I Reflect on It; It Reflects Me

This year marks the very first year that I have had any personal experience as a blogger. I actually started writing this blog as part of my course work for a graduate level Elements of Visual Design class that I am currently enrolled in at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Prior to this class, I had simply understood blogs to be a form of an online journal. Basically, I thought that people kept blogs to chronicle their personal feelings or opinions on topics, particularly topics of personal interest. For example, most blogs that I had read or commented on pertained to friends or relatives reporting on their vacations or mission trips or their passion for cooking or pets. Any blogs that I read that were written by people that I did not know were usually on topics of personal interest to me, such as blogs on the newest restaurants in town, or the best shows coming to town. This semester in graduate school as I learned to develop my own professional blog, I have learned much.

First, I learned that blogs were very pertinent in the professional setting and that many corporations kept one, not only for their employees, but for the general population at large. I learned that much information about the culture of a company and of their leadership and products could be gleaned from their blog. Second, in researching other blogs and generally making my way around, for me, the largely unchartered territory of the blogosphere, I learned that blogs of a professional nature are probably even more prominent online than personal blogs. This is because blogs dealing with professional topics generally have a much wider audience. I found myself needing to refer over and over again to professional blogs dealing with topics that I was studying about, such as photojournalism, Flash, and Web 2.0 applications (for example http://web2.socialcomputingmagazine.com/).

Third, I realized that blogging was not as easy or simple as it first appeared to be. I learned that blogging on a professional topic definitely required careful research, reading, formulation of thoughts, and appropriate written expression. In a sense, writing a blog entry is like writing a mini-paper. You must intellectually engage with the topic you are writing on, learn about that topic through research, and then bring your own thoughts and opinions to the topic once it is understood. While the work behind a blog entry may be similar to preparing for a mini-paper, the style of a blog is quite different. I think I began writing this blog with a stiff and academic tone where I wrote predominantly in the third person. As my work progressed, I realized that it was necessary to lighten my tone, make it more conversational, and feel free to incorporate personal experiences into the blog entry. I think the switch occurred sometime in October when I wrote the entry on Skype (http://nrs8.blogspot.com/2007/10/set-your-conversations-free-with-skype.html). This was the first time (after my introductory entry) that I started to throw in information about myself and my life into my entries (for example, I stated that I was not naturally a techie in the Skype entry, and then went on to talk about my job and graduate school education that I was pursuing etc. in future entries).

Another valuable lesson that I learned was to link everything I could when I blogged. This way, the influence of your blog could be much wider. Your entry is not an end in itself, but can be a window, if linked appropriately, into other people’s thoughts and expertise on the same topic. Starting out, I was stingy with the links and provided links only when absolutely necessary (such as to the corporate blogs that I discussed in an early entry). As my blog progressed, however, I began to provide links to as many topics that I touched upon as I could - for example, I started providing links to such things as my undergraduate and graduate universities if I talked about it, or to the wiki and writeboard we collaborated on as a class this semester. The more you link, the better you network through your blog.

I definitely intend to continue to blog as I find time in the New Year. An area that I can continue to improve is that of visuals in my blog. My passion is for writing, and, therefore, I find as I reflect on my blogging efforts over the past several months, that I have concentrated my efforts predominantly on the content and the writing style of the entries. I definitely made an effort to increase the number of relevant images that I incorporated into an entry as the semester wore on, but I see need for continual improvement in this area.

As I reflect on my blog, I realize that this blog is a reflection of me. It has the potential to be an all-in-one portfolio of my writing skills, my analytical and reasoning skills, my visual design skills, and my networking skills. It can be a portal by which I reach out and form community with others in the field of technical communication by effective use of linking and commenting. I am pleased with my work on this blog so far and the progress that I have made. I am pleased that I have come so far from where I started out – i.e. with thinking that a blog was merely a personal online journal. I look forward to being an active member of the blogosphere in 2008 and further honing my skills as a blogger.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year 2008 to all my readers!

