Web3.0 trends

there's some webwide design principles
emerging
that i'm not sure many people
can see yet

wikipedia needs a page for every product
for every person
for every event

(it should supplant the evil classmates.com
as a gatheringplace for nostalgists)

and it should aggregate ALL links
on every topic
sorting them and rating them

so when your vacuumcleaner breaks
you go to its wikipedia page
(which you bookmarked when you bought it
like all your possessions
in an intelligent database)
and find sorted links
to all pages about that product
including diy repairs

this will put google websearch out of business

its 'best-first' algorithms can't compete




the concept of bookmarking
'to read later'
needs to be refined

we experience a continuous stream
of links we find more or less tempting
and we need to sort and rate these
so that the next-most-attractive
is always a click (or two) away




everything on the web
should be striving to connect individuals
who share common tastes and interests
(eHarmony writ large)

everyone's stream of rating/judgments
automatically compared
with similar-others queued
for speed 'dating'

 
 
 
 
 
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Appreciating 'Hype Machine'

i imagine that the hype machine
chose their awful name as camouflage
for their true purpose
of free-mp3-blog-aggregator

but as these things go
they seem to be cuttingedge state-of-the-art

the design-theme is giddy redundancy
everything is one-step-or-less away
and infinite reversibility
(try anything, no commitment)




it took me embarrassingly long to figure out
how to play the tunes
and find the hidden mp3s
(click rightpointing triangle to play
(player at bottom even lets you change pages
without stopping the current song)

open 'read full post' link in new tab
to find mp3 link)




finding new music

start with a song you love
that you think defines your special taste
search for it, 'love'-heart it
go thru everyone else who's hearted it
and sample their recent faves
'follow' them if there's any overlap
(watch which blogs they find good tunes on
and 'follow' these too
or sample them as radio stations)
(following individuals with similar taste
is the general solution to
the longtail fail)

search for favorite artists
and 'follow' them
(it seems you can't yet backtrace
who else follows an artist?
or find generalised most-similar recommendations)




needs:

5star ratings scale

best-first priority-queue

 
 
 
 
 
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Best skymap/ starmap comparison

[Sky-map.org]

[Java]

[Planet Wheel]

[Flash movie]

[Space.com]

[Wunderground]

[StarGazer]

[AstroViewer] (current night sky only) [Java]

[AstroImage]

[London monthly]

[Boston monthly]

[New Mexico monthly]

[Google Sky] (where's the labels?!?)

[YourSky] (generic link only?)

 
 
 
 
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Web2.0 database theory

at the heart of the classic web2.0 site
is a database of
users U
times
content-items C
U*C

each user u
expects to rate
each content-item c

and these ratings
guide
what sequence of content-items s(C)
is offered to any user
(aka recommendations)

eg flickr
tracks faves via pink stars
and creates from these
a single stream (explore)
offered to all users
but also allows subscriptions
to others' newly-added pix or faves
(not trimming redundancies)
and to tags and thematic groups
(as designated by the photographer)

or eg twitter
tracks faves via gold stars
but leaves it to Favrd
to collate these into a stream
also allowing subscriptions
to others' newly-added tweets or faves
(ignoring redundancies)
and to topical hashtags

or eg youtube
supports faving and rating
and makes recommendations
(though i doubt many people
bother with these?)




if the fundamental web2.0 goal is
helping users find the best content-items
the most important omission
from these sites is
redundancy-trimming:

once you've seen/judged an item
you won't need to see it again
so it can be silently trimmed
from offered streams

(one exception being
streams of favorites
from users you're interested to know
so you want to be told
if they-liked-that-too)




another useful database is C*C similarity

people who like c1
usually like c2 too

possibly decomposable into
thematic dimensions T:
easy-difficult
natural-artificial
common-rare
emotional-dry
sexual-chaste

 
 
 
 
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Calculating interface 'friction'

the juxtaposition of
john gruber's concept of interface friction
with david li's copula formula

has refocused an old intuition
about the science of human factors:

that someday we should have a formula
for rating the 'friction' in an interface

• how many clicks
  for each important action
  
  
• how much mental strain
  to refocus the brain
  (like shifting contexts)
  
  
• how much unintuitive complexity
  to master
  
  
• how much opportunity
  to be publicly humiliated
  
  

web 2.0 has made considerable progress
on the first two of these

but achieving sufficient mastery
to avoid self-embarrassment
is a gigantic, growing problem

 
 
 
 .

