Trends in the Web

Web 2.0 for non-experts

2008-05-20T21:43:00.006+02:00

Web 2.0 technologies intrigue me most with their social aspect. I always promote services which enable collaboration and sharing. It is difficult, though, to speak about Web 2.0 with people who consider the services and the web sites as a just another stupid social network. Moreover, some of the people who I talk with do not have technical background. Their knowledge of Internet is limited. That is the reason why often they can not understand me. The people need to see a considerable advantage in order to start using any new service or web site. So I had to think what value Web 2.0 technologies can add to the people's life.

The approach which proved to be successful was to connect the technologies which I like and use with the hobbies of the people whom I spoke to.

Flickr for a hobby painter

First, I talked with my mother. Her hobby is painting. For a while she used to send photos on Skype when she finished an art work. She needed something to share her paintings and to get feedback from the others. I showed her how to use flickr for that. Because she was really interested, she got everything very quickly and in less than a month all of her works were online.
On the left is the photo of the painting which my mother likes most.

Personalized start page

The start was quite successful. It motivated me to talk with others as well. The topic which I chose was the personalized start page. The combination of RSS feeds and widgets in the start page saves me enormous amount of time and enables me to follow a long list of blogs. I use Netbvibes for a start page. In my opinion Netbives and iGoogle are the best possibilities. The choice depends on the individual case. I was quite excited with the social features in the Netvibes Ginger release. If all my friends would use Netvibes Ginger then we could share what we read in a unobtrusive way, something which would improve collaboration and help me with new ideas. My friends and colleagues tried it out, but only a couple of people liked it. The adoption rate was low. In most cases, Netvibes did not add a value to my friends' lives in the way Flickr helped my mother.

The reason I was not successful was my motivation. It was important for me to follow what my friends read. I had to change my motivation: to focus on the advantage my family, friends and colleagues will receive and not on what I will get. At that time I registered on FriendFeed which helped me follow what my friends read the need for Netvibes. I could then think more concentrated on their needs and not on my own.

I discussed with my mother how uses Internet. Most important for her were her email, her photos on flickr, the photos of her contacts, the links to the web sites she visited regularly and the translation tools. I did not try to persuade her to use other new technology, for example RSS feeds. I focused on what she used at the moment. She registered in del.icio.us in order to save her favourite sites. Then she used the widgets available on Netvibes to add Flickr and translation toosl on her start page. She saw the advantages immediately.

Then I though how I could help my father. I decided that iGoogle was more suited for him than Netvibes. He used Internet for his emaill, for the news and for the web sites of health institutions. I though that iGoogle would be really helpful for him. However, I was wrong. Because my father used Internet in quite simple ways there was nothing that iGoogle would help him. Instead, my father felt overwhelmed by the huse information flow from the RSS feeds of the news web sites. It was another lesson for me that sometimes old ways are better suited.

The next person I talked with about personalized start page was a 18-years old boy. He was quite curious to try out new things but I needed some time to find out what is most interesting for him. I spent some showing him how I use Netvibes. I saw that it was boring. Then we started talking about his interests. I got it then: the magic word was "torrents". I checked the web sites which the guy used and saw that all of them support RSS feeds. This was the link between his hobby and Web 2.0 technologies. We integrated these feeds using tags or lables based on their thematics in his iGoogle start page. His enthusiasm was great, I had never thought before that such simple thing as RSS could make such a great difference. I hope that he will figure out by his own how such a technology could be useful for his studies ;-).

What comes next?

Now my aim is somehow to find out what service useful for my friends. I need to ask them what is most important for them, I have to listen to them and never to forget that what matters is the needs of the others.

Google Reader as Middleware

2008-05-04T16:28:00.008+02:00

Google Reader is quite a useful web site from Google. It can follow the feeds from other web sites and the user will be informed for any news transmitted in the feed. For those who do not know what a feed is - it is a XML file in RSS or Atom format which contains the latest information added on some web site.
One can insert feeds in Google Reader and later read the news from there without the need to go to the specific web site. Google Reader is very useful because it saves a lot of time and delivers information which we are normally interested in. However, it is often the case that the information is just too much. The problem can be solved with tags or folders.

Google Reader enables the user to assign such tags to different feeds, so that the information has some structure and is easily perceived. One can set up Google Reader such that it sends notifications per mail containing the new information items.

For heavy Google Reader users as me, even the tags do not work. I have subscribed for hundreds of feeds and I have thousands of unread items in my Google Reader account. If I try to read everything regularly I'll spend hours and hours reading without doing anything useful. In such case a web site which was designed to save time will be the reason for wasting time. What is the point then of Google Reader and all similar web applications ? The answer reveals the beauty of Google Reader - it emits its own feeds including feeds for the tags!

