Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
Gamage' Web 2.0 Presentation at IET
Please welcome to visit my presentation Web 2.0 Features compared with Web 1.0
Please post your comments in this blog.
Gerry's Web 2.0 Presentation
Thanks to my fellow presenters and for those of you who attended.
The main topics I covered were marketing analysis and tools for 2.0, the impact of mobile devices, and a few other observations.
Here is my presentation...
These are other noteworthy Web 2.0 links...
- Luke Wroblewski - Web interface design
- Matt May - Web accessibility
- Second Life - Virtual interactive world
- Twitter - RSS social networking
- Flickr - RSS photo image gallery
- ZCubes - Online app. for presentations
- Zoho - Online apps. for writing, showing, etc..
- Jumpcut.com - Online app. for video editing, sharing
- Tellme.com - mobile/cell phone searching, mapping
- Web20ksu.blogspot.com - where minds meld
Monday, April 23, 2007
Web 2.0 is Here
Did you know that Google is the #1 start page on the Internet? Do you have a Second Life account? When is the last time you posted a comment to a blog? 60% of Web content is viewed by someone they know (think My Space, Facebook, etc.). The term Webmaster is archaic since the "new" Web involves everyone, including the audience, to add content.
The evolving Web is Web 2.0. More to come...
The Hybrid Designer has always existed...
A lot of empahsis is placed upon the idea of a 'Hybrid Designer' within the context of Web 2.0. Chris Messina, Kelly Goto, Richard MacManus and Jeremy Keith spent 50 minutes at the Web 2.0 conference talking about the hybrid designer and what s/he is and the problems we face.
They covered the issues pretty well. They spoke of the hybrid designer having a split brain, right for creativity and left for logic, a passion for solving problems and "rock-star" coding fingers (let's not forget Ginormous abs, either, which I am sorely lacking). Tools were mentioned (Ruby on Rails being one of them) and the necessity of 'View Source', which garnered ample applause.
All this is well and good and I have absolutely no complaints about this panel discussion. It was, in fact, one of the highlights of the Expo for me. It confirmed many of the things that I've been thinking for years. The idea of 'play' being a major focus of a hybrid designer, the idea that in order for you to succeed as a designer in any of the new media you need to be very versatile and that you need to speak the language of programmers. You may not have to spit out lines of code through your keyboard, but you do need to understand the concept as well as how a programmer understands things. And it doesn't hurt to know a bit of programming. That's why it's important for us, as designers, to be able to look under the hood and check out what's going on. In the end, it helps us.
But I've been thinking a bit further about the idea of hybrid design and that it has always existed in one way or another. The comfort of the cocoon that we, as designers have always had (that of being able to just design and go about our business) is gone - if it ever existed for many of us at all because I believe the hybrid designer has existed forever in one form or another. (Look at Leonardo, he was not only an artist, but an inventor, teacher and designer. Michelangelo was an architect, artist, designer, etc. You get the picture...) In fact, when I taught Typography and Computer Imaging I was continually telling my students that they had to be flexible in order to go out and get a job. The more versatile they became, the more the market would open up to them. Things had shifted, there was no longer a need for a specific type of designer (i.e. an illustrator, typographer or graphic designer) but that the new designer had to be someone who could do everything AND build a web site for their employer. My point in this is that once again we are going through another metamorphosis and that's fine. Flexibility is good. My concern is when does it stop? When will we ever be given the opportunity to focus on what it is we were born to do? That is create.
Some would say that the act of creation is in everything that a designer does, but then I ask what about the help wanted ad for a 'Web Designer' that requires someone who is an expert in: Photoshop, Illustrator, PHP, .NET, C#, CSS, HTML, XML, XHTML, Server Maintenance, Good Communication skills over the phone (i.e. some selling required) and must be creative. I realize that there is a need for people of this caliber, but it seems to me that the majority of these types of employers are specifically looking for one person to fill the void that should normally be filled by at least two, maybe three people. Don't get me wrong, there are some incredibly creative coders out there who are also excellent designers and even good salespersons, but the sky hasn't opened and we can't say "Hallelujia it's raining hybrid designers!" (sorry Weather Girls).
