Tag : nov 7th

While OpenID is certainly gaining traction around the Web, many questions around security and privacy have been raised.

Additionally with companies like Sun Microsystems shipping OpenID code, the question of how OpenID helps the enterprise becomes increasingly important.

In under two years, OpenID has grown from a thriving grass-roots community to being supported by major companies, service providers, and open source projects.

This session will provide an introduction to OpenID, thoughts on how enterprises can benefit from integrating the technology, as well as a showcase of innovation around security technologies combined with OpenID such as smart cards, browser add-ons, and the like.

Speakers :
-- David Recordon
-- Martin Paljak

Given that the web is '95% Typography', why is most typography on the web so poor? For so long now, designers and developers have taken little time to learn the subtlety of good typographic design. But don’t worry, it’s not a black art; you just need to follow a few rules.

This presentation will take you through Five Simple Steps to improve your typography; type anatomy, types of typeface, choosing typefaces, size, space and weight, and basic typesetting.

They're small, they're simple, and they're showing up everywhere. Find out just how easy it is for you to start publishing with microformats and add to the semantic richness of the Web right now.

Location is now fundamental to the dynamics of the web, and there are powerful tools from Google Maps to Wifi Location Based Services available today.

This talk takes a tour over the recent development of the 'where' of the web across techniques and both open and closed technologies.

Google Maps forms a core which many are familiar with but maps and location on the web really go far beyond, from base data to 3D 'spinny globes' such as Microsoft Live Local.

We will cover the major APIs (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) as well as some lesser known but powerful players such as MultiMap and Map24 and how you can use them with simple tools such as Mapstraction, an API to provide common abstraction over various map providers. When on the move, there are a variety of ways to locate yourself including GPS, wifi location and from cell towers and we will go over the tools available to use those.

Aggregating and sharing geodata is an expanding and powerful area including tools such as mapufacture and data formats like GeoRSS (extensions to the common RSS formats) and KML. Geodata itself makes a lot of this machinery tick and has it's own section. Who owns data? What can you do with it? Where can you get it?

We'll cover these topics and cover projects such as OpenStreetMap which aim to free up data and make it more usable to all with clearer licensing. We'll take you through the community aspects of many projects and why it pays to build community by using a few simple techniques and tools. Finally, where's it all going? We'll look at the immediate future of location online and place a few bets on the coming developments.

Speakers :
-- Steve Coast
-- Nick Black

Analytics for Web 1.0 focused on translating metrics from print and television (such reach) to online (unique users). These measures did not capture the effect the material had on the audience – they could not, since the audience had no way of expressing interest and engagement.

Traditional page view counts and time spent on the site were notable efforts in approximating engagement but it is now clear that the duration a user spends at a page is far more important than just mere page view counts.

In contrast, Web 2.0 is defined by user participation and interaction, both with the site (saving, rating, tagging, annotating), and with other users (forwarding, commenting, responding).

These clearly observable and notable interactive behaviors gave rise to a rich set of Web2.0 metrics that can far more accurately measure active user engagement and the effect the page has on the user.

Besides providing accurate representations of user behavior, these metrics would serve as building blocks for useful user-centric tools.

For example, Flickr's "interestingness" ranking is an example of how these newer metrics on engagement (favorites, comments) can also be used to bubble up outstanding and unique photos amongst millions of mundane ones. While specific sites such as Amazon.com were central to Web 1.0, the notion of a standalone site is disappearing in Web 2.0. Companies are now being represented on widgets and mini-applications on user's sites and Facebook profiles, and being reported on blogs across the web.

There has also been a strong trend towards opening up datasets via APIs and RSS feeds, and encouraging developers to build 3rd party services on top of them. Given these decentralization trends, highly relevant opinions and content are now distributed across the World Wide Web. Analytics measuring metrics on a site alone has become only one half of what needs to be tracked.

Given all these changes, how can you measure these metrics of "active engagement" in both qualitative and quantitative measures, and what are the actions that can be taken based on them? Given new usability technologies like AJAX, how should these affect the ways you measure your analytics? What instruments do you need to develop to collect relevant activities that are happening across the web, both around the data you provide and opinions about you in all the various user networks, blogs and forums?

Web 2.0 has brought about profound changes in user engagement and decentralization of sites. At the heart of companies will be their ability to identify new key metrics that reflect these changes, and develop highly actionable plans that allows for quick and effective response to short-term issues, as well as factoring in a long-term strategy.

Speakers :
-- Andreas Weigend
-- Bill Tancer

Tagging represents a new type of metadata used to organize information. As with all types of metadata, there are advantages and disadvantages to tagging. Also keep in mind that metadata is independent of its UI representation, and that there are many potential ways to leverage tags in an interface. Ultimately, to bring value to your business, people must be able to efficiently navigate your tagging system.

In spite of the dearth of design guidelines at the moment, you must nonetheless understand the broader context of tagging in order to create an effective system.

This presentation offers practical design recommendations around three key steps in the tagging process, with many examples to illustrate each point:
1. Creating tags: In general, encourage tagging and lower barriers to adding useful tags. Make recommendations to help people find the right words to use, allow for tag forms to resemble natural language, and avoid space-separated tagging.
2. Navigating your own tags: People tag so they can return to a resource later. The system must allow people to effectively manage their own tags, including editing, deleting, filtering, sorting, and searching them. The ability to combine tags can also help people find the resources they are looking for quicker.
3. Navigating tags from other users: Finally, a social system let's users share resources via tags. Here, adaptive navigation proves to be helpful, such as with enhanced tag clouds. Expose other types of metadata where appropriate as well, and add structure to tag menus. And because of the social aspect of tagging, consider how to provide rich linking to other members of the tagging community.