You may ask, what is the beauty here ? The answer is: Google Reader can be used as a middleware, as a service which aggregates the information but is not used for rendering it. Instead a new application which is better suited for visualization will present the information items to the user.

Here are the drawbacks of the interface of Google Reader:

the items are displayed in a sequential order, having the title and a bit of details - it would be much better to have only the title and to use the saved space for displaying another item.
if the user chooses one feed then the new items will often be too few and if the user chooses one tag then the items will sometimes be too much - better would be an aggregate + truncate approach. It would be nice to use tags for aggregation and then to display only the first 10 or 20 items. Ignore the rest! You may say that the information is lost then. I admit it could be the case. However, we can not be able to follow everything. Even if we read all the items, we will forget the information which is not relevant for us. We have to learn to let things go. Moreover, if a piece of information is really important it will be inevitably repeated. Especially if it is trend-setting news.
the information in Google Reader is out of context. We can much easier remember and apply certain information if it is the proper context, if we can make associations. Our aim is then to deliver the information items from Google Reader in the proper context using its feeds.

What I did was to use Google Reader in conjunction with Netvibes. First I set up my start page in Netvibes and created tabs there which corresponded to different cotnexts : work, home, hobby, web applications which I use and so on. Then I inserted my Google Reader feeds in the appropriate tabs. In this way I solved both the problem with the linear presentation and the problem of the lack of context. Netvibes allows to arrange the elements of the start page spatially. I could have then up to 7 boxes with Google Reader feeds in one tab which I could scan immediately, saving enormous amount of time and absorbing a lot of information. Reading the feeds in context helps me filter, assimilate and remember the useful items. I could configure as well how much items will be displayed in order not to feel overwhelmed. Interestingly, if the boxes for the Google Reader feeds are spatially distributed - one left, one right for example, the information is perceived much easier.

That is how I use Google Reader as middleware. I utilize its feeds by inserting them in my Netvibes start page. It turned to be an exceptionally useful combination. Now I am up-to-date with everything I am interested in without feeling overwhelmed or spending too much time.
Of course, that combination is not unique. One could use any other feed reader instead of Google Reader as well as any other customizable start page. Google Reader + Netvibes is my personal choice which I do not insist to be the best one.

Google Translate

2008-04-25T11:52:00.002+02:00

I was in W4A conference in Beijing between 19 and 23 of April. What was really exciting was a demonstration from Charles Chen from Google who showed how the combination of ARIA markup, screen reader and a translation bot will overcome the language differences.

What they did in Google was first to inject ARIA markup in gmail chat. ARIA is a standard which enables Assistive Technologies (AT) to access the content of Rich Internet Applications (RIA). In the case of gmail chat the a screen reader will be notified for new lines in the chat and will read them loud. Charles and his colleague T.V. Raman have combined the ARIA markup with translation bots. A bot is a program which can be invited in the chat. The translation bots developed at Google read the input from the gmail chat and use Google translation services to translate the text. Then the bot posts the translation at gmail chat. Now interesting thing happens: the screen reader reads the translation. It is like the one side posts in English and then it is read on the other side in Chinese. This demonstration was very successful.

A day before the demonstration an interesting real life situation proved the usefulness of Google translation service. I was in a hotel where nobody spoke English. I needed to get my shirt ironed. The hotel offered such service but nobody could understand me what I needed. In the end I asked the service boy to come upstairs in the room where my computer was. Then I went to Google translate and used the service to translate my question in Chinese. It worked! I got my shirts ironed the next day.

Web 2.0 is really a life hack! When solving Web Accessibility problems we get much more than accessible web content - we get machine-readable content which is the basis for more advanced programs applicable in everyday life.

People with Disabilities Using the Web

2007-11-24T12:58:00.000+01:00

I have just read the W3C document How People with Disabilities Use the Web. It describes several scenarios, assistive technologies and possible barriers for user with disabilities. I will summarize the information here, removing the scenarios and the references. If anybody is interested I recommend reading the W3C document. The post will consist of several sections each dedicated for a disability with the respective assistive technology and barriers. The sections will follow the template

Disability:
Assistive technologies and strategies:

Assistive Technology 1
Assistive Technology 2

Barriers:

Barrier 1
Barrier 2

Blindness:
Assistive technologies and strategies:

screen readers
speech synthesizer
text-based browsers
voice browsers

Barriers:

images that do not have alternative text
complex images (e.g., graphs or charts) that are not adequately described
video that is not described in text or audio
tables that do not make sense when read serially (in a cell-by-cell or "linearized" mode)
frames that do not have "NOFRAME" alternatives, or that do not have meaningful names
forms that cannot be tabbed through in a logical sequence or that are poorly labelled
browsers and authoring tools that lack keyboard support for all commands
browsers and authoring tools that do not use standard applications programmer interfaces for the operating system they are based in
non-standard document formats that may be difficult for their screen reader to interpret

Low Vision:
Assistive technologies and strategies:

extra-large monitors
increasing the size of system fonts and images
screen magnifiers
screen enhancement software
specific combinations of text and background colors

Barriers:

absolute font sizes that do not change (enlarge or reduce) easily
inconsistent layout which makes navigation difficult the page is enlarged, due to loss of surrounding context
pages or images with poor contrast which cannot be easily changed through user override of author style sheets
text presented as images, which prevents wrapping to the next line when enlarged
many of the barriers listed for blindness

Color blindness:
Assistive technologies and strategies:

own style sheets to override the font and background color choices of the author

Barriers:

color that is used as a unique marker to emphasize text on a Web site
text that inadequately contrasts with background color or patterns
browsers that do not support user override of authors' style sheets

Deafness:
Remark: Deaf people may use predominantly a sign language, and they may or may not read a written language fluently, or speak clearly.

Assistive technologies and strategies:

captions for audio content
rely on supplemental images to highlight context.

Barriers:

lack of captions or transcripts of audio on the Web, including webcasts
lack of content-related images in pages full of text, which can slow comprehension for people whose first language may be a sign language instead of a written/spoken language
lack of clear and simple language
requirements for voice input on Web sites

Hard of hearing:
Assistive technologies and strategies:

captions for audio content
amplification of audio

Barriers:

lack of captions or transcripts for audio on the Web, including webcasts

Motor disabilities:
Remark: People with motor disabilities may need more time when filling out interactive forms on Web sites.

Assistive technolgoies and strategies:

specialized mouse
keyboard with a layout of keys that matches range of hand motion of the users
pointing device such as a head-mouse, head-pointer or mouth-stick
voice-recognition software
eye-gaze system

Barriers:

time-limited response options on Web pages
browsers and authoring tools that do not support keyboard alternatives for mouse commands
forms that cannot be tabbed through in a logical order

Speech disabilities:
Assistive techonolgies and strategies:

voice recognition software
alternate input mode such as text entered via a keyboard

Barriers:

voice-based interaction is required and no alternative input mode is available

Visual and auditory perception:
Assistive technologies and strategies:

getting information through several modalities at the same time (web site + screen reader, audio + captions)

Barriers:

lack of alternative modalities for information on Web sites, no textto be converted to audio to supplement visuals, no captions for audio

Attention deficit disorder:
Assistive technologies and strategies:

turn off animations

Barriers:

distracting visual or audio elements that cannot easily be turned off
lack of clear and consistent organization of Web sites

Intelectual disabilities:
Assistive technologies and strategies:

graphics to enhance understanding of a site

Barriers:

unnecessarily complex language on Web sites
lack of graphics on Web sites
lack of clear or consistent organization of Web sites

Memory disabilities:
Assistive technologies and strategies:

consistent navigational structure throughout the site

Barriers:

lack of clear or consistent organization of Web sites

Mental health disabilities:
Assistive technologies and strategies:

turning off distracting visual or audio elements
screen magnifiers

Barriers:

distracting visual or audio elements that cannot easily be turned off
Web pages with absolute font sizes that do not enlarge easily

Seizure disorders:
Assistive technologies and strategies:

turn off animations, blinking text, or certain frequencies of audio

Barriers:

use of visual or audio frequencies that can trigger seizures

Fore more detailed information, please visit How People with Disabilities Use the Web.

7 Real-Life Situations where Web Accessibility is a Must

2007-11-14T22:32:00.000+01:00

Web accessibility is very often neglected by individuals and companies while creating their web sites. The reason for that mostly is not enough information about the accessibility and its benefits.What people think about accessibility is to provide some description of the images they use and stop using JavaScript and Flash. There is a lot of misunderstanding about web accessibility and its goals. Therefore, I will list 7 scenarios from daily life when people need accessible web sites:

Users can not see. The text content of the site can be accessed using an assistive technology (screen reader, braille output device but the it can not reproduce an image or a video. The assistive technology can not identify structural elements from pure content. The tables used for layout confuse the screen reader, as it tries to read the content of the table in a manner appropriate for tabular information.
Users can not hear. They can not access audio content, nor can they follow the narrative in a video clip.
User can not move. They can not use the mouse nor the keyboard as an user without disabilities can.
Users can not understand a complex text. They see very long page or too complex sentences. Until they reach the conclusions, they have forgotten the real problem.
Users have a slow Internet connections and the images either take too long to download or are not downloaded at all.
Users are not native speakers and have difficulties understanding the foreign language.
The situation prevents for the user from using their hands, eyes or hears to access a web page. Driving or working in a loud environment are examples.