Online Collaboration

Working collaboratively is no new concept. For as long as businesses and schools have existed, there have always been opportunities for teamwork and collaboration. However, in the last several years, with the boom of the information age, online collaboration has burst into the scene, adding a whole new level of collaborative opportunity. I am a currently a graduate student enrolled in the completely online MSPTC program at The New Jersey Institute of Technology. As an online student, I do not have the opportunity to mingle face-to-face with professors and fellow students, discussing assignments and tests over coffee, or huddled in the college library. However, as I have come to learn over the course of this year as an online student, the level of collaboration that I have experienced with my colleagues and instructors is not significantly lower than when I was a traditional undergraduate student at the University of Tennessee. Certainty, the social aspects of face-to-face collaboration are severely curtailed, but I find online collaboration to be surprisingly productive from a work stance. Perhaps, it is the inherent limitations of the online experience that causes students to seek to interact on course materials via chats, forums, and message-posting with their fellow-students with a greater gusto than in the traditional classroom where interaction is more or less taken for granted and, therefore, utilized less from a learning standpoint. In a traditional classroom setting, the predominant course collaboration seems to exist between the teacher and the student. The student enters the classroom, the teacher presents the material, the student takes notes and then goes home. If the student has questions, the teacher most likely has office hours during which the questions can be answered. Of course, during study groups and group projects, students interact and collaborate with one another, but the predominant source of learning or of new material is the instructor.

In the online setting, on the other hand, I am consistently surprised to find that a significant part of my learning is not only from the instructor and from course readings and podcasts, but also from my peers. Due to the asynchronous nature of my online classroom, a fellow student may log on and answer a question posed by another student prior to the instructor even logging on. I find students in the online classroom ready and willing to share knowledge or tools that they have discovered and found useful. Furthermore, since the online classroom is usually home to students from diverse backgrounds and in different stages of work and life experience, a range of valuable nuggets of information from varied viewpoints and areas of expertise can be gleaned from classmates. Additionally, ironically enough, it is probably the limited engagement between students in the online setting that keeps it free from the trappings of any types of interpersonal drama (for want of a better description), making it a purer platform for fruitful work-related interaction.

Aside from some of the aforementioned incentives that foster collaborating in the online setting, one of the major reasons that this type of interaction is increasing in effectiveness is because of the presence of new, excellent, and usually, free software platforms that exist to make collaborative tasks possible, even when collaborators are geographically separated. In the class that I am currently in, PTC605- Elements of Visual Design, I have been introduced to the world of wikis in Wikispaces, and to collaborative writing and editing in 37Signal's Writeboard. In the next few paragraphs of this blog entry, I will briefly touch on three areas of collaboration that we experienced as a class this semester:

(1) Forums
The type of collaboration that is expected via a forum is definitely more casual than that expected in a wiki or on writeboard. Generally speaking, forums are ungraded areas, permitting it to be the area where most questions or concerns about course material appear. It is here that the majority of collaboration in the form of questions and answers/suggestions occurs between students and the teacher, as well as between students. Ideas are exchanged and doubts are clarified. However, aside from a few required forum responses, the lack of any specific requirements for interaction in this area has the potential to make it the area where participation is often kept to a minimum. Posting a question to the forum is almost like sending out a group e-mail; each person thinks the other is going to respond to it, so no one is really feeling an obligation to respond unless the issue at hand concerns them too, or they have special knowledge about that area and are willing to share. Overall, I thought the forums worked fairly well in our class. I always got answers to any questions I posed and, particularly towards the end of the semester, collaboration between students took on a new dimension as we started working on our projects.

