2010 Primer

2010 What's happening that's new and big? What is relevant to me and why? Are there implications for my work?

2010 What's happening that's new and big? What is relevant to me and why? Are there implications for my work? 1 Internetting on steroids 2 Information discovery and retrieval challenges 3 Building blocks for the next version of the web 4 The role of social media

10 Science letdowns of the new millennium Katherine Harmon Scientific American, December 31, 2009 Few flying cars and no fountains of youth: Since 2000, many old science goals have remained as far away as ET's signals
2000–2009 disappointments
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=science-letdowns-decade

10 Science letdowns of the new millennium Katherine Harmon Scientific American, December 31, 2009 Few flying cars and no fountains of youth: Since 2000, many old science goals have remained as far away as ET's signals
2000–2009 disappointments
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=science-letdowns-decade
1 Evolution optional
Cancer carries on
Electric cars on empty
Brains still baffling
ET won't phone home
Ancestral angst
Climate still changing
HIV roadblocks
Energy remains grid-locked
Spaced out

Top scientific breakthroughs of the year 2009 Wired Science December 31, 2009 Number 1—Gene therapy makes a comeback This year, four teams of gene-therapy researchers had major victories in finding ways to safely treat human volunteers. Nanotech researchers concocted dozens of tiny particles that may be able to carry fragile DNA and RNA through the bloodstream and into the cells where they're needed. Biologists have refined a method for clipping disease-causing DNA sequences out of any genome with extreme precision. But the greatest success this year belongs to doctors who treated blindness, brain disorders, immune system deficiencies and a severe skin condition with an array of different gene-therapy techniques.
2009 success stories
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/12/discoveries-gallery/

Top 10 news stories of the decade cnet news December 22, 2009 1 Google launches Adwords and is tech's most important company 2 Apple unveils iTunes 3 Microsoft and the feds make a deal 4 Pffft goes the dot-com bubble 5 Apple releases the iPhone and changes mobile technology 6 Yahoo plays Hamlet with search 7 Craigslist and the slow fade of traditional newspapers 8 Google acquires YouTube and legitimises social media 9 Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates retires 10 Hewlett Packard acquires Compaq
The last decade's big news
http://news.cnet.com/2300-1023_3-10002061-8.html?tag=mncol As hard as it may be to remember now, the dot-com boom was nearing its dizzying peak as the decade started. But just as the bust hit a few months later, Google was pairing a savvy business model with great technology, Apple was most decidedly getting its mojo back, and Bill Gates was becoming exasperated with those pesky trust-busters. Since then, Google became a giant, the iPhone broke through the smartphone design barrier, and a social media went mainstream.

Top 10 news stories of the decade cnet news December 22, 2009 1 Google launches Adwords and is tech's most important company 2 Apple unveils iTunes 3 Microsoft and the feds make a deal 4 Pffft goes the dot-com bubble 5 Apple releases the iPhone and changes mobile technology 6 Yahoo plays Hamlet with search 7 Craigslist and the slow fade of traditional newspapers 8 Google acquires YouTube and legitimises social media 9 Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates retires 10 Hewlett Packard acquires Compaq
The last decade's big news
http://news.cnet.com/2300-1023_3-10002061-8.html?tag=mncol

Internetting on steroids

Internet accessibility—speed and penetration increasing, cost decreasing
http://www.itif.org/index.php?id=143

The first decade of the 21st century…
http://www.cinema-and-movies.com/

Did you appreciate just how far we have come?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ILQrUrEWe8

Part of the daily American diet, 34 Gigabytes of data NICK BILTON Published: December 9, 2009 The average American consumes about 34 Gigabytes of data and information each day—an increase of about 350 percent over nearly three decades—according to a report published Wednesday by researchers at the University of California, San Diego . According to calculations in the report , that daily information diet includes about 100,000 words, both those read in print and on the Web as well as those heard on television and the radio. By comparison, Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” contains about 460,000 words.
Data overload
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/10/technology/10data.html?_r=4&partner=rss&emc=rss

a_r_w 9:53 PM Dec 17th, 2009 from Twitterrific A single sperm has 37.5 MB of DNA information in it. That means that a normal ejaculation represents a data transfer of 1,587.5 TB
Information is everywhere, not just on the web… lots of it
! http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/afpez/a_single_sperm_has_375mb_of_dna_information_in_it/

Bill Bryson A short history of nearly everything There is as much as 20 million km of DNA inside each of us—enough to reach to the moon and back 26 times over. 97% of our DNA is "junk".
Lots and lots of information, but how useful?

