Klemen has done excellent job organizing Slovenian HTML5 and CSS3 meetup that’s going to happen on 29th of October in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
You should attend if you’re into these kind of technologies 😉
Klemen has done excellent job organizing Slovenian HTML5 and CSS3 meetup that’s going to happen on 29th of October in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
You should attend if you’re into these kind of technologies 😉
Image from Flickr
Here are my notes from tonight’s Web Standards Group London Meetup, the topic was Findability.
It’s a big subject, so he’s going to focus mostly on theoretical aspect. The topic of findability has been very well research by Peter Morville (semanticstudios.com) – Ambient Findability book
“Finding†and what it means.
Dictionary:
We’re searching for: physical items. We’re also searching for digital information, mostly knowledge about: oneself, concepts (mining of something), more detailed information (e.g., products), entities in the same society (people, organizations, businesses).
Besides knowledge we’re trying to find opinions also. To validate feelings or judgments, in order to feel more conformable about data; we also search to establish trust relationships; complementary judgments (finding different POV on things).
Definition of information is a complex subject, but authors definition is:
Information is very closely tied to communication.
Examples are memes, pieces of information that are transmitted from one mind to another. Either verbally or physical action. One example of this is “Rick Rollingâ€. If you are able to achieve this, you have “viral marketingâ€.
Multi-agent systems, systems composed of interacting intelligent agents. It’s a domain of AI. There are two types of agents:
Interesting base to study collective environment.
Findability referees to the quality of things we find.
Item level:
Evaluate to what degree a particular object is easy to discover or ..
System level:
How well a psychical or digital environment supports navigation and retrieval
Wayfinding: a complex events of what people to get from one place to go:
5 step process:
How do we make something findable?
Make sure that the item is easy to discover or locate
Have a well organized system which supports easy navigation and retrieval
“In your face†discovery principle; expose the item in places known to be frequented by the target audience. This is a case for advertising and commercial display. Advertisers have to understand how people navigate and use the world in which they live. Contextual example are airport related adds around airports since these are the people who usually drive around.
Hand-guided navigation:
Example: restaurant menus are sorted by the dish types and when you eat it in the process.
Describe and browse:
It’s also possible to mix things up. First example is from Google, direct links to custom web sites and inline search. Search assist for Yahoo proposes stuff to users other interesting things around this term.
Recommendations:
Essentially they are heavily based upon communication between peers..
Web is essentially a giant referral system. Anyone can add signs to entry-doors on your site. But this leads to need for relevancy system; someone seeing the signs don’t really know if that is the best way to go. One solution for this is PageRank, in order to put ranking on links; peer based example is Digg.
Relevance has two ways to measure effectivens the best as possible:
Precisions = (number relevant and retrieved) / Total number retrieve
Recall = (number relevant and retrieved) / total number of relevant
When we talk about relevance, we need to identify the type of search that is being performed by the user:
Content Organization:
It’s increasingly important as the volume of information grows and information is shared. Very good base for search engines.
Measuring Findability on the Web:
Recommendations:
Image from Flickr
Tonight I had a chance to visit Bloggers Delight meetup, sponsored by Berocca – a sort of vitamin tablets. They are trying to get more engaged in “social media” scene. They gave out free samples of their stuff, so while I’ve never heard of their brand I’m going to try it out and maybe this will become my preferred power booster of choice when I’m on not on the continent.
I’ve also met a lot of really interesting people. I’ll write about the ones I have Moo cards of, please correct me in comments if I say something wrong or want me to link somewhere else.
Lisa Lam is blogging at U-Handbag, site that specializes in handbag making supplies.
Julius Solaris is running one of the biggest blogs on Events and how to manage them. This is certainly something I’m interested in since I’m attending lots of events.
Illandancient is blogging about little known bands. Should have something nice and obscure for music lovers out there.
Chris Applegate is one of the masterminds behind the campaign, but also blogs at the qwghlm which seems that’s a lot about social media and UK scene.
Tom Phillips writes lots of cool stuff in his blog, while he’s not working as a real-life journalist.
Cedric Chambaz is “A mountain Dweller in the Thames Valley“, where he writes about cultural differences.
Linda Hartley is a great Flickr enthusiast and runs a number of exciting flickr groups, like classroom displays.
The Londoneer is traveling around the London and country, taking pictures and writing about things he sees. Really exciting blog.
Franco Lebanese is another blog about cultural differences, this time between France and Lebanon.
Xavier was also there, talking about his startup – Commentag – widget to sort discussions on your blog.