Budapest? Yes, I am in Hungary. I am spending the day with a friend after a week of ministry in Hungarian high schools. This is my seventh trip to Hungary. My wife and I lived in Eastern Hungary for a year in 97–98. I really love this country and enjoy every opportunity that I get to come back and be part of the Campus Crusade ministry here.

I scheduled some extra time to spend with my friend Laci. I met him 17 years ago when I came to Hungary on a Campus Crusade for Christ Summer Project. Laci is now leading the Campus ministry in Hungary. He and his wife are expecting their third child in April and I brought along several outfits for the baby that our children have outgrown.

I will be sharing more about my trip on my other website after I return to the U.S. and share pictures on Flickr. I fly home on Tuesday with more memories and looking forward to seeing my family after 10 days away from them. Szia Hungary.

You can also drag a link from the socialmeter site into your toolbar. You can use it to check the score of the page you have currently open in your Web browser. I found this tool while on the homepage of del.icio.us.

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.

]]> http://jeffbridgforth.com/joshua-porter-on-recommendations-and-web-20/feed/ 0 http://jeffbridgforth.com/you-send-it-and-tinyurl/ http://jeffbridgforth.com/you-send-it-and-tinyurl/#comments Thu, 26 Jan 2006 19:42:49 +0000 Jeff http://jeffbridgforth.com/?p=69 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

]]> http://jeffbridgforth.com/you-send-it-and-tinyurl/feed/ 1 http://jeffbridgforth.com/articles-i-have-found-helpful/ http://jeffbridgforth.com/articles-i-have-found-helpful/#comments Fri, 16 Dec 2005 14:08:54 +0000 Jeff http://jeffbridgforth.com/?p=63 Here are some articles that I read recently.

• Prioritizing Design Time: A Long Tail Approach — this article by Joshua Porter got me thinking about the importance of designing secondary pages. It also prompted me to consider how important a homepage really is. With Web 2.0, more visitors will probably enter sites bypassing the homepage so it decreases its importance even more.
• The 5 Second Test — This comes from UIE and Christine Perfetti.
• Joshua Porter has put together an introduction to Web 2.0. He includes links to articles that he terms “foundational writings.” In case you missed it, I did a posting summarizing a presentation Joshua gave at UI 10 Conference in October.
• Dan Saffer of Adaptive Path talks about the types of experiences we might see in the future with Web 2.0. I found it interesting and will probably go back and reread it later.

]]> http://jeffbridgforth.com/articles-i-have-found-helpful/feed/ 0 http://jeffbridgforth.com/web-20-themes/ http://jeffbridgforth.com/web-20-themes/#comments Thu, 20 Oct 2005 13:41:15 +0000 Jeff http://jeffbridgforth.com/?p=4 Last week, I attended the User Interface Conference in Boston. It was hosted by UIE. It was a really good conference and I would like to go back next year if I can get the funding.

Joshua Porter did a seminar on Web 2.0 and here is my summary. He talked about it using different themes he has identified.

• Information Remixing — He showed us housingmaps.com which is “mash up” of Google Maps and Craig’s List. Information remixing takes previously disparate information and ties them together in new ways that are more useful.
• Architecture of Participation — We looked at del.icio.us. This theme takes one person’s activity and makes it a useful tool for others. Del.icio.us allows a user to enter bookmarks and then tag them with different categoried that are useful to that person. Then I can look to see what others have put under those tags. It is collabortive filtering that takes personal info to help others find valuable content.
• Social Networking — Flickr and Netflix would be examples of this. This theme deals with sorting information based on who I am and who my personal authorities are.
• Interfaces — This theme deals with making new interfaces for content through what are referred to as APIs or Application Programming Interfaces. One example is Andale which uses information in eBays database to help those who sell on eBay become better at it. Here is a description from their website, “Andale Research is a power tool that can boost your sales every day. By helping you uncover the secrets to successful selling on eBay and formulate winning pricing strategies, it can show you how to sell more and maximize your profits on every sale.”

I thought Joshua did a good job of trying to make the concept of Web 2.0 a little easier to understand.

]]> http://jeffbridgforth.com/web-20-themes/feed/ 1 http://jeffbridgforth.com/web-20-in-my-own-words/ http://jeffbridgforth.com/web-20-in-my-own-words/#comments Mon, 26 Sep 2005 17:27:40 +0000 Jeff http://jeffbridgforth.com/?p=6 I was challenged to put Web 2.0 into an elevator pitch. This is my attempt to process what I have learned and try to pass it along. This was a helpful exercise.

From what I understand, a big part of Web 2.0 is about making information accessible. I have heard the term “content silo” kicked around with a project here at Campus Crusade. A content silo means that only I can access a database or resource documents because they are only contained in my “web.”

Google and Flikr are using new trends to make the information in their databases accessible to others so that others can take what they have created and use it for another application. An example would be Google Maps. Others have used the information for the “maps” and built another interface application that helps people find housing, find cheap gasor map the movement of hurricanes.

RSS is making information accessible in that I do not have to browse to find information that I want but I can “subscribe” and that info comes to me. RSS is what makes podcasting different from just posting an mp3 on a website.

So in a nutshell, I understand Web 2.0 to be about making information more accessible, both for users and developers.

]]> http://jeffbridgforth.com/web-20-in-my-own-words/feed/ 0 http://jeffbridgforth.com/what-is-ajax/ http://jeffbridgforth.com/what-is-ajax/#comments Thu, 08 Sep 2005 17:05:53 +0000 Jeff http://jeffbridgforth.com/?p=7 I have been seeing the term “Ajax” a lot in discussions about Web 2.0. This article from User Interface Engineering is a good place to start in understanding what Ajax is.

]]> http://jeffbridgforth.com/what-is-ajax/feed/ 0 http://jeffbridgforth.com/the-future-of-the-internet/ http://jeffbridgforth.com/the-future-of-the-internet/#comments Thu, 14 Apr 2005 13:54:21 +0000 Jeff http://jeffbridgforth.com/?p=27 I came across a thought provoking Flash presentation this morning. It is an 8 minute presentation and it predicts the next 10 years on the Internet by looking back at the previous 10 years. My friend Keith Seabourn blogged in response to the implication for the future. I think it is important for the church to consider where our culture is heading and make sure we are ready to jump in. Some of what Keith says reminds me of what the apostle Paul said to Timothy in 2 Timothy 4, “For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires, and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths.” Will personalized content become increasingly more important than accurate content? I already see it today and I believe it will only increase.

]]> http://jeffbridgforth.com/the-future-of-the-internet/feed/ 0