Demands on the mobile phone to become the omni-potent mobile computer mean that successful design for mobility needs to first and foremost understand people. People are more than numbers. They are mobile beings by nature.

When designing for mobility we must immerse ourselves in routine, the movement of crowds and the beauty and simplicity of casual computing.

Navigation patterns are changing. Objects are increasingly reactive to context and the new UIs are becoming services in themselves. The web is more sociable — how can mobility be more sociable?

Successful cross-platform design must understand and leverage all of the above.

Kwame will talk about new processes that designers need to understand in order to innovate within mobility.

Scaling a Web Application is a very hard problem, especially for small project and teams who do not have sufficient manpower, money, and time to solve this problem. Luckily Amazon already had to solve this problem in their datacenters and offers their services to other developers.

This talk will introduce the two most important Amazon Web Services, the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and the Simple Storage Service (S3), and will present different ways to leverage them in your own web application. Ruby on Rails will be used for the examples but they will apply to any web framework.

Several use-cases will be covered that show how S3 and EC2 can be used to move load from your servers to Amazon’s or even to completely host your application at Amazon.

After the talk developers should know when and how to use Amazon’s services to scale their own application at low costs. We will also hear the CEO of Web OS platform Ghost and how they use more Amazon Webservices than anyone else.

Speakers :
-- Jonathan Weiss
-- Zvi Schreiber

Ajax is becoming a part of almost every web application. Users expect this and are increasingly disappointed when page refreshes occur for trivial updates. An Ajax framework can help you create or update your application using the best techniques available.

Simon Willison, co-creator of Django and OpenID advocate, will take you through the scenarios where you'll want to use Ajax. He'll also explore the frameworks you can use to make improving your web app that much easier and faster.

Simon will walk you through Dojo, Prototype/Scriptaculous, jQuery and YUI.

As Web 2.0 is now a global phenomenon, its powerful concepts find their applications everywhere around the world. What primarily started as a trend among U.S. startups quickly spread to other continents where entrepreneurs recognized the potentials and were quicker than their role models to localize and launch similar companies.

Whether you agree or disagree with this trend, it certainly can't be ignored. So what are the lessons and what does localization mean in Web 2.0 terms? How do Web 2.0 applications differ internationally and where is there innovation?

Using an extensive series of examples, this talk will cover what European, Asian and American companies have learned, invented and adjusted when making Web 2.0 a global/local phenomenon.

Data is a hot business. The recent acquisitions of NAVTEQ and Tele Atlas highlight that fact. “Data” is typically produced by specialized groups of people, producing data that is used for specific and explicit purposes.

Web 2.0 has also brought about 2 major trends here - the first is the concept of peer production, where groups of seemingly unrelated people conscientiously come together to collaborate on producing specific data, with Wikipedia being the prime example.

An example is Payscale, a website where people can contribute their own pay scale data in order to receive the aggregated data of people in their domain.

The second trend is about the emergence of implicit data which are much more than mere behavior trails, but are actually much more accurate proxies of the user's attention, ranging from intention data (search), attention data (tagging and voting), location data (GPS), to interaction data (between users on a social network).

As the complexity of production, aggregation, distribution, and terms of data consumption gets more complicated, what are the challenges facing companies seeking to manage this complexity? How will people expect to be paid for their data? Money? Attention? Quid pro quo? How can organizations process data, insights and actions iteratively through the constant use of experiments?

Speakers :
-- Andreas Weigend
-- Jonathan Laventhol

Once we progress from the user-centered design model to community-centered design we’ll need to identify and gather a similar set of best practices regarding community design.

This presentation collects the key features and interactions that a successful community should display in order to empower its users and facilitate conversation between its members.

The transition of user's role from consumer to producer requires that those who produce online and offline services not only to understand the process by which the conversation happens but also which interface mechanisms and flows should be present in their interfaces.

This presentation aims to be a bridge between Usability Best Practices and Community Centered Design, a practice that can maximize the networking and crowd effect under online user communities.

Is the legal framework in Europe ready for Web 2.0? How are Web 2.0 Services liable for user generated content? How does the legal framework and legal risks affect business models?

Learn about the evaluation and the development of the European legal framework for internet and media. Get informed about legal risks and how to avoid them in Web 2.0.

This panel will cover the shifts and moves in the whole traditonal media landscape and the role the Web played/ plays in that changing media landscape.

It will begin with short presentations of the results of the three newspaper-surveys done by Luca Conti (Italy), Robin Hamman (UK) and Steffen Bueffel (Germany). All three analyses have been inspired by the Binvings Groups 2006 study of "The Use of the Internet by America’s Newspapers".

The discussion portion dive into the following trends: Decline in circulation, reach of (young) audience(s). Ad revenues shifting towards the Web, new big players on the scene (Google, Yahoo, MSN etc.), Web 2.0 and Social Media (Bloggers, Podcasters etc.)

As a sneak peak here is some data from the 2006 German study on the use of interactive and "web2.0-like" features of Germany's Newspapers. They took the 100 most read papers based on circulation. In ( ) they have included our guess on what will change in the follow study of this year (- = decline, + increase).
* Message board: 49% ( - or no significant change)
* RSS-Feeds: 43% (+*)
* Videos: 37% (+++)
* RSS (Categories): 36% (+)
* Reporter Blogs: 21% (+)
* ... with comments enabled: 19% (+)
* Chat: 14% (- or no significant change
* Reader-comments on news stories: 10% (+++)
* Blogroll: 9% (+)
* Podcasts: 8% (++)
* Registration: 8% (+)
* RSS-Feeds (full story): 5% (no significant change)
* "most read": 5% (+)
* Social Bookmarking: 0% (+)

Speakers :
-- Igor Schwarzmann
-- Sam Sethi
-- Falk Lueke
-- Robin Hamman
-- Luca Conti
-- Steffen Bueffel