(2) Wikispaces (PTC605 Wiki)
As part of our Visual Design class, we were asked to collaborate on a wiki on the topic “Elements of Visual Design.” While the content of the wiki was a large part of the learning, perhaps the main lesson to be learned from the wiki project was that of collaborative editing. Each student in the class had one area of visual design that they focused on and created a page about. Once that page was mostly ready, students edited each other’s work, adding information as they saw fit. An article by Naish Michani entitled “Planning and Sustaining Wiki-based Collborative Projects” suggests that a certain degree of planning is required prior to starting work on a wiki so that, among other things, the rules of engagement are known at the front end. While we did not actually participate in any pre-planning activity before our collaborative activities on the wiki, much of that was taken care of for us by the instructor as this was a class assignment with specific guidelines and deadlines. In a sense, as this was a graded assignment, every collaborator has a vested interest in the wiki and there generally seemed to be excellent participation and collaboration. The completed wiki appeared to be very comprehensive and bore marks of every active student’s participation. However, the wiki project still fell short of being a completely collaborative experience. This is probably because each student had a specific assignment and was most committed to editing and beautifying their assigned page. Furthermore, when a certain page has someone’s name behind it, it has the potential to hinder free, unrestrained editing by others.

(3) Writeboard (PTC605 Writeboard)
Of the three types of collaboration addressed in this blog entry, this was the most collaborative. Essentially, apart from a basic structure for this collaborative item provided by the instructor, we started with a blank slate. No student had any particular assigned role in this project; everyone had equal opportunity to add content and edit other’s content. No one even knew who had added what unless they carefully perused the comments and editing history. As a result, when compared to the wiki, this project fostered a sense of immensely greater freedom when it came to editing or adding content as everyone was responsible for everything on it. An excerpt entitled “The Three Musketeers” from 37Signal’s book on web application, "Getting Real", suggests that a collaborative project begins with a “developer, a designer, and a sweeper (someone who can roam between both worlds).” Although we had no assigned roles (and probably especially because of that), the writeboard project brought out the particular strengths of different collaborators more than the other collaborative projects. While I enjoyed adding content, I found myself less efficient at organizing that content than some others in the course. Similarly, while some were fine with a detailed academic list in black and white, others favored adding visual elements in color to liven up the project. Again, as in the case of the wiki, the completed writeboard project appeared to be very comprehensive.

Overall, I found this online course on Visual Design to be enlightening. In the past, I had always passed around a paper document that required editing at work, and struggled to incorporate people’s different scribbled suggestions into the final document. Writeboard could be a valuable tool for the workplace, saving time, and not to mention, paper as each collaborator does not have to print the document out to make changes.

The different aspects of collaboration that came into play in the case of the forums, wiki, and writeboard provided us with great experience with all three types of collaboration and highlighted some of the benefits and pitfalls of each. I really see no reason to alter any of the assignments to any great degree in the future. I think the biggest item that was lacking in our collaboration was a sense of camaraderie. Perhaps, this is inevitable when dealing with online classes. Even when you successfully complete a collaborative project, there is very little of that rush that is generally felt in the context of successful teamwork (there were no virtual high-fives : )). This, I think, is actually something that will solve itself as time goes on and MSPTC students progress further in the program. In the four classes that I have taken this year, I am already starting to recognize more and more names, and am encountering the some of the same people from class to class. As students get to know each other and the instructors better, collaboration will also reach new heights as trust and friendship are built between individuals.

Data Visualization

As an individual working in the science field, I am no stranger to data. The very foundations of science are based on the scientific method, which relies on the accumulation of data through observation and experimentation. While experimenters may be content with looking through reams of numerical data that make perfect sense to them, it is vital, particularly in an industrial setting such as my own, to be able to translate that data into meaningful information that appeals to management that may or may not have any science background. This is where data visualization enters the scene. Data visualization is simply the graphical representation of information. In a sense, it increases the usability of data by making it easier for users of the data to understand and use it.

Data visualization is not a new concept. It has existed for decades in the form of bar and column graphs, pie charts, and maps. With the exponential growth of information technology in the past several years, however, the area of data visualization has exploded! It is getting increasing more sophisticated as powerful applications increase the quality and level of interactivity of animations and images. I came across several new and interesting examples of data visualization just from surfing the web. Three of them were:

(1) Tag Clouds – This is a way to visually depict user-generated tags. Tag clouds were popularized predominantly by Web 2.0 applications such as Flickr and del.icio.us.

