Archive for September, 2005

As my talented coworker Bill Scott pointed out recently, an exciting area of development aims to make DHTML, Ajax, and Rich Internet Applications (RIA) accessible to the widest possible audience.

Information and examples here: http://www.mozilla.org/access/dhtml/

I’ll have a lot more to say about this soon. In the meantime, I’m very happy to see that this great work (by IBM) has made it onto the public W3C WAI roadmap:

1. WAI Dynamic Accessible Web Content Roadmap 0.21
2. States and Adaptable Properties Module
3. Role Taxonomy for Accessible Adaptable Applications

Stay tuned!

If you’re not using Yahoo!’s My Web yet, allow me to recommend it. The value of My Web is what it does to your experience on Search.

At first glance, most see similarities between My Web and del.icio.us. It’s true, My Web contains a full featured social bookmarking service, complete with tags and RSS-love.

But My Web is much more than that: My Web is relevant search. Human-verified search. Better search.

Here’s a screen shot of a Yahoo! Search results page for javascript, with My Web enabled.

Over on Flickr, I’ve extensively annotated that screenshot. In short, it shows the following:

• Of the about 265,000,000 results for javascript, 1,569 have the unique distinction of being personally saved and annotated by people in my community.
• For each link, My Web shows who and how many people saved it, what they said about it, and if they’re currently online.
• Lower on the page, the normal search results are enhanced and show which links have been saved by either me or my community, and any notes I may have made about the link.
• For every result, there’s an quick way for me to save it to My Web. Thanks to the goodness of some AJAX DHTML, clicking Save brings up an on-page editor that lets me annotate and save the link without leaving or refreshing the page.
• (As a bonus, Yahoo! Search also tells me if the site in question has an RSS feed, and if so gives me access to the XML feed, and a one-click “Add to My Yahoo!” link.)

In addition to an improved SERP, My Web also offers what I’ll call the “Browse” view (screenshot below, again annotated). The Browse View lets you surf the data in interesting and useful ways. There are three objects you can explore: Pages, Tags and Contacts. Pages are my favorite, exposing tons of interesting and relevant links. You can scope your exploration to My Pages, My Community’s Pages, or Everyone’s Pages. I spend most of my time on the My Community page, since these are the people I’m most interested in, who’s interests I care about, and who’s expertise I value. If Jeremy comments on MySQL, I know it’s a quality link. If Douglas Crockford saves a link on Javascript, I know it’s a must-read.

The pages — links — are arranged chronologically, with the most recently saved toward the top of the page. (You can sort by popularity, title or URL too.) The most common tags in my community are listed on the left. Clicking one limits the pages to those with that tag. Selecting multiple tags is an AND operation, so I can quickly see all My Communities links that deal with “CSS” + “Hacks”.

I actually have this My Community page (not Jeremy’s page as in the screenshot above) set as my browser homepage. Each time I look at this page, I’m seeing the web sites my friends and colleagues have recently deemed worthy. I see high quality, fresh links, and get insight into what coworkers are thinking about at this very moment. More than once I’ve pinged somebody on IM to talk about something they just saved. It’s great for staying in-the-know.

There’s much more to My Web — invites, cached pages, a sweet API, RSS feeds for each facet, optional search history, tag clouds — but the two I described are the most important to me. I’ll let you discover the rest on your own, that’s half the fun, right?

If you want more information, there’s no place better than the official My Web blog or FAQ. Of you could read what Michael Nguyen, Yahoo!’s Jeremy Zawodny, or the blogosphere had to say.

Be on the lookout for new features all the time. In the last few weeks, the team has improved the auto-complete tagging features and the RSS feeds, and provided slick inline editing capabilities. 2.0 is lightyears better that the 1.0 product, and it’s getting even better every few days.

Have you tried it? What do you think? How do you use it? What features are most important to you?

PS: If you’re interested, it’s API is ready and waiting.

Microsoft has made a beta release of its Web Developer Toolbar available for download. It has many of the features long available with Firefox’s Web Developer Extension from Chris Pederick.