So what's new?

Lessons from Nature ?

Some lateral thinking…
Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.

Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. By using the types of rules embodied in simple programs one can capture many of the essential mechanisms of nature.

Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. By using the types of rules embodied in simple programs one can capture many of the essential mechanisms of nature. De Bono presents a model of the brain as a self-organizing system that forms and uses patterns. Behavior in this system is driven by perception that varies according to circumstance—a new "lateral thinking" is needed to liberate the mind from the shackles of language-dependent thought.

Simple interactions Emerging patterns Everything in context Reduced dependence on words Management of complexity
Hints from extra mural reading!

How should we interact with the information "cloud"…
http://www.ted.com/talks/pattie_maes_demos_the_sixth_sense.html

Information discovery and retrieval challenges

The SEO challenge

Search engines—signposts or advertising billboards?

Google's webmaster guidelines When your site is ready Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html . Submit a sitemap using Google Webmaster Tools. Google uses your sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase coverage of your web pages. Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.
Google seems to encourage the signpost approach…
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?&answer=35769

Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links . Offer a sitemap to your users. Create a useful, information-rich site, with accurate pages. Think about keywords and make sure that your site actually includes them. Use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. Make sure that <title> elements and ALT attributes are descriptive . Check for broken links and correct HTML. Be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages. Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100). Review image guidelines for best practices on publishing images.
Design and content guidelines
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?&answer=35769 1

Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site and check that JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash don't prevent access to essential content . Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. Otherwise possible incomplete indexing, as bots may not eliminate URLs that look different but point to the same page. Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google when content last changed. Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. If your company buys a content management system, make sure that the system creates pages and links that search engines can crawl. Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of pages that don't add much value. Test your site to make sure that it appears correctly in different browsers.
Technical guidelines

Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines . Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking." Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?" Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links. Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.
Quality guidelines—basic principles

Avoid hidden text or hidden links. Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects. Don't send automated queries to Google. Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords. Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content. Don't create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware. Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content. If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.
Specific quality guidelines

Google search engine operation overview
http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dc5x7mrn_245gf8kjwfx

Advertising?

Advertising ?

Is online reputation management the new Search Engine Optimisation? Niall McKeown Niall's Online Marketing Blog, 9 December 2009 There is a strong argument that being #1 in the natural search engine results in Google for some industries is no longer what it used to be. I'm not arguing that search is irrelevant or that a site should not be built optimised for search engines, my argument is that the customer and how they purchase has little to do with being top of Google. Rather, it is how you are represented in terms of your online reputation. My argument is that online reputation management is fast becoming more important than search engine optimisation in service based industries. Better still, get your ORM right and the SEO takes care of itself.
Search Engine Optimisation effectiveness
http://blog.ionom.com/2009/12/is-online-reputation-management-the-new-search-engine-optimisation/

Netskills SEO workshops for Strategic Content Alliance Summer 2009 Steve Boneham, George Munroe, Brian Kelly, Christine Cahoon Structure Accessibility Content integrity Promotion via social media Metadata Richer semantics
A different view of Search Engine Optimisation
http://www.netvibes.com/scaseo

"Improving your online presence"
impression of value total discovery visitor satisfaction measurement of activity evidence of success sustainability improvement increasing significance visitor numbers online resource

"Improving your online presence"
Structure Accessibility Integrity Metadata Richer semantics Social media impression of value total discovery visitor satisfaction measurement of activity evidence of success sustainability improvement increasing significance visitor numbers online resource

Getting started with Google Analytics Create a Google account Identify your unique web ID Insert unique ID into Javascript tracking code and add this code to all pages (which links to JavaScript library on the Google servers) After logging in to your account you may select reports of interest from your Google Analytics dashboard
Google analytics
http://services.google.com/analytics/tour/index_en-GB.html