(2) Visual Thesaurus – This is a visual navigation of the dictionary. Check out the graphic to the right which is a visual representation of the word “writing” and its synonyms.

(3) Amaztype – This is a fascinating typographic book search, which collects information from Amazon and presents it visually in the configuration of the keyword selected by the user. For example, a search of the word “Classics” yielded the image to the left. More information about a particular book can be accessed by clicking on the image of that book.

The above examples are, by no means, even scratching the surface of this fascinating topic. The use of data visualization is cropping up everywhere as it is an excellent way to enhance understanding of information. Data visualization has long been popular in academic settings. It is, however, increasingly finding its place on the Internet and in various corporate settings. The end purpose of presenting data in a visual form is, after all, to convey something to the user of that data. The old adage, “A picture is worth a thousand words” (or numbers) still rings true. Whether we are talking about students in an academic setting, viewers of a presentation at a company, or users of a website, they all have in common the experimentally-proven fact that pictures can be comprehended faster and retained in the memory longer than words or numbers (http://www.usenix.org/events/sec99/full_papers/jermyn/jermyn_html/node17.html). As such, when speaking from a usability standpoint, it is probably best that data generators increasingly find ways to present as much of their data as is possible in a visual form to make it the most palatable to their users. Various creative means can be used of displaying data in ways that can help generate new data and understanding. Besides making information easier to digest, data visualization can also be a data-analysis tool, uncovering relationships and connections and patterns between data, not previously perceived. Furthermore, the availability of powerful data visualization applications is making it possible for users to increasingly interact with data, thereby enhancing their handling, and subsequent comprehension of it. Given these and many other advantages of data visualization, it only seems logical that this area will grow and its scope broaden tremendously in the future.

Sources:

“7 Things You Should Know about Data Visualization” (http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7030.pdf)

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/08/02/data-visualization-modern-approaches/

Web Writing

At its very core, good writing is just that -- good writing. Irrespective of whether it is writing for the web or for print, a reader can easily pick up on whether a piece of writing is good or bad. Essentially, all good writing shares a few basic elements: ideas that are interesting and important, a focus on the reader or audience, organization that is logical and effective, simplicity and specificity in word choice, use of active versus the passive tense in sentence structure, sentence fluency, and use of correct punctuation, grammar, and spelling (adapted from an article entitled “What is Good Writing?” by Steve Peha at http://www.ttms.org/writing_quality/writing_quality.htm). No good piece of writing, irrespective of the medium, is exempt from those and other such general guidelines. However, the similarity between web and print writing ends there. The predominant reason that web writing must differ from print writing is that the two media are handled very differently by users. The reason for the different handling is either a factor of user behavior or of the medium (i.e. a computer or other screen) itself.

User Behavior

The same user approaches the web with a significantly different mind-set than that he or she approaches a text book or other printed text with. In the case of a book, the user is generally willing to sit down and chronologically work his way through the material. Usually, each chapter builds on the one before. Generally, he has either purchased or specifically sought out the book or other printed material and, therefore, has more of a vested commitment to it. Websites, on the other hand, are in most cases, stumbled upon by the user, either through a search engine or a hyperlink from another site, and the user merely scans a page quickly to see if it has the information he is looking for. If that information is not readily available from a quick scan or if the layout is too tedious, the user moves on to the next website. Jakob Nielsen, termed the “guru of usability” by the New York Times has done extensive work studying the habits of users reading material on the web. According to his work “Writing for the Web,” 79% of users merely scan a webpage instead of reading word-for-word.

The Medium

In the same study referred to above, Nielsen pointed out that reading from a computer screen increases eye strain and fatigue, and is, therefore, 25% slower than reading from paper. Consequently, Web content should have only 50% of the word count of its paper equivalent.

Given the restrictions of the medium (computer screen) and user behavior, it is easy to see why writing for the web must differ from writing for print.