My second question is this: Besides being able to focus on being creative, what happens when the tools (and there are ton of them out there) begin to get in the way of the design process and then in the way of the creative process? (We'll talk more about creative process in a different blog.) In my experience, when tools get in the way, the quality of design and usability goes down. It has taken me many years to hit expert level in Photoshop and Illustrator and even today I am still find things within those two applications that surprise me. Some level of built-in functionality that I didn't know was there. Now we are experiencing the impact of Moore's Law at an even faster rate as designers and developers (obviously, Moore's Law applies to the number of transistors on an integrated circuit, but the concept also applies to technology in general). New tools to 'help' us in our work come out daily and each vendor says their tool is better than their competitors. This places us in a tremendous bind. We either stick with the tools that we know and fear becoming 'outdated' as a designer or we try the latest and greatest and do our best to keep up with the learning curves required for all of the wonderful new tools. Some of us try to find a happy medium, but are we ever really happy about medium?
In the end, we are required to be agile and flexible and some of us may be required to have ginormous abs (although requiring that may result in a lawsuit...) and we have to be okay with those things. But I think that we also need to be okay in the realization that many times, we can take a creative concept and utilize a pencil and some paper... two of the most elegant tools in our arsenal.
Friday, April 20, 2007
Vidoop...
Why Vidoop? Because we liked it. The word sounds cool. It's as simple as that. But there is a bit more to the story...
We were sitting in the last row of the right hand corner section of the Web 2.0 keynotes when the CEO of vidoop.com did his ten minute spiel. The technology he was introducing was very exciting: A way to visually authenticate a user. The process is quite nifty in its simplicity. A user has a pre-set group of images (2,3,5, etc) that are presented within a grid (size set by an administrator) of other random images. Each image has a letter super-imposed in one corner. These letters and order of the images change each time a user attempts a login. The user looks at the images and sees which ones correspond to the categories they've chosen (the example was boats and airplanes). They then type in the letters that are superimposed on the images into a text field and press 'login'. If everything matches up, the user is authenticated and can proceed. Great concept. Cool interface and an ingenius idea for authentication... Just one problem and it's a big one. ADA compliance and standards compliance.
According to the CDC approximately 14 million people, 18 to 64, have "vision trouble" and for every 10 sighted users there will be 1 blind user. So, by nature, any system that employs images for authenticating a user will be exclusionary to this segment of the population. Real-life example: Let's say a major bank utilizes Vidoop's technology for authentication on their online banking system. They've just excluded approximately 1 in 10 of their users and possibly more who have "vision trouble" from using their online banking system.
When I asked the representatives of Vidoop about standards compliance and ADA compliance and related the statistics to them regarding visual impairment, they agreed that it was an issue, but they didn't have a solution at this time. They also didn't have a plan to address this issue for future releases of their product. In their words, they "weren't really working on that aspect (ADA compliance) of it." I was stunned, to say the least.
It bothers me that a company featured at the Web 2.0 Expo would be moving forward with a product that is very Web 1.0. It'd be like a web development company designing web sites using tables and non-semantic HTML.
Vidoop has a great idea for authentication, I just hope they can bring it forward into the 21st Century so everyone can use it.
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
So, what is Web 2.0?
There's a strange phenomenon occuring here in San Fran at the Web 2.0 expo. The people at the Web 2.0 expo booth have been giving out T-Shirts this week that say "Web 2.0 is" and then there is a white rectangle that one can write on with a marker. In this way a person is allowed to express what they think Web 2.0 is. All of the little white rectangles have remained blank.
I think leaving the shirts blank is very significant because it allows people who see the shirt - let's call these people the users - to fill in the blank themselves. It allows Web 2.0 to be anything that the user can imagine.
But alas, our boss didn't send us out here to find out that the Web 2.0 is a blank box on a T-shirt. So, here's kind of a summary. Web 2.0 is about collaboration. It's the collective use of many small parts taken from here and placed over there with other parts that have been taken from everywhere else. It's less about a place on the web and more about the web being everywhere we go with or without a computer. A simple analogy might be that Web 2.0 is like air. It's everywhere around us and it's a part of everything we do, except where air is passive Web 2.0 is active and interactive.
I could sit here and bore you with what the Web 2.0 is made up of (i.e. mash-ups, widgets, badges, etc), but that's not really the point. Those are pieces and parts of Web 2.0. What we're really looking for is what it is. The bottom line is that the Web 2.0 is about the user regardless of where the user is or what s/he is doing.
The t-shirts are right... Web 2.0 is ______________________.
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