Joel is “starting to see a new round of pure architecture astronautics: meaningless stringing-together of new economy buzzwords in an attempt to sound erudite….I’ll do my part. I hereby pledge never again to use the term “Web 2.0″ on this blog, or to link to any article that mentions it. You’re welcome.”

Most of what is ‘Web 2.0′ is based around ideas of a few people who had to ride out Web 1.0 with no buzz or funding, while people selling fresh mangos online were talking to VCs.

This time perhaps the good people, the Evan Williams’ Dave Winers’ (yes, dammit, Dave Winer), ‘Ian Clarke equivalents are in their garretts building the real next generation web.

Those people will be beavering away, building instead of talking. On that note - I’d guess I’d better get back to work.

Joel on Software - Friday, October 21, 2005

Cribcandy is today’s Yahoo pick:

“A sleek catalog of nifty gadgets and hip furniture… like a Gizmodo or Engadget for Eames chair enthusiasts. You may also be looking at the future of online shopping — this site uses “wists,” or bookmarkable thumbnails, to create its constant feed of tiny images from boutiques and blogs across the Web.”

Jakob Nielsen says that the new UI paradigm to replace Apple’s will come from Microsoft:

“Macintosh-style interaction design has reached its limits. A new paradigm, called results-oriented UI, might well be the way to empower users in the future…The next version of Microsoft Office (code-named “Office 12″) will be based on a new interaction paradigm called the results-oriented user interface”

Results-oriented UI turns out to be templates. Because there are too many options in MS Office to have individual commands the idea is that the results of groups of them are displayed.

It is, perhaps, a bit rich for anyone to champion Microsoft over Apple in terms of design at the moment, but design is subjective, I guess. Where Nielsen is provably wrong, however, is where he confuses User Interface with User Interaction (isn’t he supposed to be an expert in Interaction?):

“rather than typing in commands and parameters, users select commands from menus, freeing them from typing errors. Menus, toolbars, and dialog boxes operate on the screen’s visual objects, which faithfully represent user goals. This is known as WYSIWYG, or What You See Is What You Get.”

No. WYSIWYG refers to the fact that what you see on the screen is what it looks like when printed or nowadays, printed on the web. It has nothing to do with dropdown menus rather than typing commands, it is just that command line interaction sits in a UI that is not WYSIWG. This is just a confused metaphor.

I used to work with a CAD system that had several thousand menu items because templates don’t tend to work for professional software. Templates are often the ‘hide the crap under the carpet’ approach of UI design avoiding stripping out superfluous features for true design elegance and providing the worst UI experience of all when templates can’t be adapted intuitively

This would be OK, but for the fact that from ‘clippy’ to the automatic insertion of things like bullet points in Word, Microsoft has a terrible record at UI which is results oriented, i.e. tries to guess what results you want and groups commands together.

What’s currently badly designed about Office is not the details or the bloat, but the premise. Yes, the WYSIWYG UI is dead, but only in the sense that it refers to printing a document from what you see on screen.

Paper documents, ledgers, and overhead projector slides were the metaphors that, Word, Excel and Powerpoint were based on. But we live in a realm of email and weblogs, websites, shared web updatable financial data and multimedia mashups. Office is not designed to deal with these types of documents. What is wrong with Office is Word, Excel and Powerpoint not the principal of menus.

R.I.P. WYSIWYG - Results-Oriented UI Coming (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)

This is my personal opinion and does not reflect any company policy.

Most web content is published and then indexed when a search engine finds it, taking up to 30 days. In the past submitting your site to a search engine was the done thing - now its coming back, only better.

Search engines have completely different indexes for news and weblog search, because the indexes need to be updated more quickly, to be able to do this they cannot search the entire web every few minutes but need to be alerted - or pinged. Currently, ‘pings’ to sites like weblogs.com or ping-o-matic or blo.gs say that SOMETHING has been updated on a weblog or news site. Specs such as RSSPing change this to a ping that says WHAT has been updated. If all pages being published on the web did this (and there is no technical reason why they couldn’t), then search engines would not need to crawl websites and search engines would be updated instantly.

Search engines are measured on how much, how relevant and how fresh. Pings are the answer to the fresh bit.

Mike Graves points out that Verisign plan to build value add services on top of pings, but acknowledges that pings themselves should be free:

“Ping services are not a profitable business, in and of themselves. Pings are free by tradition and by necessity. Attempts to introduce cost or latency into the ping layer would be self-defeating; the network simply routes around such problems. A free, open, scalable service fabric for pings is a powerful base for us to build value-added services on, however.”

This is good news because a single vendor ‘owning’ pings would really mess things up for publishers and Internet users in the long term.

In order to maintain innovation and development in weblog style publishing, RSS syndication and possibly even, in the long run, search, publishers such as SixApart should now bake the default ping to a (soon to be) non-profit service such as Ping-O-Matic (unless Feedmesh gets its act together) who would then pass it on to weblogs.com, blo.gs etc.