Google analytics
http://services.google.com/analytics/tour/index_en-GB.html

Establishing desirable target audience Determine your audience profile Demographics—age, gender, location, income What particular interests, influences, beliefs What media will they be using (desktop, mobile, home, work) How many are there Any relevant behavioral trends Clarify how to deliver value to your audience What do you want to achieve when users visit What is your goal or "conversion" metric How will you measure this
Knowing your audience

Google Analytics http://www.google.com/analytics/support.html http://www.google.com/support/conversionuniversity Checking word maps http://www.wordle.net/ Identify suitable keywords and see popularity https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal Compare keyword phrases and see trends over time and per country http://www.google.com/trends Make sure all links are working http://validator.w3.org/checklink Introduction to Google's web site optimiser http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer/tour.html
Useful "tools" of the trade

Content strategy
http://www.richardingram.co.uk/2009/10/instilling-confidence-with-content-strategies/

The Case for content strategy Margot Bloomstein A List Apart Issue 290 What's your role? Are you a designer who needs "real copy" for your comps? Maybe you're an information architect trying to organize an experience, or a search engine marketer eager to influence your client with keywords they'll actually use. Whatever your role, a content strategist can help you be more successful.
Content strategy
http://www.richardingram.co.uk/2009/10/instilling-confidence-with-content-strategies/

Google Squared The official Google blog June 2009 Some information is easy to find. If you want to learn the rules of golf, you can search Google for [golf rules] and we'll return a list of relevant web sites right at the top. But not all your information needs are that simple. Some questions can be more complex, requiring you to visit ten, perhaps twenty websites to research and collect what you need. Google Squared is an experimental search tool that collects facts from the web and presents them in an organized collection, similar to a spreadsheet. If you search for [roller coasters], Google Squared builds a square with rows for each of several specific roller coasters and columns for corresponding facts, such as image, height and maximum speed.
More intelligent searches
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/square-your-search-results-with-google.html

Real time search Google announcements December 2009 Google's real-time search features are integrated into the Google search experience and surface highly relevant, fresh content from across the entire web including public content from social networks, news and micro-blogs The new features are based on more than a dozen new search technologies that enable Google to monitor more than a billion documents a day for fresh updates and process hundreds of millions of daily changes.
Google's latest improvements
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXHHkROejik&feature=player_embedded#

RDFa and SEO webBackplane Mark Birbeck on December 16, 2009 Improving display of results This is the area that has probably seen most discussion recently, in the context of Yahoo!'s enhanced results, and Google's rich snippets… Benefits to the search engine of doing this, are that users can get more done, on their site, making them more likely to return. The benefits for the companies are improved click-through. For many, click-through is more important than ranking. Some SEO experts say that if adding RDFa to a site gave an increase in click-through of only a couple of %, sites would see that as worth it—yet as Peter Mika said in Year of the Monkey: Lessons from the first year of SearchMonkey , adding RDFa or Microformats to a page gives significantly better click-through than a mere few %.
Improved information discovery and retrieval
http://webbackplane.com/mark-birbeck/blog/2009/12/rdfa-and-seo

RDFa and SEO webBackplane Mark Birbeck on December 16, 2009 Improved search accuracy This is beneficial for the users of search engines, in that it can help them to find the information they want, faster. But it's also significant for site creators and SEO practitioners, because it means that sites are increasingly found in the right place. An increasing part of SEO is writing relevant articles that relate to products and services. Since search engines are increasingly clever enough to differentiate between a bunch of keywords dumped into a page, and an article with real content, a virtuous circle is created, rewarding 'proper' articles with improved rankings. RDFa can help—it allows authors to make pages unambiguous. http://webbackplane.com/mark-birbeck/blog/2009/12/rdfa-and-seo

RDFa and SEO webBackplane Mark Birbeck on December 16, 2009 Vertical search engines RDFa will allow the search giants to offer partitioned search engines, aimed at particular audiences. There are many search engines already available, for specialist areas, but most of them tend to be out of date, or missing information altogether. The major search engines are often crawling these sites already, but page ranking algorithms will hide them away in the 1000th page of search results. By adding targeted mark-up to web-pages it becomes easier for search engines to differentiate the subject-matter of the pages, and so offer specialised views on their data. http://webbackplane.com/mark-birbeck/blog/2009/12/rdfa-and-seo