From the Microsoft page, here is the list of features:

• Explore and modify the document object model (DOM) of a web page.
• Locate and select specific elements on a web page through a variety of techniques.
• Selectively disable Internet Explorer settings.
• View HTML object class names, ID’s, and details such as link paths, tab index values, and access keys.
• Outline tables, table cells, images, or selected tags.
• Validate HTML, CSS, WAI, and RSS web feed links.
• Display image dimensions, file sizes, path information, and alternate (ALT) text.
• Immediately resize the browser window to 800×600 or a custom size.
• Selectively clear the browser cache and saved cookies. Choose from all objects or those associated with a given domain.
• Choose direct links to W3C specification references, the Internet Explorer team weblog (blog), and other resources.
• Display a fully featured design ruler to help accurately align objects on your pages.

I’ll post some feedback on this tool once I’ve played with it a bit more. In any event, I’m glad to see MS giving us developers a bit of love.

What’s your experience with this tool? Please let us know in the comments below.

Wow, this is slick. Before you’re even done typing, your answer is there in front of you. Don’t bother hitting “Search” or reaching for your mouse. No page refresh, just your answer, instantly.

(Plus, it’s a nice use of AJAX to improve the user experience.)

It works for a bunch of other “shortcuts” too, and I’m sure the list is ever-growing. Let me know if you have a good idea for a new one.

What do you think about this feature? Seems like a vastly more delightful user experience to me.

(Once again, Charlene Li has the scoop.)

Nearly 18 months ago, James M. Kilts, CEO and President of The Gillette Company, “announced” in The Onion:

Fuck Everything, We’re Doing Five Blades

Then, six hours ago today:

Gillette unveils 5-bladed razor

Proving once again that “you can’t make this shit up”.

(via Ernie)

This is excellent. Over the last 36 hours, I’ve been chewing on these intersections, not quite seeing how they’re going to end up fitting together. Then along came this new essay by Danah Boyd, “Why Web2.0 Matters: Preparing for Glocalization“, and I’m totally there.

Well, not totally — as she says, it’s “bloody tricky” — but she did give me more than one epiphany moment and the motivation to dig deeper. As I read it, I also started to see answers to questions like these:

• Why does Friendster (nearly all social networking sites) not hold interest?
• Why is Google (inbound-link-based search) broken?
• Why don’t I like some of my friends restaurant recommendations?
• Why do I care what some blogger’s lat/long is?
• Is it OK that I have 20 different tag maps tag clouds?

Still with me? Cool, go check it read it. I’m quoting several sections below (taking notes as I read basically), but her piece is lengthy and broad in scope, and worth reading in full.

(emphasis mine):

During the boom, there was a rush to get everything and everyone online. It was about creating a global village. Yet, packing everyone into the town square is utter chaos. People have different needs, different goals.

…

A global village assumes heterogeneous context and a hierarchical search assumes universals. Both are poor approximations of people’s practices. We keep creating technological solutions to improve this situation. Reputation systems, folksonomy, recommendations. But these are all partial derivatives, not the equation itself. This is not to dismiss them though because they are important; they allow us to build on the variables and approximate the path of the equation with greater accuracy. But what is the equation we’re trying to solve?

…

But on a personal level, no one actually wants to live in a global village. You can’t actually be emotionally connected to everyone in the world. While the global village provides innumerable resources and the possibility to connect to anyone, people narrow their attention to only focus on the things that matter. What matters is conceptually “local.”

…

In business, the local part of glocalization mostly refers to geography. Yet, the critical “local” in digital glocalization concerns culture and social networks. You care about the people that are like you and the cultural elements that resonate with you. In the most extreme sense, the local is simply you alone.

…

When the web started, the hype was that geography would no longer matter. Of course, we know that now to be utterly false. But the digital architecture did alter the network structure of society, allowing interest-driven bonds to complement geographically-manifested ones. Web1.0 created the infrastructure for glocalized networks.

…

Yet, the responsibility of big Web2.0 companies is to provide flexible glue to all of this innovation, to provide the information infrastructure that will permit glocalization, to allow for openness.

Those are just a few pull quotes. I know I missed numerous great one. If you read it, feel free to quote your favorite sections in my comments, as I’d love to hear what you got from it too.

OK, off to bed.

Thanks,
Nate

Update:

(I didn’t know it until I went back through this post to add links that Danah is a researcher at Yahoo! Research Berkeley.)