Via the Google blog: Google is trying out and releasing to the world (via Creative Commons license) a new XML format for site maps. This new format is an XML representation of your web site that Search Spiders would read upon entering your site, much like they read the robots.txt file now.

Several things are very interesting about this:

1. This is the #1 Search Engine company doing this.
2. This is Web 2.0 in all its semantic markup glory.
3. This could be the beginning of a web site discovery format with which we could build simple tools that search for relevant content (without having to go through a search engine!). Obviously, though, Google sees an opportunity to leverage this format to improve their own Search.

I’ve had conversations in the past in which I’ve discussed this idea with others. In most of the conversations, though, we focused on an “IA” XML format and not a sitemap, but the basic idea is the same. It is all about exposing structure, not through explicit linking but designer purpose, and all the pitfalls that that entails.

Going further, this is almost like a feed for the permanent content on your site, that grows with time and doesn’t lop off the oldest entries like RSS does. Instead, it keeps the old entries and even gives valuable metadata about them (like when they were last changed). This is interesting to me because we would then have a feed into the latest changes to your site, not just the posts/articles/content published lately (as in RSS). That would let us discover, say, when someone updates an old web page, a feature we don’t don’t currently have.

These ponderings aside, Google freely admits that this may bomb or it may win the day. What do you think?

Update: Dave Winer has an interesting take on the role of RSS in this Gillmor Daily podcast. He says that RSS is very good for news: information that we want to keep up to date with and that changes quickly. He says that most information is not news, and doesn’t change very much. As a result, static information needs a format that is different than RSS, and Dave says that format is OPML, which he created. So, the issue becomes what formats (RSS, OPML, and Google’s SiteMap Protocol) are doing what work, and is the work they’re doing necessary?

I recently got the chance to interview web-maven Molly Holzschlag about web standards. As usual, she cuts right to the issues and addresses real-world problems that teams have had implementing web standards, including the biggest hurdle of them all: workflow. I’m happy that Molly is going to be speaking at our conference again this year (with the CSS-minded Eric Meyer, of course). If you’re familiar with their books, or have seen them at the event in the past, you’ll know that they used to break down the UI Conference web site and then rebuild it with web standards, showing every step of the process. Very interesting and worthwhile, but a tad embarrassing if you’re the developer of the web site like I am. Well, I couldn’t let that go on forever, so we’ve taken steps to make sure that they have to use a different web site for their examples in the future. 😉 They had their fun, though! Needless to say, interviewing Molly is always a delight.

Jeffrey Zeldman celebrates 10 years on the Web. Zeldman was one of the first voices I listened to way back when as I discovered web design. He’s always been a community leader and an outspoken people-first person. As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, he’s always got interesting, thought-provoking things to say. And he’s somehow done it for 10 years. Wow.

I love the fact that blog comments and resulting discussion are often as illuminating as the post they reference. Take Peter Merholz’s reaction to the exact same comment by Dirk Knemeyer on Digital Web that I mentioned in my recent post: Give up Control or You’ll Lose it Forever: Experience Designers Beware – Web 2.0 Interfaces Change Everything.

I think Peter makes some interesting points here, and I’m glad that he’s talking frank about design. He picks up the “control of content” thread that I talked about as well as talking about what he calls “designer arrogance” and a “weakness for styling”. I agree with his comment that this stuff is dealt with by all of us, and I think that without regular introspection we all fall victim to these things now and again. His post reminded me of a call-to-action I made recently concerning articulating and discussing design: The Difficulty with Articulating Design.

Every now and again, when I’m in the middle of creating an interface or writing about them, I wonder: what is the end goal? What is the ultimate reason why we’re creating these things and what would be the ideal interface? Where is all this going, and how will we know when we get there?

The answer, I think, revolves around communication. Obviously, interfaces are used to communicate with. Right now, we’re seeing the transition to Web 2.0, where interfaces are becoming remix hotspots, places where content from multiple stores of information are combined into something new and more useful. But we also have a bunch of personal interfaces such as email, chat, and the telephone.

Taking a bird’s eye view of all this, I think we’ll eventually be just like those aliens in AI, where they communicate by brain power only. In other words, interfaces will be so small and smart that we’ll actually build them right on top of our brains, or around our brains in such a way that we don’t need anything else for input or output but the thoughts that we have. That, I think, is the end goal.

Another movie that shows a glimpse of the evolution toward this is Minority Report. In it, the detectives use this amazing interface that relies on gestures and speech commands for input, and I didn’t really think much of it until I realized that that’s what my touchpad is. No moving parts, just gestures.

