Tagged: web2.0

Web Directions South 2008, Sydney Convention Centre, September 26 2.40pm.

/Hear how Drupal, Semantic MediaWiki and other bleeding edge tech were enlisted along with pixie dust, FOAF, RDF, OWL, SPARQL, Linked Data (basically all the Semantic Web stuff) to build a distributed social network. The focus will be not on evangelism (I don’t really care about that) but how disparate open source platforms can talk and work together. This stuff actually works and makes development more fluid. These technologies make local development easier, but when it is time to broaden your scope, classic search is still king. How can you leverage this? Newcomers such as Yahoo Searchmonkey can play an important role in the creation of a truly distributed information system.

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A presentation given at Web Directions North, Vancouver Canada, January 31 2008.

We’ve always had metaphors to understand and design for the Web.

The original conception of the Web was as a library of documents. Our building blocks were derived from spatial ideas: “breadcrumbs,” “visits” and “homepages” were used to understand the medium.

Website-as-application was a new and novel metaphor in the late 1990s. The spatial concept of navigation was replaced by concepts derived from tools: buttons performed actions on data.

These metaphors inspire separate but complementary models of the Web. But the Web in 2008 has some entirely new qualities: more than ever it’s an ecology of separate but highly interconnected services. Its fiercely competitive, rapid development means differentiating innovations are quickly copied and spread. Attention from users is scarce. The fittest websites survive. In this world, what metaphors can be most successfully wielded?

Matt takes as a starting point interaction and product design, with ideas from cybernetics and Getting Things Done. He offers as a metaphor the concept of the Web as experience. That is, treating a website as a dynamic entity - a flowchart of motivations that both provides a continuously satisfying experience for the user… and helps the website grow.

From seeing what kind of websites this model provokes, we’ll see whether it also helps illuminate some of the Web’s coming design challenges: the blending of the Web with desktop software and physical devices; the particular concerns of small groups; and what the next movement might bring.

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A presentation given at Web Directions North, Vancouver Canada, January 30 2008.

What does Web 2.0 mean and, specifically, what does it mean for the future of governments? Tara Hunt has been speaking all over the world, talking to government audiences on this subject. She believes that Web 2.0 has very little to do with the technology and everything to do with people. Her talk will cover the main tenets of Web 2.0: openness, collaboration and community and what it means for government.

See the slides and hear the podcast »