For more information about the importance of Web Accessibility I recommend the web site of the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative.

GeoBlog

2007-11-11T23:17:00.001+01:00

Parallel to this blog I am maintaining another blog - Life In Maps. There are not so many articles as here, however it is quite new and it will grow.

The blog contains maps of the places where I have been. This includes:

places where I have lived;
places which I have visited;
locations of events which I have attended.

For each location there is a map with a marker for the location. If the marker is pressed, a short video will be started if such is available. I have created the video clip with the help of animoto. The clip contains an album from my flickr photos, if there is an album for the location or the event in the map. My aim is to have a diary of the all the places which I have visited. There is a short description of the map as well. My intention is to make the descriptions longer.

Currently I have posted maps of my home in Bonn, of my working place - Fraunhofer FIT and of my trip to Amsterdam with my parents where we visited Madame Tussaud's.

The motivation behind the LifeInMaps blog was to check out how I can create a mashup using Google Maps and flickr. I was reading a lot about the mashups, I was fascinated with them but I had not tried them yet. At the same time I wanted more sophisticated geo-interface to my photos than what is offered by the Flickr Map functionality. So I created this geo-blog as a mashup experiment where I can try out and combine different services which are available in Internet. I know it can be improved a lot and I'll be grateful for every comment there.

Yahoo! Pipes in action

2007-11-07T20:47:00.000+01:00

Yesterday and today I spent some time to set up Yahoo! pipes.
The result are two public pipes which merge the content of several RSS feeds and each emits a new feed.

The Companies pipe will be more interesting for broader audience. It gets information from the blogs of really trend-setting web companies. Currently I have included Google, Yahoo! UI Theater, IBM alpha works, Netvibes and RememberTheMilk. The entries are modified in order easily to recognize where they have come from. I have included labels with their source. They are sorted chronologically as well.

I had to work a lot on creating readable entries because some of the feeds are in format which is not processed well by Yahoo! Pipes. One example is how Yahoo! Pipes processes a set of elements with the same name. I had to try a lot of stuff until I realized that I can access an element with index 0 using the following notation: item.element.0. I am glad that I could manage it because the documentation contains only the basics.

The other pipe is focused on accessibility. The web sites whose feeds are aggregated are as follows: W3C WAI - the Web Accessibility Initiative of W3C, WebAIM and Juicy Studio. W3C WAI prepares guidelines for web accessibility and reviews web standards with respect to accessibility. WebAIM is a commercial organization and Juicy Studio is an independent UK web site. Any news about accessibility probably will be covered there.

These are my first tries for pipes. I plan to create more with different thematics. An example could be a pipe for the upcoming scientific conferences. The two pipes will evolve as well, new sources will be added there.

I have included both of my pipes in my Netvibes start page. I am waiting impatiently for the Netvibes Ginger release so that I can share my pipes and other widgets with friends.

Facebook

2007-11-01T02:12:00.001+01:00

It is really cool!
It is so much fun!
It is the trendiest, and the friendliest, and the expensivest ;) social network in Internet. You guessed. Yes, it is Facebook!

And me, the guy who knows about it, who reads about it, who is going to make unimaginable amount of money from writing widgets from it, did not use it. Just did not use it. Today that problem is gone. Today I am the most active person in Facebook, adding new friends, importing applications and spending all my free time there. My friends will delete me from their lists because of my constant spam ;).

OK, now seriously. Here are my positive impressions from Facebook:

the design is simple and usable;
it was really easy to create a profile, connect with the people from my address books and insert applications for my other web sites;
very nice iPhone widget, which can be inserted in web sites like Netvibes;
it is nice seeing what your friends are doing;
it is fun to explore the facebook applications
and much more... ;)

There are some remarks as well:

better integration with blog and photo hosting providers
joining more than one place network
better group overview
better high school, colleges and workplaces database
advanced people search
more will come while I'll use the application

These are my first impressions from Facebook. It is cool and it is promising (for me).

See you next time,
Mitko

Back to life

2007-10-30T02:13:00.000+01:00

The time to resume my work on the blog has come at last.

