BrightKite: New location based Social Networking site

This morning I was checking my iGoogle and came across the following blog post that reviews a new social networking application called BrightKite. What separates Brightkite from many other social networking apps is that every activity and or event is based around your location which is really cool idea. After watching a video review it also seems to integrate with Google Maps so events and activities are visually plotted out using Google’s Maps API. Sites with this kind of intelligence are definitely the future. And fit into the roadmap of what the semantic web is all about; an internet that offers targeted content centered around what the user wants versus the one size fits all mentality. I've signed up to try the app and look forward to sharing some insights.

The mobile web.... slow adoption

This week I finally entered the Smartphone world with a Blackberry curve. It seems everywhere I look these days people are using Smartphone’s. Whether iPhone or Blackberry I notice a large amount of people's heads buried in these devices at meetings, lunch, out to dinner, cafes or even bars. So I was quite amazed to see the slow adoption of the "mobile web" has been in a recent emarketer article on mobile media advertising.

I can attest that despite liking the access to email and calendaring on my Blackberry the web experience, which is a combination of WML and basic HTML for me was fairly disappointing in this day and age. So I am probably another contributor to the statistic of someone who has a smartphone but isn’t embracing the “mobile web” just yet.

Web evolution

Check out my latest post over at the Hanson Dodge blog titled "Semantic Web – what is it, and how did we get here?". I give a brief history of web evolution from 1.0 to 2.0 and delve into the next evolution into the semantic web. A term being used to describe the next generation of the web as it becomes smarter. Enjoy!

Walmart down for "maintenance"?

Wow this is the second time in just over a week I’ve stumbled across a big name dot com that is down for "maintenance". Having worked in this field for a while I’ve used “maintenance” pages like this on sites big and small as a more graceful application error page or during an upgrade or deployment.

I’ve always thought that when you’re a multibillion dollar retailer like Wallmart or a big name social networking site like LinkedIn it puts you in a different league where you have uber redundancy and 99.9% uptime. Seeing unexpected maintenance pages like this especially on Wallmart (a site that generates a lot of revenue from ecommerce) validates that my above mentioned approach is still used for websites of all shapes and sizes!

Great new book on social media for corporations

Last week I attended a webinar title "Join the Groundswell in Enterprise Social Software" hosted by Lithium and authors of a new Forrester book titled "Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies ".

It focused on successful examples of using social media to enhance a company’s dialog with its customers online. The reoccurring theme was that people are already talking about your brand online whether it is on blogs, discussion boards or portals. And the recommendation was to embrace this medium and participate in the discussion versus becoming a spectator. Ultimately doing this will give you a deeper understand of your customers and help to retain and recruit new brand advocates.

There was some great advice for things to consider before adding a community and social networking feature to your site. If you’re currently wrangling with community and social media ideas and want somewhere to start I would suggest doing what I did and ordering the book.

LinkedIn down... even the pros have problems

I went to log in to LinkedIn today on my lunch break today and I was confronted with an error message "LinkedIn Will Be Back Soon". Its reminder that even the pro's with lots of money and uber server architecture experience occassional technical issues with their web applications too!

Useful Web 2.0 directorys

It seems like every other day there is a new cool web 2.0 application startup. I've got to be honest even for an enthusiast like myself it’s hard to keep up to date.

Below some sites and useful directorys I use to keep up to date with the latest and greatest web 2.0 sites:

• Go2Web20.net - The complete Web 2.0 directory:
  http://www.go2web20.net/
• Webware Cool Web 2.0 apps for everyone:
  http://www.webware.com/
• And lastly my old faithful, Techcrunch:
  http://www.techcrunch.com/

I hope you find them useful.

You've bought a web application, now maintain and enhance it!

Maintenance and updates of web sites never really seemed to be a big problem in days gone by. Once in a while you would add a new press release, update the company page or tweak something here or there. However with the shift from web sites (static) to web applications (dynamic + data driven) and the move from web 1.0 functionality (1 way communication) to web 2.0 (bi-directional communication) the modern web application requires much more attention.

A Web application with Web 2.0 functioanlity can do much more for your business than its Web 1.0 cousin:

• It will connect you with new and existing customers
• Sell your product
• Reduce your support costs
• Increase your brands awareness
• Build community

However with all these new features it is unrealistic to think you can buy a Ferrari without maintaining it! The amount of upkeep is often challenging to communicate and sell to clients. Most of them are used to spending a portion of their marketing budget on the build with a few yearly updates and not a lot of additional promotion of their site. Therefore it is our job to educate then what has changed in the last 2-3 years since their last website redesign.

Modern sites and the content on them can be driven by any number systems including:

• Content management (CMS)
• Ecommerce
• Community and social media
• User generated content
• Rich media engine
• Analytics

Add to that traffic building and emarketing programs and frequent updates are a reality of doing business online. Investing in a dynamic sites means a commitment of time and cost to keep your web application up to date. Not only by adding fresh content, but by adding new features and refining your application to give users a reason to return.

As the web evolves and new features come along you should constantly be thinking about how to leverage them to improve and enhance the user experience, adding engaging content and providing tools that encourage interaction. Critical Mass have coined the term "Always in Beta" and developed a concept around that theme. And I think this idea of Beta pretty much sums up my feelings on the modern web application. It will never be done, and nor should it be. Make sure that you allocate budget and earmark time for adding to and embrace the rewards of going Web 2.0!

Web 2.0... another bubble?

