When developing any application, getting proper user feedback during the early stages is essential if you want to have the application suit your customers’ needs. Often this is done with staged tests, but with web applications you can have the benefit of using an online method of retrieving your users’ opinions.

However, doing so can be tricky. If you want to get feedback, you can implement your own system for soliciting it, however, this takes up extra time that could be used to further develop your core web application. Alternatively, there are some existing online services that can provide survey-like questionnaires to users, but honestly, these present more trouble to the user than they’re worth.

When I first started using Stack Overflow, I noticed that the feedback service they had been using, UserVoice, was an elegant and functional solution to this problem.

UserVoice takes care of the problem for you, by providing you with an easy-to-use comment and feedback forum. (It can also be a place where users can submit bug reports, as well) However, it’s more than just a forum: By allowing users to “vote” on particular topics, it allows clustering of the most popular ideas/requests, thus bringing them to your attention the most. It also helps prevent duplicate topics from being submitted, and is a great “Digg-style” way of using the “wisdom of the crowds”, as they say.

There are some drawbacks, of course. If you’re using it to allow users to submit bugs, I wouldn’t rely on it as your sole bug tracker. Instead, I’d use it to receive the reports, then parse through and verify them before adding them to a proper bug tracker (like Trac) where they can be better integrated into your development work-flow. Furthermore, if you have a popular site, the feedback forums can still become deluged in too many requests/ideas, but that is a problem no matter what type of system you’re using for feedback. And, as mentioned before, the voting system helps to bring to your attention the most popular ones so that you can further make a value judgment.

I’ve since launched a feedback forum for RunTrackr, my side project for the past little while. I encourage you to give UserVoice a try, since it’s so easy to get started - you’re literally up and running inside of two minutes. At a minimum, give their home page a visit - it does a great job of explaining the process in a simple and easy-to-understand manner.

After much speculation yesterday, marked by a leaked web comic and finally an acknowledgment by Google, Google Chrome, the much anticipated web browser, is here.

I encourage you to download it and give it a try, as I did as soon as it came out. Here are some of my initial impressions.

Overview

Google released a fairly long web comic that delves into quite a bit of detail about Chrome - it’s not your typical comic! Touted as being built “from scratch”, Chrome uses the WebKit rendering engine, the same one that powers Safari and Konqueror.

The first thing you notice is how minimal the “Chrome” or UI of Chrome is. If you’re used to a half-dozen toolbars, buttons and widgets all over the place, Chrome will seem like a greenfield to you. By default, there is only a tab bar and then an address bar containing back, forward, a combined reload-stop button and the address bar. There are also buttons for bookmarking a site and for page and browser settings. The bookmarks bar is not displayed unless you specifically change that setting.

Keyboard shortcuts are also present so that you don’t have to click through context menus. If you’re used to the keyboard shortcuts of Firefox and IE7 you’ll be pleased to know that most of them transfer over without change: Ctrl-T opens a new Tab, Ctrl-W/Ctrl-F4 closes a tab, Alt-D focuses the address bar and Ctrl-J opens Downloaded Files.

The address bar also functions as a search bar, and this combination just makes sense. It’s something I’ve always been doing using Firefox Quick Searches

By default the home/start page is set to set to show an Opera-style “Speed Dial” page containing most recently-accessed pages/bookmarks. You can also configure Chrome to restore the previous tabs/websites on startup, which is my personal preference ever since I started using Firefox.

Features

Chrome integrates Google Gears to speed up supporting web applications and is an obvious effort by Google to self-promote. This is substantial since the download link for Chrome is on the main Google search page - no small feat considering only the most popular/important services get that sort of attention and furthermore the link is positioned dead center beneath the search field.

The address/search bar

Chrome allows for quasi-Site-Specific Browsers by use of “Application Shortcuts”, which can be set for any website but are meant to be used mainly with web applications. These allow you to open the target URL in a browser window that does not have the menu or address bars and essentially serves as a blank canvas upon which the web application’s own UI can be displayed.

This is similar to other SSBs such as Mozilla Prism or Fluid for the Mac, as they aim to bridge the gap between desktop and web applications to make their integration more seamless.

However, like Google Blogoscoped points out, using such non-browser interfaces may condition the user to be more lax when entering their credentials and makes phishing attempts more viable since no URL is displayed. This is curious since security, “sandboxing” and general safe browsing were so high on Chrome’s feature list - this feature seems to help undo some good user practices of always confirming the URL before entering credentials.

There are also some nice little enhancements as well - the combined address bar/search bar is very much like Firefox 3’s “awesome bar”. Chrome also allows you to dynamically resize any textarea element, without the site designer having to code this specifically in JavaScript or some other client-side technology.

Performance

Each tab/window is a separate process and thus will show up separately in Task Manager; Chrome also offers its own Task Manager but the memory usage reported here differs from that in the Windows Task Manager. To get the full picture, you have to click on the “Stats for nerds” link, which takes you to about:memory

This page displays the full memory usage details, and also, surprisingly, displays memory usage for any other web browsers also currently running! (I have confirmed that it will display Firefox 2/3, IE7 and Opera 9)

Much talk has been made of this feature; indeed while it does use more resources, it also prevents a single site from bringing down the entire browser as only that tab/window will be affected. To test this out, just terminate one of the instances of chrome.exe and you will see that tab’s screen into a “sad tab of death” with an amusing message.