Nielsen’s Basic Guidelines for Web Writing (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9710a.html):

Nielsen offers a few suggestions for web writing in order to ensure that a webpage is easily scannable. He suggests:

• highlighted keywords
• meaningful sub-headings
• bulleted lists
• one idea per paragraph
• the Inverted Pyramid style, starting with the conclusion
• half the word count (or less) than conventional writing
• an increase in credibility with meaningful graphics and appropriate hyperlinks

Let’s briefly explore the use of some of these aspects of web writing by looking at a press release put out by the U. S. Consumer Products Safety Division (CPSC), and a product information webpage belonging to L'Avian Plus Premium Nutrition.

Press Release by CPSC: This online press release is entitled “Kolcraft Recalls Play Yards After the Death of a 10-Month-Old Child.” This release is a good example of web writing as it, as are most press releases, is written in the inverted pyramid style with conclusion first, followed by an explanation and further details. The information is presented in the form of brief paragraphs, often consisting of only one sentence each. The conciseness of the text makes this an easy piece to scan quickly. This press release contains visual elements to enhance and clarify understanding of the text. The visuals consist of a tabular summary and several photographs of the Kolcraft Play Yards being recalled. As these graphics are related to the content of the press release, the text and images work in combination with each other.

Product Information by L’Avian Plus: This webpage contains general product information on L’Avian Plus Hamster Food. It uses a few of Nielsen’s pointers for effective web writing. This product information piece makes use of highlighted text and bulleted lists to make the information concise and readily scannable. Additionally, this piece also includes a relevant graphic – a photograph of actual product, and hyperlinks to other pages in the website with information on hamster treats for additional nutrition.

Overall, Web writing has many advantages. A user can generally take in all the relevant information after a quick scan of a well-written web chunk. The interactive nature of the web makes it easy for users to click their way through hyperlinks to the level of detail they desire on a topic. Websites generally tend to be more concise from a textual standpoint and more visual than print writing, which might make them more readily comprehensible to a wider range of users than the same information in its printed version. However, much of the beauty of an eloquent writing style with anecdotes and colorful prose is generally discouraged or under strict restriction in web writing, making print writing the better medium from a language or literary standpoint.

Flash-y Websites

Adobe’s Flash software is claimed by the company to be the industry leading interactive content creation tool (www.adobe.com/products/flash/). Despite the common criticisms of Flash such as its relatively high download times, dependence on a fast internet connection, and occasional inaccessibility of its content by search engine crawlers, introducing Flash programming into websites is increasingly growing in popularity. Perhaps it is the “flashiness” and high level of creativity, interactivity, and cutting-edge design skills that are demonstrated by a website containing Flash content that makes it such a popular medium, particularly for film and other artsy types of industries.

I got my first real exposure to Adobe Flash CS3 last summer in an elective class I took as part of my graduate program in Professional and Technical Communication. The class was a brief introduction to Flash Animation and I got some exposure to motion and shape tweening, morphing text, adding buttons and associating actions with them. It seemed like the creative potential of Flash was endless and was clearly only limited by my inexperience with it. Flash can be a wonderful medium for creativity and great visual design.

I recently ran into a very interesting Flash site -- http://www.mono-1.com/monoface/main.html. This site was created by a Minneapolis-based PR firm, mono, that works with high-end clients to help raise brand awareness, and develop new identities and brand campaigns. The monoface site was created as a New Year’s greeting card from the company. It is a Flash-intensive site that is highly interactive. Essentially the premise of the site is that it consists of head shots of several real-life mono employees, the facial features of whom the user can mix and match by simple clicking into seemingly endless new combinations (759,375 to be precise!). The results are generally hilarious and the interactivity of this site makes it an enjoyable site to dabble with for a few idle minutes. Monoface has gained the reputation as a high-quality time waster and as the Funny Site of the Day. Despite the time killing potential, it is hard to deny that this site is a brilliant expression of Flash. The transitions as the faces move from one iteration to the next are seamless and the features in each of the faces appear to be blended perfectly. From a visual design standpoint, this site has an extremely clean and simple design and unity with the mono’s corporate website is quite apparent based on the color scheme of the monoface website. The background of the site is generally white with the typography appearing in blue. In screens where the Flash elements are loading, the background appears blue with the typography in white. These are the same basic colors are those used on the corporate website. The typography on this site is minimal and appears in all lower case, which lends this site a youthful and modern look, reminiscent of electronic forms of communication like texting.

