Shadow Footprints

Breakfast with yr web idols was too early for me at 7:30am so Friday started with Russell Brown and Tales from the Content Side. This was not the advertised presentation. Russell covered how media writes stories as if there is no history. A statistic can be described as alarming when in context to the same statistic 6 months ago a substantial improvement can be seen. This does reinforce my contempt of the mass media. I hate the way every fatal accident is described as a tragedy.

Russell also covered what we blog about, and cited Nielson's Online Consumer Generated Report.

I'm an avid user of rss feeds, currently via Google Reader and was surprised that 92% of internet users are not using rss. It's worth doing and saves time. Set-up takes 2-5 minutes and saved you from visiting sites only to find no new content.

He also pointed out that there are no rich media solutions. What we've seen encourages users to adblock, blocking many inoffensive ads also. For an ad to work it needs to link to a good e-commerce site.

Nest up was Simon Willison with two subjects: OpenID and decentralised social networks.

OpenID

This solves the "What's my password?" and What's my username?" that many people experience, without trying to have the same username/password combo on every site. The web needs a single signon but it needs to be decentralised. OpenID does that. With one (or a few) URLs (or "WWW's") an individual has a unique identifier. By either finding a , or setting up an yourself, you have an ID that requires less signons.

One of the disadvantages of OpenID is phishing, but there are solutions.

Decentralised Social Networking

This works by utilising microformats and relating your different profiles around the web. An advantage could be upcoming.org to use your last.fm profile to recommend events.

Google released a Social Graph API to crawl public relationship data and find your friends, simplifying the need to add all your friends again when you join a new social networking site.

The Transforming Web: To Infinity and Beyond was one of the presentations I was most looking forward to. I stumbled across Tom Coates' online presence several years ago and followed it.

A few of Tom's points were:

• Sites are an interface to a wide range of information
• Your site is not your product. E.g. Twitter's product is people keeping in touch with each other, and only 10% of the traffic is on the website.
• Play well with others. It's good to design for recombination and opening up data sources. It makes your service more attractive with less central development. Creating something that doesn't do much but enhances other sites is a powerful product.
• You can never have too much data. You just have to make the excess manageable. With the additional data you have the potential of combining one dataset with another, increasing data value. Capture metadata whenever you can.
• Hierarchies can't take the weight. Top navigation is just a jumping off point for people finding the path they want.

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