Greetings WOW members and Web professionals everywhere. Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute.
Today?’s podcast is a continuation of the media coverage of the Web Design World Conference in Seattle, WA. I had the pleasure to interview Jared Spool, User Interface Engineer at User Interface Engineering. Jared presented on the topic of Web 2.0: The Power-Behind the Hype where he explained the four elements of Web 2.0 complete with the benefits and the potential challenges and pitfalls to be aware of as well.
Check out the four minute interview on the WOW Technology Minute website.
Look for podcast interviews with a host of other notable speakers in the near future including representatives from Adobe, Microsoft, Yahoo and much more.
Today s podcast is sponsored by the Webmaster Survival Guide. Check out all of the great resources and links on the WebmasterSurvivalGuide website.
Transcript of The Power Behind the Jared Spool
BILL CULLIFER: Greetings WOW members and Web Professionals everywhere. Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute, here at Web Design World Seattle at the WOW table top,. With Jared Spool, user interface engineer at User Interface Engineering. The organization?’s been around for a number of years. Jared?’s a practicing professional, he?’s been doing this for a number of years and an expert at a wide variety of topics including the session he provided this morning on the topic of Web 2.0. Good morning Jared and thanks for agreeing to this interview.
JARED SPOOL: Good morning.
BILL: Jared, you had talked about Web 2.0, the benefits of the four components and some of the potential pitfalls of Web 2.0. Can you summarize that session for the listeners and the viewers of this podcast?
JARED: Right. So I talked about, well gee I only took an hour before but I?’ll try and do it shorter, I talked about basically, we consider Web 2.0 to basically be four things– APIs, RSS feeds, tagging, also known as folksonomies, and social networks. And when you combine these four things in interesting ways you get what people would consider to be a Web 2.0 design. And so for example, Flickr has social networks, you have contacts, it has tagging — you can tag pictures and you can find pictures based on the tags that you?’ve created and other people have created –it has an RSS feed for every possible thing that you?’d want to get off of the site, they have a feed for it so you can get it, you don?’t have to go to Flickr to see your pictures or see your friend?’s pictures you can go someplace else, and they have APIs so that developers can create things that actually take advantage of it. For example the folks at MOO added an entire printing capability to Flickr that is new and novel. And the Flickr people probably would have never thought it was a big enough business to justify their resources. But MOO has made an entire business out of that.
BILL: Interesting. And you referred to a couple of pitfalls. I mentioned earlier, for example, the interest I have in the areas of pitfalls of Web 2.0 is that many of the webmasters that I represent, the Web professionals, the subscribers of this podcast, represent business and industry, education, and they have to explain or justify Web 2.0 to their management. Can you address that potential issue?
JARED: Yeah. One of the problems with Web 2.0 is that people ask for it without knowing what they?’re asking for. So that is a key element. They think they?’re asking for wikis and blogs and those are things that were built out of Web 2.0 components, but it?’s the components that they?’re really asking for. So you have to sort of deconstruct and say, “What?’s going to make sense in our application, in our needs?” What you really want to be doing is looking at the experience that you want the user to have, to actually be mapping out what is it that you want users to be able to do that they can?’t do today? Such as be able to find a particular thing on your website because other people have found it first so that?’s what you use tagging for. Maybe they want to know that you?’ve added new stuff to the site, so that?’s what you use RSS feeds for. Maybe they want to be able to manipulate the things on your site, so that?’s what you use APIs for. So what is it that you want, the experience that you?’re looking for? And then you figure out, just like with everything else, what components are going to be the essential components to add into that to make it work.
BILL: Yeah, great. Well said. I?’m curious, you said that you had some free resources available for the world population in terms of your blogs and so forth.
JARED: Yes.
BILL: Can you address that?
JARED: Yes. So on our site, which I?’m desperately hoping is usable, uie.com, we have articles and podcasts ourselves and we have a slew of blog posts and all sorts of things, not just talking about Web 2.0 stuff but anything to do with user experiences and designing for user experiences.
BILL: Excellent. Well thank you so much for that. Great resources Jared and great session by the way. Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW), the WOW Technology Minute on site here at Web Design World Seattle at the WOW table with Jared Spool, principal from UIE.com. Thank you so much for your time today Jared.
JARED: You?’re welcome.