JavaScript

Though JavaScript falls under the category of `Performance` I felt it deserves its own section because of the importance of JavaScript in web applications. Chrome uses the Google-developed V8 JavaScript engine, which has also been released as open source.

The main points of V8 are outlined at the Google Code page for the project, and are quite interesting. One of the main improvements in performance is the use of a Virtual Machine (VM) for processing JavaScript.

The V8 Virtual Machine is different from say, the JVM (Java Virtual Machine) in that it compiles JavaScript source directly to machine code; there is no intermediate byte-code representation used and hence no interpreter is needed for this. This seems to indicate that JavaScript performance might be faster on Chrome since there’s no intermediary. Google provides some benchmarks to confirm this.

From some informal/unscientific preliminary testing, the V8 JavaScript engine in Chrome does appear to be quite fast; loading the same Digg topic in Firefox took longer than it did in Chrome. (Roughly 14 secs vs. 8 seconds over a few trials - and Chrome did not have the benefit of AdBlock Plus) I’d be very interested to see how Chrome stacks up against Firefox 3.1, considering the rumoured performance boosts coming with it.

If Chrome has anything going for it, it’s definitely the lightning fast JavaScript performance. Coupled with the crash-proofing this makes it ideal for use in web applications.

Development

Chrome comes with a nice DOM inspector reminiscent of Firebug. Using it is dead simple; you just right click and select “Inspect Element” and the inspection window will pop up with the element highlighted. Here you can see the full DOM tree as well as the computed CSS styles for the element.

There’s an included JavaScript console for executing code/commands/expressions on-the-fly and while there is a JavaScript debugger included, it seems at this time to be a command-line only tool, far less user-friendly than Firebug.

Not ready for prime time yet?

Of course, Chrome is marked as Beta by Google, something we’ve come to expect since Gmail has been in beta for longer than the company has been publicly traded. Nonetheless, there are still some features that are sorely missed.

The one thing I absolutely love about Firefox is the vibrant developer community and subsequent widespread availability of quality, useful extensions. This has produced such gems as the aforementioned Firebug and Adblock Plus.

For now, extensions/addons are not part of Chrome but may be added in a later version. In the meantime I don’t think I’ll be even close to ready to switch, as I’m very stubborn. I don’t use that many extensions but the few that I do are “must-haves” and I just can’t browse without them.

Lastly, there are always privacy concerns, especially from a company as big an involved as Google. Though you can turn off the sending of usage statistics, there will always be some with their tinfoil hats on.

Conclusions

All things considered, Chrome is a very good entry into the browser market. While I don’t think it’s ready to take on Firefox or IE yet, it does provide competition. So as long as Chrome continues to support standards (which I think it will, since it uses the WebKit renderer and Google has also been forthcoming with their support for web developers), I won’t have a problem with it. I won’t be switching over to it anytime soon, but at the very least it’ll be a useful development tool to verify/test my websites on to make sure they look proper in Safari/Konqueror/Chrome.

Back in in June, the USPTO started a pilot project called “Peer-to-Patent” with the aims of opening up the patent review process to the public. By doing this, it hopes to leverage the help of the community in speeding up the patent process by having teams of volunteers looking for prior art that can determine the relevancy of the patent application. The IEEE Spectrum had a good article/interview with the founder of Peer-to-Patent; it’s a short read (2 pages), and I suggest you read it since it does a good job at explaining the goals and the means with which the project aims to accomplish them.

There is apparently a huge backlog in patent applications, so the needs for a project like this are obvious. However, will the “wisdom of the masses” prevail in helping to resolve the numerous problems in the patent system, evidenced by the seemingly endless litigation related to it?

Software only, for now

First of all, the USPTO is not opening the review process for all types of patents. Since Peer-to-Patent is a pilot project, for now, it’s only covering software patent applications. Additionally, inventors are not forced to submit their patent to this open process - it is a voluntary choice. However, if you choose to opt-in to this process, your application will skip the four-year backlog of applications submitted using the “regular process”, and will be reviewed in a much more timely manner - this is the incentive for the program, at least on the inventor’s side. So far, companies like GE, HP and IBM have opted to participate in the project this way.

Community involvement

Community is a two-step process, and anyone can choose to be involved in the review process. Your job, should you choose to accept it, will be to scour for “prior art” - publications or work that relates to the claims of the patent application, and that would help decide on its relevancy. You then post/upload your findings to the Peer-to-Patent website. 10 to 25 new patent applications are expected to be posted to the website every month, providing plenty of material for volunteers to search on.

The second part of the process involves deciding the 10 best pieces of prior art for each patent application. After a set amount of time, new submissions of prior art are closed off, and the community must then vote on which pieces of prior art they think are best. Each user/reviewer would get one vote, and the top 10 choices are then forwarded, along with the patent, to the USPTO for the final decision as to whether the patent is awarded or not.

