I’m sitting in Hagan River’s session on web applications and something is explicitly clear: developers all over are using Ajax. Last week when I was at Web2Con everyone was using Ajax there, but that was expected because it was all about brand-new, first-time apps.

At UI10, the attendees aren’t working on start-ups. Most are working in entrenched applications for universities, Fortune 500 companies, small businesses, and other places that don’t need to be cutting edge. They just need stuff to solidly work. Usable applications are a must.

That’s why I’m surprised that so many people are talking about and using Ajax. In most cases when a new technology comes along, it takes years to get into the mainstream applications. Ajax, it seems, doesn’t fit that model.

The following bit is from the Deconstructing Web Applications session at the User Interface 10 Conference. Hagan Rivers, the principle designer for Netscape browser versions 1,2,3 and one of the designers of 4, is talking about the different structures of web applications. She has talked about 3 major structures so far: Interview-based Apps Interview-based apps […]

Continue Reading: UIConf: Web Application Types: Interview, Hub & Spoke, Hybrid

A major topic at the Web 2.0 Conference is the web-based office suite. The competition is getting heated, to say the least. Many companies are throwing their bets into the ring, and several have released word processor type applications recently. One recently one was the minimalist Writeboard, released by the 37signals crew, riding an always […]

Continue Reading: Web-based Office Competition Heats Up

The following bit emerged out of the Mash-ups 2.0: Where’s the Business Model? session at the Web 2.0 Conference. Despite it’s name, there was only one salient point about business models to emerge from this session, in my opinion. The point came from Paul Rademacher, the creator of the most interesting mash-up we’ve seen so […]

Continue Reading: Web2Con: Remixing/Mash-up Apps and Competitive Advantage

Do you find yourself writing the same sort of blog post over and over, using a blog tool that isn’t optimized for it? If so, you might benefit from structured blogging. If you’re writing a cd review, for example, your blog tool probably doesn’t supply fields for “cd cover image”, or “liner notes”, or “related […]

Continue Reading: Web2Con: The Value of Structured Blogging

At the Web 2.0 Conference it is becoming clear that much of the energy spent on applications these days is directed toward wading through the murky waters of recommendations. For example, in Wednesday’s session “Mash-ups 2.0: Where’s the Business Model? “, the number one answer to the question “What kind of mashup tool do you want?” many people suggested something that could make recommendations for them. (one fellow wanted a GoogleMaps and school data mashup so he could tell where the best schools were and the regions they covered)

Going further: How can we create software that allows us to receive recommendations that match our own authority model?

Our own authority model is built upon how we gather recommendations and make decisions from them.

Who do you listen to for movie recommendations? Friends, family, movie critics?

How about software? Friends, colleagues, industry pundits?

The value of recommendations changes according to what’s being recommended. And those people and places we ascribe authority to changes as well. I’m not going to ask my mother, though she uses a Mac, what software I should be using. Usually, I make recommendations to her. I think an important point in all this is that each person’s authority model is unique.

When creating software (web apps) for this, it will undoubtedly be crucial to allow for flexibility that allows for this uniqueness.

Just for the heck of it, the next time you make a decision to see a movie and actually go see it, try to trace the route of authority you took to get there. Can it be done in software?

FYI: the tag for all things Web 2.0 Conference seems to be: web2con. Check out Del.icio.us and Flickr.

Also, note on the hot tags page at Flickr that web2con is a hot tag in the last 24 hours (at time of posting). That’s the popularity decay in action…and you could even call the web2con tag emergent.

If any of you reading Bokardo tend to stay in your RSS reader, you wouldn’t have noticed my latest redesign of Bokardo.com. Not given to wholesale redesign much, I actually did the redesign over several weeks after finally getting a local copy of my blog running on my Powerbook (it wasn’t that hard, but I […]

Continue Reading: Notes on the Redesign

The following bit emerged out of the What’s in a Tag session at the Web 2.0 Conference. Closely related to the popularity decay idea is the idea of emergent tags. Emergent tags are those tags that become more popular over time. The interesting thing about emergent tags is that they’re rare, but hugely valuable. Why […]

Continue Reading: Web2Con: Emergent Tags

The following bit emerged out of the What’s in a Tag session at the Web 2.0 Conference. One of the great features of tagging is seen when tags are aggregated. Then, we can see trends in what people are tagging: valuable bookmarks on Del.icio.us, cool pictures on Flickr, for example. These trends are trends of […]

Continue Reading: Web2Con: Popularity Decay in Tagging