I’ve loved the internet since my first experience with it back in ‘96 when I was at college and we’d rack up huge bills talking to Canadian’s about the weather over Compuserve at £3 a minute.  The dawn of a new age!  One thing that has struck me since that time is watching the process of ‘old media’ (for want of a better phrase) deal with the freedom that ‘new media’ brings.  Content out there on the internet is freely available and from it’s inception, the pay-per-view model associated with newspapers and magazines wasn’t likely to work…or so the assumption could be made.

I have to admit, most of the news either of current events, tech or entertainment I get now comes from Internet sources.  There are a few destination sites I got to regularly and I skim a load of RSS feeds to pick out interesting bits here and there but I do also subscribe to a couple of magazines and buy the occasional newspaper.  A part of me wonders why.  Is there anything I can only get from having a magazine in print?  Is there anything that I don’t get from te web that I find in the pages of a newspaper?

If the content is reproduced verbatim across media then in my opinion, there’s something wrong, which is perhaps part of the problem during this wayfinding between publishers and online media.  There needs to be a clear value proposition between the delivery methods.  Not all streams are created equally – and they shoudln’t be treated as such.

In my eyes, why not have a full article with great images in print and use the web to have a summarised version perhaps with video or some interactive elements that can work together?  There is clear value between the sources – buy the newspaper and get the full ‘meat’ of the content, or the web for a summary and rich media.  Either one can work on it’s own but together they make a whole.

Bringing in commenting and interactivity around a web version of printed assets extends the life of event images from a printed piece.  Does that mean there needs to be some tagging system for all printed content?  Perhaps, or maybe referring to the issue, page and some identifyer is enough?

The interesting blend may be with ePaper – imagine down the line a bit where flexible, colour ePaper displays become somewhat normal to see around.  This mimics the printed world in principle but would devices such as these offer a real blend not only between methods of supplying content but also in terms of charging for content.  If we’re now happy to pay for digital music now that the supply has been made convenient for people, would the same work for newspapers of magazines?

(check out the durability of these displays: http://www.epapercentral.com/hp-debuts-new-paper-thin-plastic-display.htm)

So yesterday was my first proper speaking engagement, down in Bristol at the Web Developers Conference.  I was lucky enough to be on a panel there last year and was very fortunate to return with my own slot this time around.  Like anything new, getting out of your comfort zone, it was a little daunting.  I’ve done a load of BarCamp sessions before – some planned with slides and others made up on the spot but never anything of this length and to more than 20 people.

Part of the realisation of what I’d committed to was that I’d be sharing the stage with the likes of Jon Hicks, Sarah Parmenter and Elliot Jay Stocks – all well known and amazing designers.  Not really calling myself a designer (as I guess I’ve far more of a history in front and back-end development), I went for hand drawn slides which I think turned out OK with a flick-book-esque spider running across the bottom.  I normally rant/ramble about stuff I either know about or have passion for so it was a new experience trying to give that some kind of a narrative and actually make a point!

The Talk

So what I got together was a different approach to workflow – labeling a group of existing disciplines and ones not currently considered widely as a stage about context.  This basically means that before design or development, looking through these and seeing how they can apply to the content the site or service will be generating.  This includes elements most/all of us would do anyway, like considering who your audience are, language/localisation, etc and also ensuring accessibility is included at this embryonic stage.  Bring into the mix how relevant location is (both of the visitor and of the location of the producers of the content or those cited within), time, device used (not just desktop or mobile – considering the dearth of web accessible devices we’re now using) and most importantly – how does your content work outside of the framing your design provides?

Strong design works with the content, whatever that may be, and can lift otherwise templated, formulaic sites to a new level working with the content (I was another one to give a nod to Jason Santa Maria’s site) but we need to do this while understanding how our content is consumed, through RSS feeds, in aggregators or shared through Twitter, Facebook and the like.  This comes down to the importance of copy to some degree.

I also feel that we need to look more about the importance and relevance of meta data and show it up on screen, so I used examples of the meta information The Guardian uses, which in their case is the names and locations of the journalists (linked to each journalists space within the site) and an article history, the way Flickr scrapes out the EXIF and IPTC data from jpegs to gleam the device used, the location of the image was taken (should the device record that) and of course when it was taken.  I also showed Yahoo!’s Search Monkey to demonstrate part of the solutions around understanding context.

In my eyes, content (meaning the focus of a site – related text, images, video, audio) has implicit contexts that we as humans can interpret and a few that we choose to explain explicitly, which also enables computers and therefore search engines to interpret what these things mean or relate to.  Through semantic web type technologies we’re looking at unlocking these implicit contexts and to have machines look somehow take these and weave the web closer together.  Almost the flip-side of this are ideas coming from microformats and RDFa, which enable to to explicitly mark-up these hidden contexts and make them machine readable.  By verbosely describing what can be found within our content opens up more possibilities for how it can be used.

Perhaps by looking at which contexts, from a large collection, might be relevant to what we’re creating, this might allow us to add new dimensions to what we create and to maybe take our conventional ideas in very different directions.  An example may be that a local news site may actually try to do more around location and perhaps look at the location of their visitors and welcome them in an appropriate way – there may be different needs from people viewing within their area to those from outside.  By considering how these contexts could be relevant to what a site produces, we could be pushing our presentation and technology and informing our design decisions.

Digesting it all…

There were certainly times before hand where I was nervous as hell about the idea of doing something like this but all things considered, it was a fantastic experience.  The other speakers were all really good people and very friendly and welcoming.  Although I was pretty much shaking on stage, I managed to get through my session and actually got some good feedback from members of the audience.  So I certainly appreciate Alex giving me the slot and the support I had.  I’m definitely up for more of this and can see how it contrasts with my experience of BarCamps and the like.  Now I know what to expect I can work on the nerves and round off some of the rough edges I still have…

I hold my hands up and admit I’ve not updated this blog in a while.  There are good reasons however!  First of all, there’s the balance between micro-blogging through Twiter and a conventional blog – I’ve been avidly updating through Twitter and not taking the time to actually write full blog posts abotu many of the ideas and issues I’ve meant to.

Another great reason is the change in my job.  I’ve recently gone full-time freelance, which has already been a rollercoaster ride!  I foolishly though that starting out, I would have the time to turn this site into something more representative of who and what I am at the moment.  While I’ve been through many design iterations for my branding and design, I’ve yet to book time into my schedule for my own site.  I can’t complain about being busy though!

Shortly I’ll be taking the whole site down and slowly build up the new one in phases.  There’s a few interesting ideas I’d like to demo with it…

I’ve been booked to talk at the Web Developers Conference down in Bristol later in the year with the likes of Elliot Jay Stocks, Jon Hicks and Sarah Parmenter after last year being on a panel.  Really looking forward to it, especially in such illustrious company!

In the meantime, if you’d like to get in touch, please drop me a line at dan [at] hereinthehive.com  or follow me on Twitter as @hereinthehive