It is obvious based on the visual design of the site that the head shots are the point of emphasis. The faces are positioned in the center of the screen where the eye is immediately drawn. Furthermore, the faces are the largest visual element on the screen and are also the only elements that have any color other than white, blue, and occasionally black (as on the works “happy new year from all of us”) associated with them. All of the aforementioned attributes establish the hierarchy of the faces and draw the eye instantly to these head shots. The clean white background helps to further highlight the form against it – the headshot.

Navigation on this site is generally simple and effective and the site, overall, does not have any distinct purpose other than to entertain and to highlight the technical and creative expertise of the mono company to its present and potential future clients.

Another interesting Flash site that I discovered is http://unlimited.orange.co.uk/flash/go. This site belongs to Orange, a UK-based mobile communications company. The Flash website was created especially to promote the company’s “Speak Easy" pay-as-you-go plan. The campaign's tagline is "Good things should never end" and the Flash site, therefore, seeks to offers a virtually unlimited experience (http://www.adverblog.com/archives/003290.htm). In this site, you can scroll down seemingly endlessly, encountering various interactive characters along the way. As the name of the company is Orange, orange is the predominant color used in this Flash site. In addition to being the “theme color,” orange is a warm color, reminiscent of summer and happiness and freedom, and works well to establish a friendly and warm tone to this interactive site. The rainbow is a prevailing element throughout and works as a line of sorts to guide the eye down the site. The expansive nature of this Flash site actually makes the rainbow key to providing a sense of continuity and guidance to the site. Ridiculous as it may sound, it is actually possible to get “lost” in this site as you scroll aimlessly further and further down, if not for the rainbow path. The interactive icons and figures are the points of emphasis and are made to stand out against the rainbow colors with the use of neutrals – black and white. The black provides an excellent contrast against the background, drawing the eye to these interactive elements. The elements range from mind-reading games to “talking” characters to trees to “create your own music” characters.

Despite the seemingly random nature of the activities as you make your way down the site, the creators have incorporated a good sense of balance into it. The number of interactive elements are generally symmetrically (or, sometimes, asymmetrically) balanced on either side of the rainbow. If the element is a heavy one, such as the “leave your message here” character, it is the only element present in that area. On the other hand, if the element is smaller, such as the monkey, there are two of them positioned an equal distance from the boom-box in the center. This helps the eye keep from getting visually overwhelmed by keeping interactive-element clutter to a minimum.

The Orange site is an excellent use of Flash. As this is not the main corporate site, but a side advertisement, navigation and typography is minimal. Although this site is aimed at consumers of Orange's mobile communications services, it may be better enjoyed long-term by a juvenile audience. Overall, it meets its purpose of entertaining, while at the same time visually reminding us that it is Orange’s site and that one of their tag lines is that “Good things should never end.”

What in the World is Folksonomy?

Folksonomy is one of the new buzz words sweeping the world with the advent of the Web 2.0 craze. While Microsoft Word still underlines the word “folksonomy” with the swiggly red line to indicate a spelling error, this word is freely and frequently used and understood within the online community. Dictionary.com defines it as “a type of classification system for online content, created by an individual user who tags information with freely chosen keywords” (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/folksonomy). This word has its roots in the well-known word “taxonomy,” which is the science of classification. Thomas VanDer Wal combined the word “taxonomy” with the word “folk,” resulting in the word “folksonomy.” The “folk” component of this word signifies the social nature of this form of taxonomy. While in the past, professionals and experts in the field of taxonomy and, perhaps, the creator of a document or data were the only ones privy to rigidly classifying and organizing that piece of information, the world of folksonomy permits users like you and me to create metadata simply by tagging online data with relevant keywords of our choosing. A popular site that is designed to focus on this type of user-generated web content organization is del.icio.us. Within this site, the user-generated tags associated with a piece of web information are used to classify that information within that user’s collection, as well as across the entire system (http://www.adammathes.com/academic/computer-mediated-communication/folksonomies.html). That tagged bookmark can then be viewed not only by that particular user, but can also be shared publicly with others. It is this form of Collaborative Tagging that makes folkosonomy a social form of bookmarking.

