit that evolve into context-specific services as they are passed from one context to another."

He has a nice line on how the old webpage paradigm is increasingly being turned on its head:

"In the Google network era every page brought down to a local context via the Google network will become its own local Web service, enabled for commerce by virtue of where it's wound up rather than from where it was sent."

Emphasis mine. Check out Josh's and my (note the correct grammer this time) first Digital Web article for more on this theme. Blossom continues...

"There will always be a desire to experience content, communities and major events accessible from a centralized source, but the emergence of the Google network publishing model challenges publishers to be able to make content as relevant as possible in as many distributed environments as possible."

I agree, but I'd add that the creation and storage of the data itself will often still be centralized. Accessible via APIs, yes. But one of the not-so-hidden secrets of Web 2.0 is that data isn't yet as open and free as it could be. Most of the premium Amazon and eBay data is entered into their systems and their APIs carry with them restrictions. I don't see Google or any other bigco changing that anytime soon. Blossom finishes with this:

"...at its early stages the Google network promises to accelerate changes to the publishing industry about as much as the browser started to transform publishing some ten years ago."

I feel the same way, only I think it's more generic than just being about Google. Tom Curley's speech was a major reason why I invested so much time and energy into the topic of Web 2.0. But it's not only the publishing industry being turned on its head, it's the whole media industry.

ionRSS.com

My new Silicon Valley Watcher blog, called ionRSS (eye on RSS, geddit?) is in beta mode right now. There are still some i's to be dotted and t's to be crossed, but it's basically primed for action. The site's tagline is The Business of RSS, which tells you all you need to know about the focus of the blog. I'll be covering RSS over on ionrss.com and continuing my focus on Web 2.0 on Read/Write Web. Where there is any crossover, I'll cross-link.

p.s. bonus points if you can figure out the other pun of "ion" in an RSS sense. Hint: alternative RSS format...

Digital Web Magazine Article: Web 2.0 for Designers

Also a new Digital Web Magazine article that I co-authored with Joshua Porter has just been published. Josh and I are going to be writing a column on Web 2.0 Design over the remainder of 2005. Our first article is entitled Web 2.0 for Designers and it introduces 6 key Web 2.0 trends that we see impacting the Web Design profession. I'd love to receive your feedback on it.

First a "in a nutshell" re-cap of what Design for Data means to me:

- Living Data; content is alive!
- Momentum: it's about movement of data/content (in time); not places where data/content resides
- it's about the user being in control of their webfeeds
- DYI websites for the users
- the application of weblike design to data
- Information Flow
- Rip, Mix n' Burn; Re-using content

That's not a complete picture, but I'm getting there.

Branding and Web Experiences

Digital Web Magazine published an article last week entitled The End of Usability Culture, Redux. It argues that web design is about creating effective "web experiences" and one way to do this is to focus on branding more so than usability guidelines (especially from the much-maligned Jakob Nielsen). The author, Dirk Knemeyer, cites Starbucks as "the perfect model" for what he's talking about:

The role of the web designer then would be to create this compelling user experience. As Dirk puts it: "design is about creating for people."

While it's an excellent article, it seems to me that Web Designers are still fixated on the idea of website as 'container' for the content. Branding to a Web Designer is still largely a visual exercise. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that, because the Web as a 'place' won't be disappearing anytime soon. 

However I also think RSS flow is creating a need for the data itself to be 'designed', not into HTML containers but into chunks of branded microcontent that will probably be XML. What I mean is: the data may not end up as HTML, so we have to figure out how to "brand" our data.

Associated Press & Atomized Content

Another excellent article recently was a speech by Tom Curley, head honcho of AP (Associated Press). There were a lot of great insights in this speech and one of the main ones was this:

He talks about unlocking content from those containers and "consumption on demand" will drive this - in other words, the user is in control. Words such as "disintermediate" and "reaggregate" are thrown into the mix. This is what he says about branding:

Curley doesn't actually say how we're supposed to brand what he calls "atomized content", but he does say that RSS and search are two of the main ingredients.

Gillmor Gang & eBay

I also listened to an interesting edition of The Gillmor Gang (a regular podcast from the likes of Steve Gillmor, Jon Udell and Doc Searls). They interviewed my namesake Jeffrey McManus, who is a technical evangelist at eBay. Steve Gillmor was giving Jeffrey a grilling about RSS and "disintermediation" and so forth, and in response Jeffrey noted this about the eBay website:

In other words, the website is still the place where users go for the eBay "experience". 

Steve continued to press the matter, asking "what can't be done via api's [meaning off-site]". The object of the question being to find out if the eBay website was really necessary for users to do business with eBay. To which Jeffrey replied: sign-up, registration; bidding can't be done off-site [nb: I took rough notes only, so the quotes may be slightly off].

And Jeffrey later said: "It's our job to make eBay a compelling place to buy and sell stuff".

So what do I take from all that? Well it seems one of Web 2.0's leading companies still regards "place" (ie their website) as a critical part of their business model. That will please the web designers. Whether that will be the case in 5-10 years time is another matter...