Understanding Twitter

reddit doesn't understand twitter!?!
(i'm surprised)

• it's the algonquin roundtable redux:
  a universal competition
  to say memorable things
  in 140 characters or less
  
  the more you're Favorite-d, the better you're doing
  
  if you're not finding
  a dozen tweets a day
  worth Favoriting...
  you're doing it wrong
  
  look at others' Favorites
  to find the wits you like best
  
  and doublecheck their own Favorites
  so you can subscribe (by rss)
  to those who'll broaden your scope
  
  
• bookmark twitter searches
  
  watch for interesting hashtags
  or mentions of interesting people
  
  (these are also rss-able)
  
  get comfortable with searching on @-names
  to check others' replies
  before replying yourself
  
  
• keep reloading hashtag-searches
  during interesting events
  (#oscars #sotu #superbowl #ted)
  or favorite teevee shows (#house)
  to sample an infinite range of reactions
  and occasional insights
  
  temporarily follow
  the best of these
  
  
• add friends and family
  (and celebs you wish were f&f)
  not expecting algonquin wit
  but grateful for random
  keeping-in-touch tweets
  
  
• ask/answer questions of the #lazyweb
  
  monitor memes
  
  announce time-critical tidbits
  
  

twitter is like usenet
where you subscribe to
people not topics

fastfastfast

spamfree by design

intolerant of prolixity

easily capturing stray thoughts
and trying them out
on a mostly-forgiving audience

 
 
 
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Web 2020

what i'd like/expect to see:

• html replaced by simpler e-markup like _italics_
  
  
• links remember their chain of 'via's
  
  
• commenting is globally unified-- you don't have to remember where you've left comments
  
  
• article/page/post/bookmark distinction erased, just views of data
  
  
• multiple links to same content automatically collated
  
  
• automatic comparison of tastes/favorites to recommend likely similar author/bloggers
  
  

CounterPunch: worst site design?

It's a shame, because the content is above average, but here's what I hate about CounterPunch.org:

• 25 new articles today (usually more like 10)
  
• articles announced in skinny sidebar (35 screens long, today)
  
• no summary, no clue about length (usually absurdly longwinded)
  
• one-line author bio at end of article (if we're lucky)
  
• 1st screen is always ads, never content
  
• righthand sidebar 30+ screens long, all ads
  
• content squeezed into narrow central column, hard to focus
  

Who has time?

 
 
 
 
 
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Everyone should (link)blog

Warren Ellis so completely misses the point of linkblogs that I feel compelled to respond:

"...no-one’s going to do a better job of being the internet’s copy/paste editors than the BoingBoing crew anyway"

The simplest counterproof is to consider mp3 blogs (or mp3 links among others in any blog)-- I've never found a blog with musical links that come within 1% of my own tastes, and I don't ever expect to, but I'd dearly love it if everybody maintained a musical linkblog at some site that allowed easy comparison of favorites-lists (like iMeem).

Ditto, to a lesser extent, for favorite books and movies, graphic arts, humor, food, philosophy, gossip, politics, etc.

So ultimately, BoingBoing is an extremely LAME lowest-common-denominator linkblog by four distinct personalities, who surely filter their own tastes to fit the rut they've built for themselves (eg, they seem to leave music out almost entirely?).

But in the blogosphere-to-come, everyone should put themselves out there 100%, linking everything they like, and subscribing only to those feeds that match their own tastes best. The idea that BoingBoing has won the status of an 'indie NewYorkTimes' makes me puke!

Del.icio.us does hosting best, for now... though their format is barely readable.

Linkbloggers also need to study how to craft short headlines that boil down stories to their essence-- hardly anybody has even recognised the importance of this. (When I read the newspaper, I often have to read several paragraphs before I can extract the simple obvious core concepts that should have been in the headline.) The point of headlines/linktext is to make it unnecessary to read the whole article, unless you really want to.

 
 
 
 
 
 
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Content-typology pages

strict reverse-chronological order
for blogs
is a semantically braindead ordering-scheme

so i used to put a lot of effort
into exploring other possibilities

especially
picking any promising topic
and winnowing search results
picking the most promising pages

and sorting those links by
type
of content

so the resulting index-pages
offered an implicit content-typology
simply via the clusters
of similar content-types
embodied in the resulting page layouts

eg for persons:
short bios
individual works
influences
gossip
etc

(if there's to be a microformat
it would have to be
a person-pages-content-types microformat)

 
 
 
 
 
 
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Blogging 3.0

the information architecture
imposed by blogging-apps
(like blogger.com)

makes the way-too-pejorative assumption
that yesterday's posts
aren't worth revisiting
or revising

(except in those very rare cases
of newcomers rereading the full archives
from the start)

unfriendlily
presenting every visitor
with just the latest full posts

(with, at most
an archive-by-date link
and maybe a tag cloud)

whereas a typical
content management system
rightly takes for granted
that every page will be
indexed from topicpages
and kept regularly up-to-date

even 'blogging' each revision
in an abbreviated changelog




while bookmark management systems
like del.icio.us
do their whole nother thing

mincing any authorial voice
into an unmodulated puree




so
i'd like to see these functions
finally
fused

every page-change, and
every new bookmark
explicitly weighed
for inclusion in the main, public
site-feed

maybe rated by the author
so subscribers can filter
all but the (author-rated) best

major sitechanges
and wholly-new pages
possibly included entire

(or even
with additional optional
context-setting text
for authorial modulation)

so
uniformly mixing in a primary 'feed'
delicious/tumblelog/bookmarks
with site/change/logging

and automatically suggesting
that any 'important' new post
tagged with some given topic
should be linked from the appropriate
sitemap/indexpages

and maybe
queuing bookmarks, so tagged,
to be eventually integrated as well
into topic-overview pages

(with that pending-queue
even possibly visible to visitors
on the appropriate page)

 
 
 
 
 
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Del.icio.us is unr.eada.ble

[eg]