I recently entered the world of social bookmarking by creating a user account on del.icio.us. Until now, my experience with bookmarking has consisted of storing bookmarks inside my browser. These bookmarks were only accessible to me, and that too, only if I was accessing the web using the same computer that I stored the information on. Despite the fact that I had stored a bookmark, I rarely accessed information using it, simply because my bookmarks stored in my browser had become long, unclassified, and chaotic lists that I had to weed through every time to find what I was looking for. I think I am going to enjoy the accessibility and versatility of storing, organizing, and sharing bookmarks online. Click on the icon to the right to access my bookmarks in del.icio.us.

Of the ten URLs that I have bookmarked so far, I tagged nine of them as “MSPTC.” This stands for “Master of Science in Professional and Technical Communication,” the degree program I am currently enrolled in at NJIT. All of these bookmarks pertain to topics associated with some aspect of technical communication. I tagged three sites pertaining to HTML as they seemed to be useful tutorials on introducing html and coding. Of the three html-related bookmarks I tagged, http://www.w3schools.com/html/ appeared to be the most popular in the del.icio.us community, based on the number of users who had also tagged that site. I also tagged a blog on typography, ilovetypography, simply because it is an excellent blog on typeface-related topics. It has beautiful examples of web typography and some excellent links to other sources of information on typography. Typography is an important aspect of visual design and very pertinent to MSPTC. I tagged one of the foundational sites on usability information, http://www.usability.gov/. This site is clearly popular in the del.icio.us community based on the number of users who have tagged it. It is a very useful site for information on usability and user-centered design of web pages. Another of my bookmarks, http://worqx.com/color/index.htm, deals with color theory, an understanding of which is critical when designing visual documents. It is a well-designed tutorial with additional links for further study. I tagged the Paradigm Online Writing Assistant as a basic writing resource. This site provides strategies for mastering the writing process and includes, among other things, sections on organizing, revising, and editing writing. Writing effectively is foundational to professional communication. Another of my bookmarks is http://www.commoncraft.com/. I tagged this site especially for the video on social bookmarking, but the site does offer other videos on topics like wikis and RSS feeds. The trademark of Common Craft is that they make short explanatory videos in plain English on complex topics, making them readily understandable to laymen. Finally, I tagged an article by Linda Weinman on http://www.peachpit.com dealing with web aesthetics. The article appeared to be replete with information on designing good web sites.

As the bookmarks I discuss above are all tagged with “MSPTC,” they are classified on del.icio.us with all other bookmarks that users have tagged with the same label (http://del.icio.us/tag/msptc). As such, I have access to bookmarks that users interested in similar content have stored, and that I might never have otherwise found on my own. This is a very useful feature of social bookmarking for students and professionals who have the potential to greatly benefit from having access to a plethora of web content pertaining to a topic of interest without themselves having to wade through the entire web to find it. Furthermore, users can form shared accounts to further collaboration, or can simply subscribe to a tag of interest on del.icio.us to keep up with any new bookmarks added by their colleagues and peers with that tag (http://del.icio.us/about/). Social bookmarking, therefore, makes it possible for the entire community to peer-review web content and participate in classifying it. There is no hierarchy of tags as in classic taxonomy. Instead, words that are most frequently used as tags by users simply rise to the top. Everything about this system of classification is collaborative in nature. The greater the number of our peers that have tagged a certain URL with a specific tag, the greater is (generally speaking) our level of confidence in that particular site containing useful and relevant information on that topic. So, in a sense, social bookmarking is a mini-democracy. It’s “of the people” – these are our bookmarks, “by the people” – we get to tag them any way we choose, and “for the people” – our tagged bookmarks, when combined with everyone else’s, results in a large peer-reviewed resource of web content (makes reference to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address). Of course, this system leaves some room for chaos as rigid tagging rules and accountability are minimal on a site like del.icio.us, leaving it entirely up to the user to select a tag of their liking for a bookmark. However, as the article “How tags exploit the self-interest of individuals to organize the Web for everyone” states,..“even with no one in charge, the product of all the individual decisions of del.icio.us's users is surprisingly well organized--and surprisingly intelligent.”