I found the folllowing video title "Here Comes Another Bubble v1.1 - The Richter Scales” which chronicles the rise and fall of some prominent Web 2.0 companies among other things. And it sparked my interest and got me thinking, are we headed for a dark place in 08?

The web is a fast moving place where one thing is guaranteed .... change! What was the status quo in 2007 won't be in 2008. Techcrunch has an article that discusses a possible Web 2.0 crash in 2008.

Companies will come and go. But one thing is certain, last time the web crashed in the dotcom era it seemed your website was an optional expense, something that could be cut from the budget. Now things have shifted, a companys website is mission critical, so to are the services offered by many websites! The web is the first place people most people go to find things. So your website is as important if not more than your bricks and mortar establishment, especially when its got an ecommerce component attached :)

So without further ado heres the video, see you in 2008.

The Web comes to the Wii

Due to the depressing winter weather conditions here is Wisconsin I decided it was time to relax on the couch and play with my new toy, my much loved Nintendo Wii. To be honest i've been out of gaming for quite some time, the Wii got me excited about gaming again. Up until now the Wii has had wireless internet connectivity through Wifi that really hasn't been leveraged. Updating the system and downloading the weather were all it could really accomplish.

Today I check out the Wii shopping channel and noticed you can now get Opera browser for the Wii! Being a web enthusiast I downloaded it right away and i've got to admit its quite impressive.

Opera is added under the "Internet Channel" from the Wii menu. Browsing with the Wii remote is simple and easy, and use the Wii controller directional arrows, A for selecting, B for back and zoom in (+) and zoom out (-). Your menu is simple:

• Enter WWW address


• Back / Forward


• Search: Via Google or Yahoo


• Reload page


• Forward link via email

Unfortunately Opera on the Wii does not support browser plug-ins or downloads, however it does support Flash 7 . So it is much like the light weight Safari browser that ships with the Iphone. Regardless this is a really solid release for the Wii which can only help Nintendo boost the Wii's popularity. Just like the Iphone, with 10 million Wii consoles out there its another platform developers need to consider when building websites.

Update on the Target and accessibility on Techcrunch

At the beginning of the month I weighed in on my feelings on the Target accessibility class action law suit. Now it seems others are doing the same in a heated way on comments in Techcrunch blog on the subject. This debate definitely is gathering momentum, ultimately I think the days of building websites that are inaccessible are over.

Amazon secures patent for SEO friendly URL's... What?

Wow this truly floored me. The US Patent Office (USPTO) has granted a patent for placing a "search string at the end of a URL without any special formatting.". See the diagram left that helped them seal the deal with the USPTO.

A popular technique known as URL aliasing and URL rewriting evolved which allowed developers to move away from non friendly URL's like this:

http://www.domain.com/index.aspx?id=63304&mode=wide

To friendly URL's like this:

http://www.domain.com/vacation packages wisconsin

URL Aliasing been around for many years, and was popularized by Google's search engine. Using this URL format is beneficial in two ways, it's ultra search engine friendly give the pages ranking a boost, and its more user friendly.

On doing some research on this the subject the USPTO is meant to granted patents for something that aren't obvious. Also unless you can prove you were using this technology prior to Amazon filing this patent in 2004 you could be in trouble. This is pure madness! It would seem that this technique utilized by hundreds of millions of data driven websites and blogs are now in breach of Amazon's patent?

Accessibility, Standards and Targets class action lawsuit

The other night I was talking at length to my brother in law Steve about his field of engineering and its various certifications and standards and comparing it to my field of web development. This isn't the first time i've thought about this issue, In a previous blog of mine I went hunting for professional organizations for web development.... there weren't many.

He argued that "no one is going to die if a website doesn't work in Firefox, however in my field if a wall collapses and kills someone we got a problem. Thus we have standards, rules and regulations to make sure that doesn't happen". I agree that no one is going to die if a website doesn't render right but as more mission critical services move online web standards become more important.

Steve is a member of an independent professional organization for engineers known as Ashrae which develops standards among other things for the field of engineering. In the web world we have the W3C which is independent and then corporations like Adobe, Google and Microsoft who play a part in helping to innovate and drive web standards. However nothing is really enforced unless your designing for government who demand section 508 compliance.

He said that engineering has been around for thousands of years, and web development is a new field of expertise and standards and enforcement of those will take time. So it was funny today when stumbled across two separate articles:

• http://ajaxian.com/archives/two-rulings-that-could-improve-web-accessibility


• http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071003-lawsuit-over-website-accessibility-for-the-blind-becomes-class-action.html
  

Both talk about Targets class action lawsuit for not being 100% accessible to the blind? I shouldn't need to state it, but I will for clarification, Target is a corporation not a government body so no standards apply right? I guess not!

My point to my brother in law is that as more services move online, whether its shopping, banking, bill payment or yellow pages there need to be standards enforced to ensure everyone, young and old, 56k or broadband, iphone or pc can access your site. The lawsuit against Target could prove to be a big factor in enforcement of standards online..... Time will tell but this will be an interesting case to watch!

The website development process told by Lego :)

This article is both informational, and humorous! :)

http://www.pingmag.jp/2005/12/09/the-website-development-process/

Create collection of articles on "Planning, Managing Web Sites and Web Site Projects"

Today I was looking for some example document for a web content plan. I have a structured approach i've used for years, but I always want to keep abreast of things and see what others in the industry are doing. I didn't really find anything concrete howevers on my Google hunt I stumbled across the following page that had a great collection of articles on "Planning, Managing Web Sites and Web Site Projects". Definately worth a look if you need help.