So, the entire process isn’t decided online, but rather, this pilot project takes care of the first step of a patent application. The founder of Peer-to-Patent, Professor Beth Simone Noveck, describes it best:

If you think about the fact that a patent examiner now has between 18 and 20 hours for the total review of a patent application, 18 to 20 hours to decide whether that Blackberry patent application gets granted or whether the peanut butter and jelly application deserves a 20-year grant of monopoly rights, 18 to 20 hours is not a lot of time to complete all the research and do the review.

The process has the added benefit that an entire community is likely to have at least a few volunteers that have some special knowledge or experience related to the specific patent that a single reviewer would not have. This would allow them to find and explain prior art and its relevancy in a better way. After all, the field of even software patents is very broad, and must encompass an enormous amount of information.

The solution?

Peer-to-Patent has the potential to succeed, and hopefully with its success, will usher in a reform, at least in the area of hi-tech. There have been too many frivolous patents accompanied by frivolous lawsuits. In addition to impeding technological progress and development (the opposite aims of patent law), these lawsuits tie up courts and waste resources. With this project, prior art should hopefully be found before these bad patents are granted.

With the community only being involved in the first step of finding prior art, the USPTO still having the final say, I think a nice balance has been struck. This way, you still have some level of control and the USPTO can still use its own judgment. It’s not greatly different than Wikipedia, where some users have more control than others. And, let’s face it: There was no way the USPTO was going to completely relinquish control - that’s just too big of a step.

However, I can see some problems developing. First of all, anytime you have an online voting system, there is always the question of fraud. Since every user/member of the site has one vote in deciding which pieces of prior art they think are best for an application, how do prevent people from establishing multiple accounts and “gaming” the system? One way would be to request a credit card number, just for verification, but I believe this would be a huge impediment to participation. This is a serious issue, with sites like Digg constantly combating “gaming” of their system and other attempts at fraud. If Digg suffers from organized attempts at fraud from marketing services, you can almost be certain something like Peer-to-Patent will suffer from something similar.

In a worst-case scenario, I could see the litigious patent arguments in court merely being relocated to the online-forum of Peer-to-Patent. While this may be better than seeing them tie up the courts, you’ll remember that I’m not exactly agreeable with online debate. Furthermore, there are more serious concerns as well. Sneaky or unethical companies could secretly hire teams of “reviewers” to promote prior art, agreeable with their patent applications, to the top of the list, ensuring that the USPTO only sees these. This would be a clear abuse of the system, and a conflict of interest.

Optimistic

While it may seem that I’ve been pointing out the worst, I’m cautiously optimistic about Peer-to-Patent. I believe it has the potential to succeed, so as long as the creators are flexible and quick to respond to any deficiencies in the system, thus keeping it fair. And, let’s hope that they do succeed, as patent reform has been sorely needed for some time.

If you do a lot of running, you’ll often find that you’d like to keep track of how much distance you’ve accumulated. This is especially important if you’re training for some event, or even if you’re just a casual runner looking to build up your endurance and stay in shape. However, short of running around a track endlessly, it can be hard to gauge how far you’ve gone on your running route.

Short of having a fancy device such as the Nike iPod Kit (which requires calibration), or an even more costly GPS watch (that’ll probably eat through batteries), you can still manually measure your running distance using the many free tools out there, all of which are based upon the fantastic Google Maps API. Let’s have a look at some of them.

Gmaps Pedometer

Gmaps Pedometer was one of the first distance-logging tools created using the Google Maps API. It works well for tracking running/biking routes, and includes a calorie counter based on your weight, as well as some rudimentary elevation information. However, the interface is somewhat bland, and this app doesn’t include some of the features found on some other routes, such as a central repository of user-created running routes integrated with the main app. You can save your running route, however, and users have shared their creations in their forums. No registration is required (or available) for this site. You can easily print maps from within the interface.

Overall, it’s an simple, but effective and easy way to track your distance. It’s somewhat plain though, and a little lacking on features. You also have to enter each point manually, since there’s no option to follow roads. So, if your path goes down a curved boulevard, you’ll have to click along each point to keep the distance accurate, since the path just follows straight lines between each point.

WalkJogRun

WalkJogRun is an application that has a large number of user-created running routes integrated with the map. You can find routes near your location simply by searching for your city; markers will then show up on the map indicating where these running routes are. Clicking on a marker will bring the running route onto the map as an overlay, along with distance measurements for each point along the route. Zooming the map can be done with the mouse wheel, just like in the regular Google Maps.

Times are also included, and are in hours:minutes, and are based on a speed you select. You can configure the distance/speed measurements to be in kilometers or miles (I still like miles, despite being raised metric for everything), and a calorie-counter based on your weight is also included. These options are at the bottom of the screen, and are fairly small, and could be relocated for better visibility.

You can also create your own route by double clicking to enter points. Creating running routes and saving them doesn’t require you to register, but you can, and have to, if you want to mark them as private or be able to come back and alter them later. This seems fair enough, and it’s good that they don’t force you to register to use the service. Also, it’s very nice to be able to see/search for other people’s routes right within the application. Overall, the interface of WalkJogRun seems quite refined, and is fairly easy to use. There are plenty of features, and you can even export routes to Google Earth.