“Set your Conversations Free with Skype”

In the past few years, “Web 2.0” has become a popular buzz word carelessly thrown around by techies and users alike. I cannot claim to be a techie, so as a humble user, I embarked on an internet journey to find a clear definition of the term. Despite finding myriad sources of information on the topic, a succinct definition of the term continued to elude me. I have come to conclude that the term “Web 2.0” is better described, and not really defined. Tim O’Reilly’s article entitled “What is Web 2.0” does an excellent job of describing this new generation in the web-based community. There are a few aspects of what he describes as Web 2.0 that stand out to me. First and most importantly, Web 2.0 is different from its predecessor, Web 1.2, in that it focuses on collaboration and sharing between users. The ever-popular YouTube video on Web 2.0 infers that the “the web is us” i.e. we, the user, are now the web. The title of that video also plays on the word, “Us” by referring to it as follows: “The Machine is Us/ing Us.” We, the user, are being “used” in the this new generation of web-based community to create infrastructure, create information, upload it, download it, discuss it, collaborate on it, share it, organize it, and the list goes on. As O’Reilly indicates, users become co-developers whose collective intelligence is harnessed. He refers to this as “an architecture of participation to build a commanding advantage.” This facet of the Web 2.0 community goes beyond users simply pooling information – the architecture of user participation can, in some applications, go so far as to create an information infrastructure that utilizes “the processing and networking power of the end-users machines” (http://www.skype.com/download/explained.html) instead of centralized resources (“P2P” technology). The idea of P2P or “Peer-to-Peer” technology is that the available cumulative bandwidth for an application grows in direct proportion to the network of users. This aspect of Web 2.0 is sometimes referred to as the “platform power of the internet” (see http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2006/11/17/web-20-summit-opening-session.html).

An application that embodies the user-network collaborative aspects of Web 2.0 is the popular internet telephony application, Skype. Skype was founded in 2003 by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis and is software that provides the services of internet telephony along with instant messaging, file transfers, and video communications by using your computer and internet connection to communicate with anyone, anywhere in the world. An article by Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service, 11/08/06 entitled “Web 2.0: Skype upgrade to get smart new features” indicates that Skype currently has about 136 million registered users in 200 countries, and adds around 250,000 registered users every day. Skype uses P2P technology and, therefore, the available resources for this application grow with the number of users. In fact, Tim O’Reilly at a Web 2.0 Summit pointed out that Skype only has 12 centralized servers as opposed to Google's hundreds of thousands of servers. But, as a Web 2.0 network-collaborative application, Skype, can either have its 12 servers, or infinitely more depending on however many users are online! In fact, Skype was recently acquired by eBay, in part, to expand its (eBay’s) global presence by automatically gaining a foothold on the PCs of millions of registered Skype users who already have Skype as a desktop application, but may never have heard of eBay (http://blogs.zdnet.com/web2explorer/?p=8). Talk about Web as a community platform! The global reach of the 12-server Skype, and now, perhaps, eBay piggybacking on Skype, would never have been possible without the network community and the distributive infrastructure of P2P technology, all aspects of this new Web 2.0 generation. So, in conclusion, I am going to borrow Ken Ronkowitz’s definition of Web 2.0 from his blog, and simply say that “Web 2.0 is what the web is becoming.”