Building blocks for the next version of the web

HTML5 HTML5 introduces new elements and attributes for semantic replacements of generic <div> and <span> elements, e.g. <nav> (navigation block) and <footer>. Other elements bring convenience with a standardised interface for rich content, e.g. <audio> and <video>. Some elements from HTML 4 have been dropped, including presentational elements such as <font> and <center>, where effects are achieved with CSS. There is also a renewed emphasis on the importance of DOM scripting. CSS3 2D and 3D transformations and transitions etc.
Latest standards
http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/ http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/current-work

More accessible, index-able, meaningful text
Benefits of latest standards

HTML5 and CSS3 Eric Meyer, "A more tangled web" Belfast Build conference, November 2009 (Summary by Charlie Neely, FRONT) The web's relative simplicity has made it so successful. Basic web tools, HTML, CSS and Javascript, have all found their way into many products and services we use today. However HTML5 wont be fully implemented until an estimated 2022 and CSS3 is likely to be in development far beyond that. But this doesn't stop us from using elements of it already. Developers are ingeniously using Javascript to emulate methods and functions of HTML5 and CSS3, for example, Alexis Deveria created a jQuery plug-in which provides support for CSS3 Template Layout Module.
Latest developments
http://vimeo.com/7863592

The web requires: Better context, and meaning, for any piece of web data… That allows that piece to be easily associated with, and properly compared to, other pieces that are related, somewhere on the web… In a generic way. And data about "things", not just documents… Ways of harvesting and presenting pertinent data from many different sources, automatically if possible… (Other highly desirables: better human computer interfaces, data infrastructure maintenance, trust mechanisms… but these would be easier to bring about if a rich semantic structure existed).
What is missing?

Computable web data? Wolfram|Alpha uses its own carefully "curated" data which provides a framework for exceptionally intelligent "searches". If a similar framework of linked data existed within the web then searches may begin to approach the power of Wolfram's performance.
What should be possible?
http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html

Metadata is the key Data about data. Many and varied versions of metadata. Add background information, put things in context, add value, make much more useful by showing relevance. Different levels of metadata—may need pointer to further information to fully explain a piece of metadata or describe how to interpret. Enable ways of classifying, connecting, rating, structuring, promoting, that wouldn't be possible otherwise— especially if a common "vocabulary" for the metadata terms is used .
Metadata

Resource description framework RDF is a generic "way" of using definitive metadata with web resources. RDF describes "things" (defined by uniform resource identifiers, URIs) by assigning properties and corresponding values—statements are known as "triples" consisting of [subject] [predicate] [object]. The predicate URI usually references a term in a standard metadata vocabulary, resulting in unambiguous meaning. Any part of the triple can be a URI and URIs can point to other URIs that can be read using HTTP and extended (or related) in other web resources, thus a scalable model and very flexible.
Applying metadata
http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-primer/

RDFa and Microformats Previously RDF statements were provided in separate .rdf files and were not widely used because of the extra effort required to produce. RDFa allows RDF statements to be included in ordinary HTML files using formally defined attributes within <span> blocks, with metadata vocabularies referenced in <head>. Microformats consist of informal vocabularies (not referenced in the document) that have been established by rapid user adoption, ease of use and desire to create richer semantics with embedded metadata. These are used with "class" attribute in <div> and <span> blocks or with "rel" in <a …> tags.
Applying metadata
http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-syntax/ http://microformats.org/wiki/Main_Page

RDFa basics A tutorial by Manu Sporny
Resource description framework introduction—linking web data
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldl0m-5zLz4&feature=player_embedded

Linking Open Data project The goal is to extend the web by publishing various open data sets as RDF on the web and by setting RDF links between data items in different data sources. These RDF links then enable navigation from a data item within one data source to related data items within other sources using a semantic web browser. RDF links can also be followed by the crawlers of semantic web search engines, which may provide sophisticated search and query capabilities over crawled data. As query results are structured data and not just links to HTML pages, they can be used within other applications.
Current projects
http://esw.w3.org/topic/SweoIG/TaskForces/CommunityProjects/LinkingOpenData/