However, one thing to note is that this application feels somewhat sluggish. This is no doubt due to the heavy use of the Google API and the resulting number of Ajax queries that must take place, in order to update the map with users’ routes as you reposition it. This is in stark contrast to Gmaps Pedometer, which while simple and plain, is also faster and more lightweight. I suppose it’s a trade off. And, like Gmaps, WalkJogRun doesn’t support a “follow by road” feature, so entering in paths down curved roads will take more time.

MapMyRun

MapMyRun is like WalkJogRun in that you can search for user-created running routes and also add your own to the mix, and it also has a fairly decent interface that shows information in both kilometers and miles. It has the nice feature that auto-saves your route, and restores it should you accidentally navigate away from the page. It also also gives calorie counts, and supports elevation data as well. You can save this information to a training log, but this requires that you register with the site.

When creating routes, you can specify different types of waypoints, for example water breaks, aid stations and bathrooms. Notes can be added to the waypoints, and the route can be printed out with these notes to keep them handy. This is very nice for operation in the real-world. You can export the route to a variety of sources, such as Google Earth, a Garmin Forerunner or Edge GPS device, or to your blog as some embedded Javascript. This is also very handy, as information nowadays should work across a variety of devices.

However, the best feature is that this application can automatically create paths that follow roads. This is good if your routes follow through a lot of curved roadways, as it’ll save you the headache of manually entering in the path. However, sometimes it’ll automatically create a path from one point to another that doesn’t follow the road route you’d probably run - this is a limitation of the Google Maps system, as it is probably calculating how a car would drive from one point to another. (For example, you can run either way down a one-way street, but cars obviously cannot) Another nice feature is being able to remove a point in the middle of your route without having to re-enter all the subsequent points.

While this application is feature-filled, it also suffers from some sluggish performance like WalkJogRun.

Run.com

With Run.com’s application, you can also search for user-created running routes and add your own. The application is fairly responsive, and doesn’t feel too sluggish because of the way they’ve implemented it - searching for routes shows them on one map, and when you click a route to bring it up, it loads a new page with the route map. This reduces Ajax-activity that is often the cause of poor performance in web applications.

Routes show elevations, and distances in metric or imperial. Different waypoints (water break, aid station, scenic view) can be specified, and users can enter descriptions as well as difficulty ratings for each route. Tips entered by the person who created the route are often useful. (Eg. BE CAREFUL - LOTS OF BIKES)

Though I don’t have much to say about this application, I actually think I like it the best. Even though it doesn’t provide all the data or features that WalkJogRun or MapMyRun might, it’s lightweight, fast and easy to use, all of which are important hallmarks of any application, especially web apps.

One last thing

You don’t need to use one of these tools to measure your running distance. You could easily use Google Earth’s measure tool to map out your running route, but it’s a bit tedious, and these online applications will greatly simplify the process. Personally, I liked WalkJogRun and Run.com’s offerings the best, but you should give them all a try to see which fits your style best.

Lastly, these tools are probably best for road running, such as planning training for a marathon of some sort, or for the marathon itself. If you do a lot of trail running, they won’t work that great, since most of that data isn’t available on Google Maps, the basis for all of these tools. However, these tools do a good job of highlighting the features and flexibility of the Google Maps API by showing what can be accomplished.

Some will say that this deal officially marks the beginning of “Bubble 2.0″, since YouTube is not yet profitable. I’m assuming Google has some pretty bright people working for them, so what was their reasoning behind this move? Certainly, $1.65 billion USD isn’t a lot for them, ever since their IPO, but the real concern is YouTube’s high operating costs - serving up all those videos takes up a lot of bandwidth, which in turn translates into large monthly bills.

Cornering the market

However, the major reason behind this move must have been to corner the online video-sharing market. Google Video, launched not long ago, was a direct competitor to YouTube, but it received lukewarm support from the majority, who were already entrenched in YouTube. By grabbing hold of YouTube, Google effectively has a near-monopoly in the video-sharing market. They must have some future plan for how they will profit from these sites, besides just advertising revenue and “getting their name out there”.

Furthermore, operating costs aren’t the only problem they need to think of. Copyright violations are rampant on YouTube, and companies haven’t been afraid to pursue these matters in court - Google will certainly be dealing with more potential lawsuits in the coming months and years over material used in videos shared on their sites.

Overall, I don’t know where I stand on this. On the one hand, this could prove to be a brilliant move if Google can successfully lead its YouTube branch into profitability - if it doesn’t, it will be a hallmark and a defining moment of “Bubble 2.0″.

It’s all about the advertising

The advent of Internet advertising as a viable income source has been the fuel for this tranformation. Ever since the major players launched huge ad networks (Google’s AdSense and Yahoo’s Publisher Network), it’s becoming easier for sites to “make a quick” buck without apparently selling any service or product. This ad model is what allows you to sign up for a bevy of free services, from webmail to social news sites, and has been the basis for large social networking sites like Facebook. It’s also been a focal point for traditional news services, who not only have been making money off ads on their own sites, but have also bought out sites like MySpace in the further hopes of money from online advertising.

