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Posts Tagged ‘Real-Time Web’

Changing Interactions with News Media – NY Times’ Alexis Lloyd

August 8, 2010 1 comment

An interesting presentation by Alexis Lloyd, Creative Technologist in the NY Times R&D lab, on profound shifts occurring in user interaction and product design in news media.

So what does working in the NY Times R&D Lab entail? Here’s how Lloyd defines its mission:

The R&D Lab was founded about 4 years ago, and our mission is really to look around corners, to foster innovation at the company by researching technology trends and projecting outward anywhere from 18 months to 2-5 years. And we design and prototype ideas for what future interfaces for news media and content might look like.

Cool. The rest of this post highlights key messages from Lloyd’s talk, and is broken down into 5 sections:

Introduction

From Static Publishing to an Interaction paradigm

Lloyd says that if she had to boil her entire presentation down to one sentence, it would probably be this:

The web is shifting from a publishing paradigm to a paradigm of communicating.

And this is having profound effects on the way we understand, experience, and create content.

The old paradigm

First, Lloyd presents the traditional publishing paradigm:

She comments:

In the old paradigm, information was at the center, and people actively seek it out. So you have a website, and people make this pilgrimage to your website to experience your content.

The new paradigm

Then, the new publishing paradigm:

Again from Lloyd:

In the new model, people have shifted to the center of this equation. And more and more often, content and information is getting pushed to them rather than them actively going and seeking it out. Which really changes how they experience it, how they interact with it. And furthermore, those arrows are now moving in two directions a whole lot more. So not only is content being pushed to users, but they’re increasingly broadcasting it and creating their own content and pushing that outward.

This new paradigm (or model) can be described in terms of three profound shifts. They are:

  1. From one (or a few) to many Devices
  2. From a web of pages to a Web of Data
  3. From static web to Real-Time Web

These three shifts are described in the following sections.

Next: Trend #1: From one (or a few) to many Devices

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5

Categories: Future of News Media, Interaction Design Tags: , , , , , , ,

Hyperlocal – Key Technologies

February 14, 2010 3 comments

This is the fourth in a series of posts on key dimensions of Hyperlocal. Other posts in this series are:

In this post we consider key enabling technologies that many of the hyperlocal platforms mentioned in previous posts will leverage.

Key Enabling Technologies

The initial post in this series identified the following key enabling technologies for Hyperlocal solutions:

  1. Identity and Personalization
  2. Social Media/Social Web
  3. Real-time Web
  4. Geolocation
  5. Search
  6. Mobile
  7. Machine Learning
  8. Structured Data/Semantic Web

Let’s explore each in turn.

*** Update January 5 2010 ***

It looks like ReadWriteWeb concurs with my identifiation of key enabling technologies for emerging web-based applications. See ReadWriteWeb’s Top 5 Web Trends of 2009. I think leaving out Geolocation is a fairly important omission on RWW’s part. I didn’t make reference to the Internet of Things in my list, but have referred to Web Meets World (another name for the same thing), and its impact on HyperLocal, in previous posts.
*** End of Update ***

Identity and Personalization

Identity is a key part of any online platform these days. Not only does Identity represent one’s online presence, but it’s the basis for relating to other in the context of one’s social graph.

Chris Messina has some great insights into the emergence of Identity as a platform – here’s video of his Identity is the Platform presentation from October 2009, and the slideshow accompanying his talk.

The two key players positioned to dominate the Identity Platform space are:

Identity forms the foundation by which to deliver and manage personalized content for a user. I’m not going to discuss Personalization strategies in detail here, but ReadWriteWeb has an excellent piece on the topic.

Social Media and Social Web

I’m not sure too much needs to be said here. Obviously, Social Media and Social Networks, or what’s often referred to as the Social Graph, is a key feature of the Web today. If you’re going to host and service a Community on your website, you won’t get very far if you don’t design your website for the social web.

Interestingly, the Identity Platforms mentioned in the previous section – OpenID and Facebook Connect – allows you to import the Social Graph from external platforms into your Community site. Alternatively, you may also want to promote your content on other sites on the Social Web – including Twitter and Facebook.

Another important concept to be aware of in the context of the Web and HyperLocal is that of the Social Object. The Social Object is any piece of Content or information that a community might potentially socialize around. So for example, Twitter posts, news articles, photos, business listings, videos, URLs, movies … all are potential social objects that a community might share and discuss.

Social Media is any form of publishing that facilitaties social collaboration and sharing of information, content, and conversation. Social Networking sites, Blogs, Wikis, Microblogging platforms etc. all fall under this category.

The following are just a few of the more popular platforms on the social web:

It’s important on your website to enable key forms of social behavior, including sharing and bookmarking content, commenting, rating and reviewing, and so on. These are features that any social website should support, and the key community platform players, such as Jive, Pluck, and Lithium all support.

Real-time Web

With the viral adoption of Twitter, the real-time web has really taken off of late. To understand the state of the Real-time Web heading into 2010, see the following:

The Real-time Web can be viewed from a number of different angles. Three are:

Real-time Feeds/Sreams

This is the core of the Real-time Web – the underlying real-time feed protocol. Please see:

Real-time Search

Here, see:

Real-time Geo, or Geo-streams

Here, see:

For more on real-time geo and geolocation trends, see the Geolocation section that follows.

