The Haystack

Jon Tan and Jon Gibbons recently launched a website for Denna Jones. It’s a great-looking site, and it makes no use of a (single, local) content management system. Rather, the content is pulled from several web services, such as Flickr and Magnolia.

This is an interesting idea, but I’m on the fence about the approach. While the site is a coherent whole, it’s an automatically generated coherent whole; the author herself may not even be aware of the state of her site at any given moment in time. In effect, it seems to me to be a very well-designed, well thought-out feed aggregator. A fan of Jeremy Keith’s approach, I’ve always tended to see these services as extras, at most supplemental bits of not-necessarily-related content.

On the other hand, this isn’t a bad thing. If the aggregated web services are often used by the author, then it’s most likely no chore for her to log in to four or five sites instead of one CMS: one to add photos, one to add bookmarks, another to blog, etc. While I’m so busy doing other things that I don’t have time to attend to this site [I haven't even really designed the thing yet], Denna is creating bits of microcontent which are combined into something bigger, perhaps more meaningful in surprising ways. Her site is updated as she tweets. That seems quite effortless.

Perhaps I need to get over the fear of the fragility of web services, the idea that they can and sometimes do hiccup, burp, vomit or completely self-destruct. The dependency on these sites. Maybe it’s a matter of choosing the services owned by the big players, just to play it safe. But wait! We want control. Our own favorite content management system, tweaked just so. Argh.

Web 2.0 is about reusing information, and Web 3.0 will be about making information more meaningful by defining and discovering relationships between all these bits of information. The Jons are onto something with Denna’s site. There’s a transition here. And now others will follow.

It’s such a logical, natural approach. It’s the gorilla on the table. I like it. I think.

Remember the Swoosh logos of Web 1.0? And the shiny-drop-shadow-reflection-gradient-badge-icon shit we’re still digesting today? Well, get ready for Network Graph logos for Web 3.0. At least, that’s my prediction.

Assuming that Web 3.0 involves the emergence of practical Semantic Web applications, we can expect to see plenty of logos based on a visualization of graphs depicting nodes within a network. Ehm, like this:

Don’t underestimate the highly creative use of the dot on the lowercase letter i as a node within the network. Real cutting-edge designers will possibly use the letter o. Oh, and for goodness’ sake, use orange and blue in the logo, okay? Dare to be different.

If you want to really turn Web 3.0 on it’s head, join me in designing square, tree-hierarchical logos for semantic web applications. In Microsoft Word. No, make that Powerpoint. No, Paint. No, ASCII. Just to keep these people on their toes.

[On a serious note, I'm testing the Twine beta and find it an awesome concept. These types of apps will change how we as end users approach information. To their credit, they are also one of the first apps in this space to utilize the network-graph-logo-with-the-dot-on-the-i-as-a-network-node design meme.]

I’ll be speaking tomorrow in Utrecht, Netherlands on truths and myths regarding the Dutch Web Guidelines. I’d like to speak more about design in front-end development, but I guess the Web Guidelines are hot, and since I had a role in producing them, I get asked to talk about them. A lot.

As with any usability or accessibility guidelines, there are some myths which keep rearing their heads. These myths came to be in the minds of clients, mostly because because of what these clients have been told by hack, unprofessional front-end developers. You know, the kind who design websites based on what their framework or CMS is able to handle in its more or less standard form; god forbid these developers should know the faintest thing about decent markup. I’m tired of hearing what’s not possible within accessibility guidelines, especially when it’s simply untrue.

We’ll be talking about that.

For the Dutch among you, read more on the Zinformatie website.