However, it’s also had the effect of making it much easier for “the little guy” to get into the business, sometimes wreaking havoc on established businesses. A great example is Markus Frind, who single-handedly started up a dating site that shook up the entire online dating industry, as he began offering a something for free that typically was a paid service. He made quite a lot of money off of his site, but overall, things were much cheaper for the “customer”. (No fees as opposed to fees)

The long tail

This sort of action by smaller companies is going to change the industry, and Markus himself best sums it up. The basic idea is that smaller startups, entirely self-funded (or at least not venture-capitalized), are taking over sectors, offering services and will be entirely happy making overall, less money than their predecessors. One need only look at TechCrunch on a regular day to see many of these startups being featured.

On the web, things move about ten times as fast, and that includes the launch of new companies and how their services will change and be updated. Where else can a business or service launch, and then suddenly be bought for $2 billion only a scant few years later? The pace at which ideas spread on the web is frightening.

Wag the tail

The best recent example of a typical industry starting to be overtaken by smaller startups is the online job search market. Typically, these areas have been dominated by sites like Monster or Workopolis. These sites are well known and established; however, recently niche job boards like those at 37 signals and TechCrunch have launched, with positive results. The idea behind these job boards seems, at first, the opposite of what would be desired - they are only known by a select group of individuals, typically those who visited the sites before the job board launched.

But that’s just the advantage - not everyone knows, so not just anyone applies to the jobs listed there, producing a higher quality of job applicants. This, in turn, makes it much easier for companies to find good people, thus cutting down on their costs, saving them money. This, of course, reduces the amount of money being pumped into this industry. Take this one comment about the TechCrunch job board (called the CrunchBoard):

We (photobucket) had posted 3 jobs on CrunchBoard and have had a positive experience thus far. We are getting less resume’s than maybe a monster or dice, but the ones we get are much more qualified. I’d be surprised if we don’t fill at least one of these positions in the coming weeks from a CrunchBoard referral. A few hundred bucks sure beats the $20k or so a recruiter will get you for.

Going from spending $20 K to less than $1 K certainly amounts to huge savings, and as more and more companies learn about this, you can bet they’ll be at least partially switching over to this model instead of traditional recruitment practices. This is really the same thing as the typical Internet user benefiting from all the free services out there - they save money, but at the cost of the previous business model suffering decreased revenues.

Whether these new job boards can maintain their level of high-quality applicants is one story, but what is sure to stay, is the fact that traditional industries are going to see their market value decreased because of low-cost Internet startups, for better or for worse.

A little background

The history of RSS is complex and coloured with many differing non-compatible standards all using this three-letter acronym. Of these, RSS 2.0 and RSS 0.91 seem to be the most popular, with perhaps RSS 2.0 becoming more popular with time. You shouldn’t have to worry about all of these differences, as anyone who makes a quality news reader/aggregator, the software used to subscribe to these feeds is probably aware of this and has made their software compatible with all these different versions.

To further add to the confusion, another syndication format, Atom was also developed back in 2003, in response to RSS not being an open format, such as XHTML. As a result, Atom was developed, and is the only format with the IETF’s backing, and hence the only format with a proper, recognized, MIME-type. It thus has a large following among the geeks and tech-saavy, who are perhaps the only people in the world concerned with such things - not that this is such a bad thing. However, most common folk only care “that it works”. (Note: WordPress offers Atom feeds as well as RSS feeds; I simply have not linked to them for brevity and so as not to create confusion with multiple feed links for the same content.)

So, how does it work?

In very basic terms, syndicated content doesn’t utilize any new web technologies, in contrast with, for example, BitTorrent. Instead, to create an RSS/Atom feed, a website will make another copy of regularly-updated content, except it will be formatted and marked up in a certain, XML-friendly way, so that it can be read easily by news readers/aggregators. This file is known as the “feed”, or its location as the “feed URL”. The contents of the feed have been formatted very carefully, and if you were to look at the source, it would look similar to HTML markup, except maybe a bit more complicated.

These feeds are almost always generated by software, and not by hand, thus they fit very nicely into most blogging and CMS software. They usually only contain content, and some useful metadata about it, such as publishing date, author and so forth, and thus allow the reader to get at what’s useful, without having to remember to visit that website.

How’s it helpful?

On their own, the feeds wouldn’t be very much use. But the other side of it is client software called feed readers, news readers or aggregators. These allow the reader to “subscribe” to feeds that they choose - in effect, making a list of sites whose content they are interested in seeing when it is updated with new information.

I hesitate to use the word “subscribe”, since although it’s useful to describe the concept (sort of like subscribing to a magazine you like), the process is not the same. Unlike subscribing to a newspaper that’s delivered to your doorstep (A “push” service), news readers actually subscribe by “pulling” the data to your computer. Thus, a news reader will check a feed to see if it’s been updated; if it has, it will download the new data. Thus unsubscribing is fully within your grasp; the act of “unsubscribing” merely means removing the feed URL from your reader, so there’s no real possibility of spam like with e-mail.

It’s useful since it allows you to dilute the vast quantity of new information on the web everyday down to what you consider to be useful. If you’re like me, you are interested in stuff like web design, development, technology and the like. Once I find a site or blog that I like, I subscribe to its RSS feed, and thus I no longer have to continually search the web to find interesting information, and can keep up to date on new developments.