Whither Design for Data?

I'll leave you with an Eric Rice post from today where he notes that his RSS traffic just passed his HTML views. My comment on that is: I don't think the RSS model is going to replace the HTML one. RSS and HTML do two different jobs. Currently it's true that branding via HTML is still the way to do business on the Web. Mainly because nobody has figured out how to effectively brand via RSS yet. And that's a business opportunity for Web 2.0. 

One company to watch in this space is FeedBurner. I think they're onto something important with their RSS feed services (such as splicing and stats).

For now, as one of Eric's commenters notes, branding is still largely visual:

OK, but mark my words: soon there will be ways to brand yourself in RSS. It's being invented right now by smart companies like Feedburner.

Postscript

Oh man, so much for blogging in my pyjamas! That was a bit full-on. If it's any consolation, it's now way past my bedtime :-) Almost time for me to get up in fact!

- it's about movement of data/content (in time); not places where data/content resides. A word that I've been noticing lately, which I think sums this up nicely, is momentum. Portability is another word I like: not tied to one place.

- Design for Data is about the user being in control of their webfeeds (RSS and Atom). Whereas the reality circa 2004 is that it's still mostly the content producer that has control over feeds.

Think about it - blogging is currently more people-centric than topic-centric, because you're subscribing to a person and you generally can't filter out the content that you don't want to read from that person. What if you, the user, could aggregate feeds from people but only view the topics you want, or automatically filter content according to your tastes? This is something developers are beginning to explore now and it's basically all about giving control of data/content back to the user.

- Design for Data is about DYI websites for the users. If you can aggregate your own content from a variety of sources, then does that mean a complete overhaul of what a "website" is? Traditionally a website is a "place", but increasingly it's about taking bits of content from movable webfeeds and making your own "place" to consume them. You and I have RSS Aggregators and our weblogs for this purpose, but Yahoo! sees this as an opportunity to be 'the place' where ordinary people aggregate their content. And they're going to mix in music and other multimedia too.

- It's all about Information Flow. And it's going to affect a lot of content creation industries.

- And it's also about Rip, Mix n' Burn. Re-using content is going to be where a lot of current "consumers" find their value in the webfeed system. Whether it be music, podcasts, other audio, multimedia, or just plain old text - it's all there to be re-mixed (putting the painful legal stuff aside for now!).

- Web of Ideas. That's a phrase I've long been attracted to and Design for Data is bringing us closer. As Joshua Porter commented recently: "The more we rip content away from visual style and present it in different contexts, the more we get closer to pure ideas. That is the goal, isn't it?" Indeed! p.s. I must read Nova Spivack's The Physics of Ideas - that's sort of what Joshua and I have been rapping about (found via The Grandmaster Flash of Meme Rapping, Marc Canter).

Visual design is a package for our data/content, but we want to make it easier for users to get at the kernels of truth via webfeeds!

There's much more, but I'm still exploring... now for an artsy-fartsy segue.

The red shed

I was feeling a bit down today. Being so far away from all the conferences and other Web events makes me feel sorry for myself sometimes. Which is why I can't understand all these disaffected US liberals who want to move to New Zealand - are you crazy? Webfeeds and ideas may be free to roam about the world, but the people who matter in the Web industry are still by and large in one place: America. You can't get anywhere in this world without F2F with your peers.

Anyways, at lunchtime I walked over to Te Papa, the national museum of New Zealand, to draw some inspiration from an exhibition of New Zealand artists (some pxts here).

This one painting, by Toss Woollaston, caught my eye because in a way it expressed what I'm thinking about with Design for Data. Here's the blurb which accompanied it:

"This orchard near Nelson was where Woollaston worked during the early 1940s. His landscapes are more a response to his surroundings than a literal depiction of them. He said he wanted to 'invent new strategies for reproducing not nature, but the emotions felt before nature.'"

I'm not sure if there is a connection... however one phrase I read later that was applied to this kind of painting (a form of expressionism I think, but I'm no art historian) is 'living paint'. There's a fusion between the oil paint and nature - and so the paint becomes 'alive'.

So too data (words, music, whatever is your preferred format) becomes 'alive' in webfeeds, in the sense that it moves, interacts with the world and is malleable...and produces ideas. So I think what I mean when I talk about Design for Data is 'living data'. Webfeeds (RSS and Atom primarily) are making content come alive to us.

"The latest version of MyYahoo! allows its users to create custom home pages that automatically bring up headlines from any blogs you select, using a technology called RSS (Really Simple Syndication). The software can also draw in stories from commercial sites, including FORTUNE's. What I wonder, as RSS and related software get better and better, is why readers will ever want to go to a media company's own website if they can craft their own out of the information feeds that they know are of most interest to them? Expect to see the very definition of the commercial media website evolve radically in the years ahead."

This is another reason why Yahoo!'s introduction of RSS feeds to its My Yahoo! service is a Big Deal, especially if it's true they're making a play into media.