And the clincher for me was this article about a paralyzed man who actually sent an email by simply thinking about it.

When Chris Anderson wrote the original Long Tail article I immediately emailed him and told him that I thought it was excellent. My email was probably one sentence long: I just wanted him to know that I dug it. (I don’t think there are enough pats on the back in this world).

Ironically, the Long Tail meme, though popular, is feeling quite a bit of pushback from folks who didn’t glom onto the idea like I did. The complaints usually include a resistance to the quality-popularity relationship. Nobody wants to admit that most popular things are of higher quality.

In his latest post entitled Isn’t the Long Tail Full of Crap? Anderson addresses this concern excellently. He points out that yes, there is a whole bunch of junk out there on the long tail, but there are also a few diamonds in the rough. He also points out that popular things usually are of higher quality, but not necessarily the best quality. This was the light bulb for me, and the first thing that came into my head was Albert Einstein. If we look at the popularity of his papers, they are minimal. The vast majority of people on Earth have never read them, not even one of them. They are so far down on the long tail that I wonder if the number of people who actually read them each year is in the thousands (as opposed to the tens of thousands or millions). In fact, we don’t really even care about them anymore. We only care about the implications of them. The ideas in them, though, have wrought his place in history next to only a few other individuals. But talk about high quality!

Read Anderson’s full post, especially if you’re hesitant about the whole quality/popularity thing. I highly recommend it.

I talked about elevator pitches the other day because it’s important to be able to articulate quickly and convincingly about what you’re doing. Dave Sifry of Technorati gives an elevator pitch for tagging in a recent post:

“So what’s a tag? Simple. It is a simple user-generated category for something. Technorati wasn’t the first to catch onto the idea of tagging – sites like Del.icio.us, Flickr, and Furl were already doing it when we jumped in. Simply put, tags make it easier to self-organize the web.”

I’ve only recently thought about the relationship of tags and categories. If the only difference is that tags are user-generated, then I’m all for it. Makes it easy talk about, at least. I think it is important to note, however, that tagging is done over time, not once in the beginning like many other categorizations are. Read Sifry’s full post.

Via Seth Godin: Fundable is a neat idea, and the best part about their web site is that 10 seconds is long enough to figure out what they do: long enough to know whether or not it’s something you could be interested in.

How many business web sites can claim that? 10 seconds, and people know what we do.

This, to me, is what is lacking on many a web site (even my own). A clear as day description about what you’ll find there.

Add another one to the earlier post: FoundCity. Foundcity lets folks “tag” physical objects in a database and displays the locations of the objects on a Map so that others can find them. Like the others, uses Google Maps.

The number of applications for Google Maps must be astoundingly high. And, since these interfaces are being created by individuals and at such an amazing rate, it must be pretty easy to tie into the API.

First it was Paul Rademacher’s HousingMaps, powered by two APIs from popular sites you may have heard of: Google Maps and Craigslist. When I first saw this interface, I knew that everything had changed…Web 2.0 interfaces were here and getting interesting. (that’s why I was so excited)

Examples of Google Maps Hacks

• HousingMaps
• Google/Yahoo Traffic Maps
• Traffic Monitor
• Cheap Gas
• Chicago Crime Map
• Earthquake Viewer
• Florida Sexual Predators
• Google Maps Plugin for Mac OS X

What I find interesting about these sites is that they are very practical (maybe not the crime one). People are using these open APIs to do really useful things. It’s only a matter of time before someone tries to leverage this type of thing into new business.

How to Hack the Google API

There are several kind folks putting out information about how to do this:

• Joel Webber has an in-depth article explaining how Google Maps Hacks get made.
• Barb Dybwad explains it in this Engadget article
• Google Maps Hacking Wiki

More Google AJAX Tools

• Google AJAXSLT is alive at Sourceforge.net

Also, a nice overview by Daniel Turdiman of Wired can be found here: Hey Google: Map This!. One thing I don’t like about his article is that he keeps referring to these interfaces as “hacks”. They are certainly not hacks (OK, maybe they are)…they’re what APIs are there for, and we’re witnessing the next great stage of interface design happening right now.

Update: [06-03-2005] Marc Hedlund over on O’Reilly Radar adds to this discussion: he was there during a recent Google Factory Tour and the issue of hack/API was brought up. He says that the Google guys “insinuated” that they might be working on an official API.

Update: [06-12-2005] Google Map hacking has hit the mainstream press: Google tinkerers make data come alive