So, how do I get started?

Syndication has been around for long enough that there are many mature news readers out there. Wikipedia used to have a good list, but it was deleted by the admins over there after an extensive discussion, because we all know how evil link lists can be and how they’re destorying Wikipedia and the moral fabric of America. However, they did link to this somewhat hard-to-read directory of RSS readers - the list is huge.

There are different types of readers, based on what you need. The traditional reader will install
onto your computer and provides an interface similar to an e-mail client. Popular ones include clients from NewsGator, and of course the built-in functionality offered by Mozilla’s Thunderbird client, and the “Live bookmark” option in Firefox. However, the built-in options in Thunderbird and Firefox are limited, in my opinion.

The other, newer breed are web applications that provide news aggregation. Currently, I’m using Google Reader, and am liking it. While it may not offer all the functionality of a regular software client, I like the fact that I can access it from any computer, and it’s fairly fast. Subscribing to feeds is also very easy; you don’t even need to entire the correct feed URL. If you enter a website URL (such as http://unitstep.net), it will automatically see if there’s any feed URLs linked from the site, and will subscribe to them. The layout is also decent, and I haven’t had any problems with it. Google Reader even provides a feed of its own, so you can subscribe to this feed to view your aggregated feeds!

Other options include “widgets”, either for desktop widget engines such as the Yahoo! Widget Engine, or online widgets for portal sites such as Google’s “I Google”, or Microsoft’s new Live service. These allow you to view your feeds in small boxes of information that are part of a personalized home page. I don’t really use these types of sites all that much, but they can be useful to many so its worth a mention.

Your world, your information

So, in conclusion, get out there, and start feeding! It’s easier to read and absorb useful information when its already been stripped down to what you care about, and syndicated content is allowing that.

It started as a rumbling

Things heated up yesterday, when it was reported that many of the fans of the old Netscape were voicing dissent at the imposition of this new style of news that was more community-oriented. Many didn’t like the new format - they wanted a tried and true format such as the previous portal, where things tended to be more organized. To many people (especially Digg fans), this may seem weird, even somewhat backwards - but whatever it is, it’s the mainstream. Evidently the community-oriented web 2.0-style news site touted by many as revolutionary, is in the minority.

The outspoken leader of the new Netscape, Jason Calacanis, made a quick response, which was also editorially promoted on the Netscape website. (Editors there have a say on which stories get pinned to the top, unlike Digg, where apparently there are no editors.) Here’s a nice quote that summed up his feelings.

Look at it this way: if Geocities could change itself to MySpace before losing it’s marketshare to MySpace you would do that right?

Same thing here, we’re in the middle of paradigm shift from top-down control to bottom-up participation, and when you make a radical change like that you’re gonna get pushback. In fact, I’m really excited to see the pushback because it let’s me know we are on the right track.

Ah, one of the fabled promises and features of web 2.0 - user participation. For some applications this really has succeeded, such as Flickr, and of course, blogging. But what many fail to see is that these trends are not mainstream - not by any total measure. While Flickr certainly is popular, it is by no means the most popular photosharing service, despite offering many web 2.0 features considered by many (including myself) to be useful, time-saving, nifty, or otherwise cool. The same thing goes for blogging - while it seems like the blogosphere is huge, it by no means comprises a significant section of all online users.

Calacanis’ own statements didn’t seem to carry much weight when, soon after, he appeared to be calling for a truce, offering a “professional”, alternate version of the site for the old school crowd. And now, today, he is offering $1000 a month to users of Digg (and other social news sites) to come over to Netscape and post their links to stories/news items there instead.

Making money in the web 2.0 world

At first, such an offer seems absurd. But when you hear some people’s explanations, it makes sense - after all, they would be paid for doing a service, and what’s wrong with that? However, after more thinking, the idea does turn out to be absurd. The new Netscape and Digg are sites that are meant to be community-oriented; supposedly by the people, for the people. If some are getting paid, and some aren’t, that makes things very absurd. At the very least, Calacanis’ offer makes the new Netscape seem very desperate to gain popularity, which it apparently has had trouble doing.

The problem here stems from several factors. Firstly, Netscape entered the game way too late - they are attempting to gain an advantage in a niche market dominated by Digg, Delicious and others - and for many in this market, the idea of “editorial control” turns them off. They want something like Digg, that at the very least gives the impression of full control by the people.

Secondly, while they didn’t fully copy Digg, the parts they did change were not for the better. Besides the aforementioned editorial control, Netscape also aims to serve up stories from all topics, not just technology as the original Digg did. This doesn’t match up with the niche market that the new Netscape is attempting to gain entry into. If Digg users are any indication, the average user is extremely tech-saavy, meaning they’re interested in, you guessed it, tech-oriented news. Even after Digg added other categories besides tech news, tech news still dominates almost all of the news that makes the front page.

Thus, the new Netscape is effectively orphaned some where in between web 2.0 and mainstream, appealing to neither and garnering criticism from both - a sort of “worst of both worlds” situation. This has evidently manifested itself in its less than impressive traffic numbers, and the seemingly desperate actions of Jason Calacanis.

