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Web 2.0 Expo – Best Practices

Just finished my first Workshop at the web2.0 Expo

This will be a quick and dirty post between sessions (and while eating a sandwich)

Web 2.0 Best Practices, authored by Niall Kennedy

Niall’s talk focused on taking the audience though the stages of web development history in order to lay down a path for the future. No matter where your web site is today, the take home from Niall is that you have homework to do. If you have a site that doesn’t have RSS distributing your content out in feeds, you need to start here. If you already have that part in place, your next hurdle is adopting microformats

Microformats is the landing pad for preparing your website for the new semantic movement, likely to be the 3.0 of web 3.0 Microformats lets you tell search engines what your content is meant to be. hCard, hCal, and hReference are all reference implementations of microformats. Using them will improve your search engine results, this is now really now debated much.

Once your site is using Microformats, it is time to extend that content out to large platforms like Google, Facebook, MySpace and others. Widgets allow you to put your content up on sites like Facebook to use their traffic to extend your content’s reach. This is usually done through proxies; your content is updated on their site only as often as your site wants. This limits your traffic burden.

Niall did a very good job with this workshop. It was compelling to see how the decisions of the past can make educated guesses on where we are going in the future. If he’s right, this really isn’t the time to sit on your latest site redesign. If you get out infront of this microformat movement and widget revolution, you can beat your competition to the punch to getting those valuable eyeballs that drive sales in an online world

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Business Video Blogging – Qik

Don’t have time to write a blog? Need something more robust than microblogging? Well if you have a phone (nokia only currently) with a camera, you can capture and stream video from your phone straight to your blog, twitter, facebook, etc. Still in alpha with just a bunch of Nokia phones supported, Qik is already revolutionizing video blogging.

Once you’ve downloaded Qik’s software, you’ll be able to stream and capture video right from your phone or video recorder. You can stream that video to your profile page on Qik’s website, to your blog, Facebook, etc. Qik is still in alpha, so if you have one of the supported phones, they still have to approve your request.

For the business audience, Qik has potential for video blogging and for documenting business processes – without having to invest in expensive video hosting and editing equipment. With the advent of YouTube and the explosion of online video, the Internet audience is not (yet) concerned with quality in picture or editing. A service like Qik could make online video so easy that it may become expected on your website.

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Qik
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Business Knowledge Sharing Community – Diigo

Billed as a research tool and knowledge-sharing community, Diigo (still in beta) has many of the same bookmark-sharing features as Ma.gnolia. You can tag and share your bookmarks with your friends and colleagues, and find new people to connect with in the social network. Unique to Diigo, the ‘People Like Me’ suggests people with similar interests based on tags and bookmarks. Suggesting new people requires enough tags and bookmarks to work. However, importing bookmarks from del.icio.us (281) either did not work with this function or wasn’t enough information for a recommendation. Along with matching tags, connections can be made with others currently online, new to diigo, featured people or searching. Diigo offers browser add-ons to make adding bookmarks, comments, tags, etc. very easy.

Most impressive and innovative is the ability to annotate and highlight content on webpages which will appear the next time you visit the page or when you share these notes with others. This note-sharing functionality makes it possible to use Diigo to share research with colleagues and co-workers, which could be very beneficial in the B2B marketplace. If a webpage is of interest to your coworkers, not only can you bookmark and share it with them, you can highlight specific content and makes notes on the webpage which they can see when they visit. Your coworkers can then make their own notes and highlights, which creates a very powerful shared research environment. (This could also be very useful for web designers who could have their clients markup website designs with changes right on the website – no more faxes and pdfs!)

The layout and design of Diigo is not as polished as Ma.gnolia, but is fairly usable. Editing bookmarks that I imported from del.icio.us took almost 30 seconds to save changes. Using the browser add-on, adding a bookmark did not ask for any tags or descriptions (which del.icio.us does), and sent the bookmark to my unread portion of my profile. This seems strange since I was the one that added the bookmark. One would expect unread bookmarks to come from friends or coworkers.

Overall I think Diigo has some very promising functionality, especially in the annotations and floating sticky notes, but seems to be very slow to use. It is still in beta, so hopefully some of these quirks will be worked out to make it a much more useful tool for business websites.

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Diigo
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