Alternatively, Verisign could keep Weblogs.com in a non-profit entity and develop premium services within Verisgn itself. This was pretty much how Dave Winer had things, separating church and state between his own publishing engine and Weblogs.com, so people trusted him to keep it neutral. The benefit with this option would be that there needs to be money from somewhere to make pings reliable and filter out the spam. The amount of money or infrastructure needed is not that great. I would argue that despamming, if it is by authentication, isn’t part of the value add but that custom subscriptions to alerts on topics are, but that’s debatable. In addition, despamming pings doesn’t need heavyweight authentication like certificates because the publisher to ping server ratio is not many to many. The problem with a Verisgn controlled root ping server (even non-profit) is that there are other large companies with ping server aspirations, such as Yahoo, who own blo.gs. There may need to be a truly neutral ping service for there to be a central one.

If this does not happen, ‘pinging’ will disappear as it either: Balkanizes, with companies who have both publishing and search products such as Google or Yahoo refusing to ping Verisign, or each other; stagnates with a single vendor having a lock on the whole thing, stopping competition and therefore, evolution.

The Internet works because nobody owns the roads. Keeping the infrastructure free and making money at the edges is what preserves the marketplace.

Today’s Cribcandy has a list of some of the most recent innovations in LED lighting from being directly embedded into fabrics, bathroom tiles and translucent glass.

LED’s are currently only in widespread use for applications with high maintenance costs such as traffic lights, but as their performance increases over the next 5 to 10 years, they will eventually replace standard home and office lighting and transform the way that interiors can be designed.

Aside from the tiny size of LED’s (or the even newer LECs (Light Emitting Capacitors), LED’s are approaching the lifespan of standard building materials, making it cost effective to embed them directly in structural components and architectural finishes.

The biggest change, however, is that because the currents involved are tiny, LED lighting can be directly controlled, digitally, meaning that there are almost unlimited effects that can be produced cheaply and controlled wirelessly.

Given that transparent wiring can be embedded in glass complete with transparent solar cells it should be possible to create windows with self-powered, embedded lighting to be any color or shade, display any image or be completely translucent.

Cribcandy - a thumbnail bookmark blog with the best stuff for your home

Over at Wists we have launched our first thumbnail product blog with bookmarkable cool things for your home, Cribcandy.com.

Cribcandy is a regularly updated link blog with a difference, since it uses Wists as its back end publishing tool, all the links have thumbnail images as well as headline links.

Wists enables us to add, categorize and create thumbnail image links with a couple of clicks, meaning that we can post decent image links to cool products very quickly.

In addition you can bookmark anything on Cribcandy with one click, complete with its thumbnail image, to add to you own wists bookmarks.

If you want to send up tips, tag any of your own wists with ‘cribcandy’ and we will be monitoring it.

Cribcandy - a thumbnail bookmark blog with the best stuff for your home

When IBM approached little Microsoft to supply them with an OS to service a market for computers that individuals owned, they did not see the lock in that would mean that Microsoft would soon be telling IBM what to do.

The combined hubris and stupidity of the record labels is repeating this game of switch with Apple. The music guys thought that they could test the waters with electronic delivery with an also ran like Apple and use tight DRM to make sure that they weren’t fueling the file sharing networks.

As this excellent piece in brainwash points out, AFF’s Brainwash :: The recording industry’s new clothes, they have created the Microsoft of music.

Apple now owns the customer, even if you have most of your music as MP3s on an iPod but a few songs you have bought from the iTunes music store, you have a real dollar value switching cost. I wonder how many of the increasingly ubiquitous iPod users even know that they can’t easily take their songs to a non-Apple product.

I expect that before long there will be court cases for Apple to display disclaimers on their products saying that they cannot move songs to a non-Apple environment, or cases to legitimize software that bypasses Apple’s DRM and converts songs to regular MP3.

By the time that these have dragged through the courts, Apple will have won. But the real irony is that it won’t be file sharing advocates pushing these cases, but the recording industry.

Apple holds the cards precisely because it and not the recording industry, controlls the DRM.

The company that Nick Denton, Angus Bankes and I started on my kitchen table in Shoreditch, in 1998, sells to Verisign - I can’t comment, but Tom Foremski has the scoop and Rafat Ali more details, including a link to a good piece on Moreover by Jason Kottke, who use to work in my team:

Moreover was early on some things, news search before Google news and RSS and weblog search. The thing that we did with Evan and Meg, from Blogger, Newsblogger, was kinda cool - and we almost bought Blogger, but who knows.

I have been banging on about the importance of ping servers for a while, perhaps Versign with Moreover and Weblogs.com can do something or perhaps another startup will.

Whatever happens, the architecture of online publishing is changing and with it, the entire architecture of search - pinged instead of crawled. That is a very big deal for Google.

SiliconValleyWatcher.com

PaidContent.org

Of all the gadgets which must be coming soon, this is what I want:

A super high res, digital paper, ebook which boots instantly and allows web browsing with lower resolution bitmap images and print quality vector text.

This news.com article shows why it hasn’t happened yet.

Forget blogs–print needs its own iPod | CNET News.com

Welcome to the Infrablog: Weblogs 2.0