First, I'd like to thank Dr. Ralf Klamma for his kind words in his Keep Blogging article. They are a great motivation for me to restart my work on the Trends in the Web blog.

The regular updates on his blog, related both to scientific research and trends in the web, inspire me to explore in detail the constantly changing world of Internet. What I like even more are his del.icio.us bookmarks. I know now he selects really interesting and innovative web sites which are worth looking at.

I'd recommend to everybody both his beamterherrschaft blog and his del.icio.us bookmarks. Best is to subscribe for the RSS or the ATOM feeds.

OpenID

2007-02-11T01:08:00.000+01:00

I've recently seen several posts that Microsoft will support OpenID. There were some comments that for first time Microsoft adopts a innovative and free standard before the competition (most notably Google).

So today I checked what is OpenID and I created my own web identity dimitardenev.pip.versignlabs.com. I checked it on several sites and it worked :). I am very glad about it.

By the way, I set up a new blog, where I'll put maps describing my life: My Life in Maps.

Yahoo! Pipes and more

2007-02-09T10:11:00.000+01:00

The day before yesterday I checked Yahoo! Pipes, I liked it but was not enthusiastic about it. Today when I realized that I'd like to check a lot of blogs and news web sites I realized some of the potential of the pipes.

I think that in the weekend I'll create some simple pipes merging the rss feeds which are interesting for me.

Meanwhile I have checked netvibes and moved my personalized home page there.
I have geotagged all my photos on filckr as well, something which I am very proud of :).

Mashups

2007-01-31T01:00:00.000+01:00

Today I took advantage of the flickr geotagging service and I assigned locations to all my photos there. Now there is a map for each of them indicating the location.

The reason why I did it was the mashups. I have read that these geotags are actually in such mashups, so what is a mashup ? As far as I understand it is a web application built on the basis of services provided by other applications. Currently the most popular service providers are Google Maps (more than 50%) , Flickr and Amazon. I expect that YouTube and eBay will increase there share as well.

My expectations of the apis provided by these companies was that they will be compliant to the W3C Web Service Specification. I was surprised when I saw that SOAP was supported by very few of the services. Every service though supports REST. Obviously it fits better in the context of mashups.

These apis can be used not only in such mashups, but in every other site (Pedja's mashup). I think that in the future we will not be able to specify which web site is a mashup and which is not.

And in the end a cool mashup site: Video Ranking.

More about mashups at programmableweb.com.

Netvibes

2007-01-29T02:27:00.000+01:00

In the first post in the blog I wrote that the customized google start page was something cool. That was because I have not seen Netvibes. I am most probably going to switch to it as my home page. It looks nicer.

The techology behind must be similar as the one behind the customizable google site. I have to check if everything I use can be imported in Netvibes. I am quite sure that it can be done.

Blogs rule

2007-01-29T02:14:00.000+01:00

I got very curious while reading the readwriteweb so I checked several other similar blogs. What I found out was something unbelievable. It is another world out there. I once thought that google are setting the pace in the web development. Now my opinion is that they are following the trends.
OK, let me start with the summary.
First we have Don Hinchcliffe's Web 2.0 blog. It presents web 2.0 applications and companies. I have to check it in detail.

Bokardo is the next blog which took my attention. It says that it is about social web design, my impressions is more that it describes the influence of web 2.0 on the real life. I find it interesting.

I do not know what to say about ProgramalWeb. When I saw it it left me speechless. I knew that there were such things like mush-ups but more I did not know. Tomorrow I'll spend some time exploring the blog. It will be well spent time.

Welcome

2007-01-29T00:36:00.000+01:00

For months now I have been using the Web in a different way compared to before.

By me Internet began with browsing. The ICQ and the email came shortly afterwards. Google became my favorite search portal and that was all. Internet = Mail + ICQ + Google. For several years there was no change in the way I used Internet.

Two years ago it started changing. Publishing my photos on the web, using RSS readers were the first symptoms of a change. In the beginning these changes were slow and gradual, switching to flickr, customizing the google start page, relying heavily on the google maps, using the social network web sites.

In the last months, though, I have rediscovered Internet. Google Calendar helped me keep track of important events. I saw the advantages in tagging for first time in del.icio.us. Rememberthemilk actually changed my lifestyle. I have big hopes for CiteULike and my blog for scientific papers.

All this happening in a very short time made me think about it. I realized that I want to keep on track with the trends in the Web and share my impressions of what I have found out there.
This is the reason why I have set up this blog. Hopefully I'll keep it alive.