AOL bearing down?

The actions of Mr. Calacanis may not be due entirely to himself. As the guy behind the idea for the new Netscape, which must have been born out of AOL’s desire to increase their ad revenue, he’s facing much pressure to get his baby to produce and be successful. He may be worried about having to take the fall if the site fails. With all the resources of AOL, perhaps it’s no surprise that he’s throwing money in every direction trying to solve the problem.

I sort of feel sorry for him - I do believe him to be an intelligent person, but perhaps just a bit misguided and obviously under a lot of pressure from AOL to produce something popular. If there’s any lesson to be learned from this unfortunate situation, it’s that offering snazzy web 2.0 features does not mean your website will be successful or popular in the mainstream, because, well, web 2.0 just isn’t mainstream.

Guilt by association

I’ll admit I’m as guilty as the next technocrat for promoting the “web 2.0″ term and how it’s going to revolutionize and change the web as we know it. But, it dawned on me the other day that perhaps it’s not all that it’s cut out to be. Sometimes, being enveloped in the “wow” factor of new technologies and what they could potentially be used for, causes one to put their head in the clouds, so to speak, for far too long to be in touch with reality.

For a while, I, like many, thought that other people just didn’t get it, and that soon enough, they would see what web 2.0 really meant and appreciate its benefits. I mean, for the tech-saavy individual it’s easy to see what benefits things like Ajax or a well-designed, standards-compliant website could offer; if nothing, they’re “cool” and have a nice “wow” factor.

From a technical point of view, these things are true. Just like gearheads who will stand around an autoshop marvelling at what’s under the hood of a nice auto that they just retrofitted, these technologies do have merit. But, what do they mean for the average user? More and more, I’m starting to believe the answer to be, “not much”. This isn’t a deficiency with the “average user”; to say so would be a gross generalization, and after all, this “average user” is your main customer.

Digg’ing a divide

A good example is digg. Launched late in 2004, the community-oriented news portal site offers the unique editorial system of user-submitted news. Anyone can submit a link to a news story, which can then be “dugg”, or voted up, by other users. Stories with a lot of diggs reach the front page, where they can be seen by more people. (This also creates a sort of “mob rule” effect, but that topic is for another day.) Digg has been quite a success, with currently over 400 000 registered users, myself included.

Digg is also the quintessential web 2.0 site - not only does it feature a strong, community-oriented website with content that users determine, but it also has many web 2.0 design features, such as nice design/layout, and many Ajax-enhanced functions, such as when you digg a story. The site has also spawned a new term, “the digg effect”, when a website featured in a popular news story becomes slow or unusable because of the mass of traffic directed to it from digg.

Though digg is quite popular, it is also quite a niche website, which may be somewhat of a small surprise. According to some statistics, 52% of digg users are “IT professionals, developers or engineers”, and furthermore, “39% publish their own blog”. These are definitely the people who are proponents of web 2.0 and the like, since the blogosphere has been quite successful in driving innovation in web technologies.

Additionally, traditional online news outlets like the New York Times, are still way ahead of digg in terms of web traffic, according to some reports. All of this leads me to believe that the vast majority of web users don’t care, or don’t know, about sites like digg, which are almost universally praised among tech-saavy circles.

It’s all in the design

Another thing that got me thinking was the generally-accepted idea that if you want to make a popular website, you need to have a good design and also offer all sorts of fancy features. This doesn’t appear to be so, as indicated by the popularity of sites like MySpace.

I think this belief arose for a few reasons. Firstly, many of us have spent hours creating a design that looked great to us; after all this work, it would be hard to believe that other people could not find an attractive design a good reason to keep visiting a website. Secondly, many of the websites that catch our attention and are popular, are also well-designed. Those that weren’t well-designed, we didn’t bother to return to, since they didn’t appeal to our niche. However, these are the sites that may have more broad appeal, and hence remain popular despite their horrible design.

Niche is still good

Which brings me to my final point - while it’s cool to have a well-designed site that features all sorts of nify web technologies, do not fall into the trap of believing that this alone will make it popular. Don’t fall into the trap of believing that web 2.0 will soon become known and praised by all, because it probably won’t. And, don’t be completely dumbfounded about why the general public can’t understand why web 2.0 is all-that-and-more; they’re not stupid, it’s just that it is still quite a niche topic, and is just fine the way it is.

Microformats

At its most basic, microformats are a concept that advocates identifying certain pieces of information so that they can be better collected, parsed, and otherwise aggregated for other uses. For example, the hReview microformat proposes a way to mark up the data that comprises a review (of a product or service, let’s say) so that the pieces of information that comprise a review (author, date reviewed, rating, comments) can be easily discerned. This example deals with the microformat in XHTML or HTML, but it could also be applied to XML documents.

Since microformats do not have strict rules like XML documents do, applying one to an existing document to make it microformat friendly is straightforward and doesn’t require you to totally re-arrange your data. A nice example is shown in the hReview specification. The changes basically amount to adding a few class attributes on some elements, in order to identify certain pieces of information. For example, the name of the item being reviewed must be in an element that has the classes “fn” and “item” applied to it. (Either by the cascade, or directly) This a simple, but effective way to identify data - that is, to use metadata identify the sematics of the information.