Sorry for the multiple blog posts over the past couple of days - I can imagine some of you muttering: "Who does this guy think he is, Dave Winer?" This Design for Data meme has got me all excited...

James' latest post touches on the 'design for data' meme that I'm exploring currently. James said:

"The point of departure for this whole debate was my view about how changing information flows may affect the industry which employs me, and whatever shapes the new information flows to, and between, investors take (centralized, decentralized, information darknets), the outcome for the brokers may be unchanged - marginalization, if they don't try to reposition their research products to be more relevant."
(emphasis mine)

I highlighted the bit that strikes me as being very important - networked information flows are changing rapidly and this is affecting a range of industries. From sell-side investment analysts to marketers to KM consultants to underemployed web technology analysts - and many more.

I'm interested in your thoughts on all this - but please comment here on my post from last night: Design for Data part 1.

"Right now, Web design feels like talking to the del.icio.us API and blending Flickr RSS with Upcoming iCal subscriptions. What happens when design(ers) has little to do with what's on the page?"

My comment on that question was:

"This is a fascinating question and it reminds me of a recent Tim Berners-Lee interview, where he talked about how the Semantic Web is all about re-using information. Yes I know TBL always talks about SemWeb, but there were some gem quotes in this one. eg:

"The Semantic Web is just the application of weblike design to data; it will be many more decades before we will be able to say we have really implemented the Web idea in the full, if ever we can."
(emphasis mine)

As I wrote a week or so ago about that: Nowadays it's not just about designing a beautiful website, it's about designing for re-use of information. In a way, that's what people are already doing with RSS - designing with data."

A few days after that, I submitted an article proposal to Digital Web Magazine on this topic of Design for Data. The proposal ended up getting lost due to the email woes Digital Web were having at the time, but I re-submitted it a couple of weeks later. In any case, I still haven't quite put my finger on what my approach would be with the article. 

Then tonight I read a new Digital Web article by Joshua Porter called Home Alone? How Content Aggregators Change Navigation and Control of Content. This excellent article got me thinking about Data Design again. So I thought I'd note down some highlights from Joshua's article, then post some of my notes about Data Design - and maybe people can give me some feedback or pitch in with ideas for us all to explore. 

Distributed Navigation and Death of the Homepage

Firstly, Joshua makes a distinction between human-aggregated content (e.g. blogs) and machine aggregators (e.g. search engines). He says:

"Aggregation hinges on gathering content from other domains. This dramatically affects the search for content. Users no longer need to start their search in the domain where the content lies. In fact, they almost never do."

...and then he asks the logical next question: "With all these aggregators providing new places to start our searches for content, what will become of the home page?"

So we're getting into 'death of the homepage' territory, which I think is currently one of Steve Gillmor's hobby horses (but I couldn't find a link tonight). Joshua notes that the homepage is traditionally the top page in a website information hierarchy, but content aggregators often bypass this:

"...users navigate completely outside the site containing the target content. The only page they see is the one that the aggregator links to. So the IA that ends up getting users to the target content page isn’t the one on the site they end up on, it’s the aggregator’s site’s IA."

Nicely put! I think this is one of the reasons I've gone off the boil in regards to weblog ontologies and taxonomies - it's because RSS and syndication technologies have completely changed the rules. It's now less about the website as a "place" to organize information - it's more about how information flows, is aggregated and re-used. 

I like how Joshua has put the 'death of the homepage' syndrome into the context of traditional IA (information architecture) - that ontologies are now just as important, if not more so, on the "aggregator's site" rather than the content producer's site. Joshua calls this "distributed navigation".

He goes on to say that it's a user-centered IA - the user makes your content work for them. Which is how it should be on the Web. Further, aggregators are "promoting a shift in the control of content" from the producer to the consumer. Again, a user-centered paradigm. Joshua lists some ways that web designers can tackle this issue - but it's at that point that I'll tack away to a different perspective.

Joshua's focus in his article is on the web designer and how distributed navigation is "bypassing much of what we’ve built for them [users]". My interest is more in the underlying technologies - RSS, Atom, syndication - and their affect on web publishing (...which makes me wonder if my article will be suited to Digital Web's audience?).

My initial notes on Design for Data

So what should I look at in my quest to understand Design for Data? I've noted down these things to explore:

- Atomflow - Matt Webb and others (see also: 1, 2)

- Atom API (see also)

- Attention.xml - Steve Gillmor and Dave Sifry

- Matt Mower and Paolo's experiments with "RSS Archive"

- The latest features in Blogdigger and other content aggregators

- Sir Tim Berners-Lee's "semantic web is a program" theory

- The results of Jason Kottke's Design for Web 2.0 session at the Web 2.0 conference (does anyone know if that workshop was blogged? I haven't been able to find anything on the Web about it and I even emailed Jason himself, who said he wasn't aware of any coverage)

- Probably get back into XML - e.g. Jon Udell's XPath experiments.

I'm sure there are a bunch of other things to consider. What else do you suggest I/we explore for Data Design?