Recommendations and Web 2.0

January 28, 2006

One of the blogs I regularly read is by Joshua Porter of UIE. I heard Joshua speak at the UI 10 conference in Boston last fall. The following is what I found to be a very interesting insight into Web 2.0 that I had missed from an entry he made in September. I ran across it today when I read a recent post he did on TV recommendations through Microsoft’s new software, Live.com.

From Joshua’s Blog entry, Tech.Memeorandum’s Filtering Illustrates Web 2.0’s Most Important Skill

Recommendation Systems and Web 2.0

The other day I wrote about movie recommendation systems and didn’t really tie it in to Web 2.0 like I wanted to. So let me try and sum up here:

Recommendation systems are the end goal of Web 2.0. They are how Web 2.0 will change the daily lives of “normal� people. It’s fun and exciting to talk about RSS and REST and semantic markup, but what we’re really after isn’t technology, it’s utility. What we’re really after is being able to see the greatest movies of all time, listen to the best music out there, and hear the most important news without having to wade through all the junk to get to it. It’s the getting rid of stuff that makes recommendation systems valuable.

Of course, the Web as Platform doesn’t filter by itself. Simply having a bunch of content from which to draw doesn’t do that much for us other than provide an exciting opportunity. With no effort in filtering we’re left with simple aggregation blogs that copy everything, word-for-word, the wheat and the chaff. With more effort in filtering we have valuable filters like tech.memeorandum that can pinpoint the important content and hide the rest. That’s why filtering is way up high in the skillset of Web 2.0.

I found this an interesting view because it points to the end goal of Web 2.0. People want a filter so they can get to the good stuff. The Web has too much information and Web 2.0 is an effort to separate the wheat from the chaff. Recommendations are a trusted way of filtering through to the good stuff based on what others have found. And the closer the relationship, the more trusted the recommendation. Which is why I think social networks is such an important feature of Web 2.0.

You Send It and TinyUrl

January 26, 2006

There are two websites that I found out about recently that are great tools.

You Send it – You can send up to 1GB files through this website. You upload it to their server and they send an email to your receipt with a link to download it from their server. You do not have to sign up. All you do is type in your email, your recepient and upload the file you want to send them.

Tinyurl – Ever have long urls that you want to send to people so they can get a resource? Go to Tinyurl. Type in (or paste) the long url into their form box and they generate a shorter url that you can use in your email. Here is an example from one of my sites, GodSquad.com. This link: http://www.godsquad.com/squadroom/evangelism/cojourners/cards1.pdf becomes this link: http://tinyurl.com/blpt5

Yesterday was “not a good day for science”

January 6, 2006

I did not have a good day with technology yesterday. I finally got back my digital camera from Best Buy after a month and it was not fixed. How frustrating. My broadband connection was not working last night (just got it installed in the morning). And then I was almost locked out of my laptop because I somehow changed the language setting to “Hungarian” so my computer would not accept my password. So I went to my old standby of power off and reboot and it worked.

I got the title of this post from “Dexter’s Laboratory (episode #24 according to their website)” It is a show on Cartoon Network that I watched a lot when we lived in Hungary fo a year in 1997-98. Cartoon Network and CNN were the only two English channels we got. Dexter is a genius child who has a secret bedroom laboratory. When Dexter has a bad day, he would say, “This is not a good day for science.” I like saying it when I have a bad or challenging day like I did yesterday.

WAMP and PHP Development

January 3, 2006

A couple of weeks ago, I started working on a tutorial to add a forum to a site using Dreamweaver, PHP and MySQL. The tutorial pointed me to a product called WAMP, which is a package of Apache, PHP and MySQL that allows you to run a test server on your local machine. I have been hesitant to load these software packages separately because when I have investigated it in the past, it meant changing some configurations in Windows and I don’t feel comfortable doing that. I had tried another product for awhile but it did not have an updated version of PHP. WAMP has the latest so I am giving it a try. One of my goals this year is to learn how to do some more development with PHP. I was excited last week when I received a book I recently ordered, PHP for Dreamweaver 8. Now I just need to make some time in my schedule to work through it.

Just Right Content

January 3, 2006

I read an article over my “Christmas break” about “just right content.” It is a paper by Jared Spool of UIE. The paper shares some findings of a research project that is still in progress. I can’t wait until they finish the project and have some practical tools that I as a designer can implement to make my sites better.