Jon Udell thinks that XML formats will rule the day:

“There’s no doubt in my mind, however, that online forms will continue to transform our means of gathering information, that hypertextual XML will make page-oriented technologies such as PDF obsolete as a means of publishing it, and that blogs, wikis, and their successors will become our primary means of collaborating around shared information.”

Tim Bray agrees, but says that easy-to-use word processors are hard to make:

“I’ve used a lot of different programs over the years, and written some myself, and I’ve never seen software, designed for use by human authors, that has good usability and isn’t a great big honking monster. And usually, they’re not only big, but they take years and years to get working properly. So I really hope Jon’s right, but I’m not holding my breath.”

Jon responds by talking about user experience, but not in so many words:

“For a decade I’ve been pointing out the vast gulf between TEXTAREA and Word. Analysis of a representative corpus of business and web documents should enable us to define a target set of features, and scope the difficulty of the problem. In this case, the right thing to do with the long tail is chop it off. Most of us don’t need that stuff most of the time. We do quite desperately need a widget that does the five or six or eight things we all do all the time. And we need it to do those things in a way that’s standard across browsers and operating systems, produces valid XHTML, and is cleanly extensible. The W3C isn’t the right venue for this work, but something like the WHAT-WG might be.

Analyzing the right document corpus might also dispel some of the MSXML-vs.-OpenDocument fog. Goverments and citizens need technology that’s lightweight, ubiquitous, and good enough for everyday use. Defining what’s good enough for everyday use would be a great contribution to the debate.”

In the usability/user experience world this finding out what is good enough is known as field research. I think Jon’s right, we need some serious field research to see what people are actually doing, so we don’t smother them with features.

But we can’t get carried away and simply make Notepad on the Web (unless those features are what people actually use). Instead let’s shoot for the Einstein quip: “make things as simple as possible, but not simpler“.

RSS man Dave Winer considers “subscribe” to be the word of choice. Cool!

Hey Dave, check this out: Interface Elements for Providing Feeds and Having People Subscribe to Them

The main reason why we all agreed was this:

“It’s pretty clear that syndicating a web site is what developers do, and subscribing to a site is what readers do.”

PHP creator Rasmus Lerdorf on the new Yahoo Maps API (via Jeremy Zawodny):

“There is of course the fancy new maps.yahoo.com/beta site which is fun, but as far as I am concerned the killer app here is the geocoding platform that drives this. And it is completely accessible for anyone to use. It’s also a sane API that anybody can figure out in minutes. Here are a few tips for using this API from PHP 5.”

This demonstrates why simplicity on the Web as Platform is a big deal. The guy who created PHP just helped thousands of developers build their own Geo applications, and it wasn’t because he had a great amount of time on his hands. It was because the API was simple, approachable, and fast.

The simplest, most useful API wins.

Update: Closely on the heels of Yahoo’s new API comes this: Clone the Google API. This is about the Search API, but it deals specifically with ease-of-use for developers…

Thomas Vander Wal explains why Tom Coates’ podcast annotation project at the BBC is so cool.

I knew it was neat, but Thomas explains why it will be decidedly huge.

Russell Beattie gives us some great words for the weekend: Making Money?

Xeni Jardin’s Wired article Web 2.0 Cracks Start to Show is a good read. I read it yesterday, and found it to be a fair apprisal of the Web 2.0 situation, except for one line by Nick Carr, whose recent The Amorality of Web 2.0 has been kicking up some serious dust.

Carr’s line, which Xeni quoted, was “A lot of participatory media is mediocre”.

I’m not going to write more about it here, other than to say that I’ve heard Nick Carr speak, and he’s obviously a swell, even-tempered person.

But if you want to know my opinion of that quote go check out Boing Boing.

Just reading this Wired piece about Memeorandum. They’re on the third or fourth wave of interest. I was on the second, behind MacManus and Scoble, who were on the first wave. I’m glad to see this excellent site get the credit it deserves!

An interesting line from the founder of Memeorandum, Gabe Rivera:

“If you read blogs, you know that there is this conversation and that some articles are the talk of the day, and other posts have important things to say about those,” Rivera said. “If you built graphs in your mind of what the talk looks like, I think it looks like what I’ve done. I get the sense (Memeorandum) is just a natural representation of what is already going on.”.

This is exactly what I’m talking about when I talk about modeling human behavior. It’s also exactly what I was talking about when I wrote my response yesterday to Alex Barnett: How Google Models How We Value Content.

Memeorandum models how we value content just like Google does. A more focused approach, that’s all.

I originally gushed about the service here: Tech.Memeorandum’s Filtering Illustrates Web 2.0’s Most Important Skill

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.

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.