Contains 4.7 billion triples, interlinked by around 142 million RDF links
Linking Open Data project

A web of data Web of data is generic (can contain any type of data). Anyone can publish to web of data. No constraints due to vocabularies (can create own as required). Things connected via RDF links provide a global data graph which can be used for new resource discovery. Separation of data and presentation. Data is self describing (doesn't require additional information). HTTP and RDF are essentially the common API rather than many other proprietary heterogeneous models and interfaces. Open model, new stuff added easily.
Features of emerging web

Semantic web browsers Disco http://www4. wiwiss .fu- berlin .de/ bizer /ng4j/disco/ Marbles http://marbles.sourceforge.net/ Operator plug in for Firefox https:// addons . mozilla .org/en-US/ firefox / addon /4106 DBpedia applications http:// wiki . dbpedia .org/Applications
Prototyping the new web

The role of "social media"

Top 50 social brands of 2009 Adam Coomes January 04, 2010 The Social Radar top 50 measures the brands with the most active web presence based on overall online conversation volume. To create the top 50 list, we used Social Radar to analyze millions of blog posts, news feeds, forums, social networks and twitter posts to aggregate a list of the words and brands mentioned most frequently on the web during all of 2008 and 2009. The list measures the number of unique individuals or sources that posted content about each brand during 2009 rather than the overall number of mentions.
What is mentioned most in social media sites?
http://infegy.com/buzzstudy/social-radar-top-50-social-brands-of-2009/

http://infegy.com/buzzstudy/social-radar-top-50-social-brands-of-2009/ 1 Twitter 2 Google 3 Facebook 4 iPhone 5 YouTube 6 Obama 7 Mac 8 Apple 9 iPod 10 Microsoft

http://infegy.com/buzzstudy/social-radar-top-50-social-brands-of-2009/ 11 Windows 12 MySpace 13 Yahoo 14 Amazon 15 Fox 16 Disney 17 BlackBerry 18 Firefox 19 BBC 20 Wii

http://infegy.com/buzzstudy/social-radar-top-50-social-brands-of-2009/ 21 Sony 22 XBox 23 Playstation 24 Linux 25 CNN 26 MTV 27 AT&T 28 eBay 29 Starbucks 30 NFL

http://infegy.com/buzzstudy/social-radar-top-50-social-brands-of-2009/ 31 Android 32 Nokia 33 Ford 34 ABC 35 Skype 36 Dell 37 UPS 38 Wikipedia 39 NBA 40 LG

http://infegy.com/buzzstudy/social-radar-top-50-social-brands-of-2009/ 41 ESPN 42 Oprah 43 Samsung 44 NASA 45 Nintendo 46 Canon 47 Nike 48 Gap 49 Kindle 50 Intel

Business purposes of social networking sites Establish pointers to web site by attracting initial audience attention and developing a relationship. Create brand. Very important—web site visitors often only seeking confirmation after having made an initial decision to use a product or service following research on social networking sites. Peer reviews—very influential. Marketing!
Use of social networking sites

How twitter is changing our lives Mary Gazze, CTV.ca News Staff January 1, 2010 If you weren't one of the hundreds of thousands of people who jumped on the twitter bandwagon this year, you might be missing out. Even if you don't want to know what your friends had for breakfast, users and experts say twitter has changed our lives this year. And if making new friends isn't for you and if you don't care about getting messages directly from celebs, politicians or companies, tech experts say you are robbing yourself by not taking part in a medium that keeps people informed about world events and even giving us a peek inside countries that are closed to the Western world.
Other reasons for using social networking sites
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20091218/holiday_twitter_100101/20100101

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SPWTyv6zBk&feature=player_embedded#

Twitter Less frequent but more in depth blogs Commenting on public blogs Sharing bookmarks Facebook Linkedin Wikipedia RSS feeds
Most effective approach with social networking sites?
?

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2010 Primer

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