Defined by usage, rather than defining usage

The neat thing about this is that it works entirely within the confines of HTML or XHTML to enhance the semantics of the language. Very few changes are needed, and in fact, the changes that microformats suggests are better since they will allow you to style elements better since they will be identified; in fact the way this turned out is no coincidence. Microformats were designed with current “best practices” in mind, so many “in the wild” examples of markup on sites were referenced before the format was specified, in order to develop something that better suited current usage, rather than trying to develop a new standard that would be radically different from what anyone was using. This makes it super-easy to adopt microformats if you’ve already been following current web-standards with separation of content and presentation.

Microformats: out in the open

Also, microformats are not just some idealized standard that’s being discussed, rather than implemented. Many sites already use them, such as Cork’d. As mentioned before, this is because they are quite easy to adopt in a site that has already been well-designed, and so they don’t require a headache-inducing, total re-working of the structure. Thus, web-developers can easily see the benefits of adopting microformats - in many cases, they’re already using them, albeit not with the same class names or attributes. Admittedly, there could be more support for microformats, but I believe that will come very soon, as open source developers of blogging software, CMSs and other portal systems update their code to provide support.

Another important aspect, already mentioned, is the organic development of the microformats. As seen on the examples page of the microformats website, there is much open discussion before any microformat specifications are developed; for this reason, almost all of them are open to discussion, based on what is considered to be the current “best practice” out on the Internet nowadays. In this way, the specifications tend to evolve around what are the best examples out there, rather than the specifications being a pragmatic announcement of what “should be done” and what “is the right way”.

For this reason, I believe microformats will be better accepted, since they will strike the right balance between standardization, ease-of-implementation, and practicality. They will avoid the fate of other web-standards, some of which have been good on paper, but suffer from poor implementation either because of practical issues or compatibility problems.

Open data formats

Microformats are also a simple but effective open data format. With any data format, interoperability and compatibility are issues in the long run. If I save a file in a certain format, can I be assured it will be readable by the hardware and software of computers 10, 20 or 50 years from now? For some data, this is not important, but for some it is very important, such as a digital photo album, any archive information, or records. With the fast pace of development for computer formats, and technology in general, this is a definite problem.

So how are microformats any better than any other format, open or closed? Surely being an open format doesn’t guarantee operability in the long run? That may be true, but one proven hallmark of future-proof data formats is being an established and traditional format. As pointed out by Tantek, this is why Project Gutenberg (”the first and largest collection of eBooks”) has decided to store their archives in the venerable ASCII format. While this doesn’t offer any sort of markup options, it does virtually guarantee compatibility in the future - it’s highly unlikely that ASCII will be forgotten completely in the future.

For these same reasons, Tantek also believes that “Compatible XHTML” (or valid XHTML 1.0 strict compatible with HTML) is also dependable over time. HTML has been in use for over a decade on the Internet, the most widely-distributed, distributed-database in human history. Thus, its ubiquity is certainly not in doubt; its ease of use also helps, as it enables wide adoption.

Openness and the present

Okay, so open data formats can be good in the long run. But what about now? Well, there’s currently some pretty exciting stuff going on. Recently, People Aggregator announced they’d be starting a social network (nothing new) that would also allow users to post across multiple, different, social networking or blogging sites. This is currently accomplished by using APIs such as Metaweblog, but in the future, they envision more complete interoperability. The idea is that switching from one service to another shouldn’t be hard, as if open standards are used, compatibility can be ensured - rather than having to make sure the new service provider has a conversion utility to convert from your old provider.

The additional benefits could also be quite useful. For example, creating a “friends” page listing your friends’ most recent blog posts and content wouldn’t be difficult. If you’re using Livejournal, this is already easy, but the people on your friends list must also be on Livejournal. If People Aggregator is successful at getting more networks onboard their idea, adding people to a friends list would be easy, regardless of what service they were using. There is already a WordPress plugin that does this, by parsing a friends’ RSS feed. But People Aggregator’s idea is to make this functionality accessibile from blogging service.

Problems

The main threat I see against adoption of standards a direct result of the benefits it offers. As mentioned, these open data formats would allow content from one service to be syndicated and/or displayed elsewhere on the web. This helps increase the accessibility of information, as you no longer have only one place where you can get it from - you can display the information how you want to, and in what order you want.

This could directly threaten the ability for services to make money because of the circumvention of ad revenue that would take place. Many social networking sites survive because they allow people to freely make content and share it from their sites, so as long as ads are served up to viewers. If the content can be aggregated, and shown elsewhere, then the ads aren’t shown. Unless agreements are reached about this, (such as ensuring ads are still delivered in any data delivered outside the site, or ad-revenue sharing), this may be a major impediment to adoption.

This would be sad, since open data formats and the ability to “subscribe” to content and display it in a non-traditional way are basic concepts of what I would consider “web2.0″ technologies. This is a natural extension to what HTML allowed, in that it will allow for content to flow easier, just like HTML did some 10-15 years ago.