Jeff Bridgforth :: Webcraftsman

Web 2.0 Themes

October 20, 2005

Design (Web) · Social Web · Web as Platform

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.