Managing the Real-time Firehose of Information

With the Real-time Web, information bursts furth as a massive stream – or firehose – of information, which is then filtered or consumed according to one’s particular social filters and interests. It can be overwhelming at first, as Nova Spivak discusses here.

Geolocation

… This post is a work-in-progress. Please return later to view the completed post.

glenn

Categories: Geolocation, Hyperlocal, Local, Local Geo, Local Search, Mobile, Real-Time Web, Social Web, Web of Things Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Using Twitter Lists to create Local Real-time News Feeds on your website – from Pat Kitano

January 9, 2010 1 comment

A very nice treatment of using Twitter and Twitter lists to create Local Real-time News Feeds by Pat Kitano at Media Transparent. Here’s the presentation on SlideShare:

Related blog posts from Pat Kitano are:

glenn

Categories: Local News, Real-Time Web Tags: , ,

A Signal – definition in context of Real-Time Web

January 2, 2010 Leave a comment

Definition of a Signal (in the context of the real-time web): A real-time pulse of information that is ideally strongly-typed with embedded semantics.

Many Signals can be aggregated to produce intelligence that, ultimately, a receiving Agent can act upon.

Just musing …

glenn

Categories: Real-Time Web Tags: ,

Real-time Web – CrunchUp Event in November

December 20, 2009 3 comments

Just stumbled across a fantastic gathering of industry luminaries on all things Real-time Web – the Real-time CrunchUp event in November 2009 in San Francisco. Here are a few of my favorite sessions.

From RSS to Realtime, a conversation with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo

Starting off, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington and Steve Gillmor interview Google CEO Dick Costolo:

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Here’s the interview summary on TechCrunch.

Filtering the Real-time Stream – Roundtable

Next, a round table discussion around filtering the real-time stream:

Vodpod videos no longer available.

The panel of heavyweights in this roundtable include:

  • Chris Cox – Facebook, VP of Product
  • Amit Singhal – Google, Google Fellow
  • Loic Le Meur – Seesmic, CEO
  • Edo Segal – Futurity Ventures, investor/entrepreneur
  • Ken Moss – CrowdEye, CEO
  • Lili Cheng – Microsoft, GM of FUSE Labs
  • Bret Taylor – Facebook, VP of Platform
  • Jason Hirschhorn – MySpace, Chief Product Officer
  • Jason Shellen – Thing Labs/Brizzly, CEO
  • Kimbal Musk – OneRiot, CEO
  • Ron Conway – Angel Investor
  • Jason Hirschhorn – MySpace, Chief Product Officer

I thought Chris Cox’s comments on the initial conceiving of Facebook’s Newsfeed was interesting. He said when they started working on Newsfeed:

[We] began with the metaphor of a Newspaper, because it was an attempt to present information from a bunch of different sources in a way that understood from a reader’s perspective what was important and what was interesting … and to imagine if the newspaper were just a stream, and the Sports, and Comics, and Headlines were all inter-mixed and just flowing down.

You kind of know that wouldn’t work. So there’s this balance to strike between the Newspaper which you get everyday, and the flow of everything that’s happening as it’s happening right now.

I find Chris’ comments interesting, as they position the (or a) future of digital news as incorporating a flowing stream of real-time news data, customized to a user’s interest, where one of the signals is the relevance of the content as determined by a user’s social graph. It points the way to potential dramatic changes in the UI for traditional news sites.

Googe Fellow Amit Singhal commented that these are very exciting times in data managing/mining, because the volume of data has exploded with the real-time Stream. Four components that are new in the equation are:

  • the real-time nature of the stream
  • the massively increasing volume of the data
  • the user’s Social Graph
  • geo-location information

Again, here’s TechCrunch’s summary of the discussion.

Geo Streams: We Know Where You Are, Right Now

Finally, a panel discussion on real-time geo.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Again, an awesome panel including:

  • Matt Galligan, co-Founder of SimpleGeo
  • Ryan Sarver, Director of Platform at Twitter
  • Tristan Walker, VP of Business Development at Foursquare
  • Steve Lee, Group Product Manager Google Maps for Mobile and Google Latitude
  • Justin Shaffer, Founder of Hot Potato
  • Elad Gil, CEO of Mixer Labs

Just watching the video now, and will provide some brief comments later. Here’s TechCrunch’s summary of the panel discussion.

glenn

Categories: Real-Time Web Tags: , ,

The Next great media company won’t have a website

October 16, 2009 Leave a comment

A provocative post from Steve Rubel from September 30, 2009 titled The Next Great Media Company won’t have a Website.

Quoting Rubel:

Lately I have noticed that many of the people, blogs, news services and more that I want to track are right inside Facebook. I have even filed them under a list called “feeds.”

This is very convient since their updates are integrated right into my stream right beside the people that I follow – friends, family, coworkers, etc.

This has tremendous potential. Conceivably the next great media company will be all spokes and no hub. It will exist as a constellation of connected apps and widgets that live inside other sites and offer a full experience plus access to your social graph and robust community features. Each of these may interconnect too so that a media company’s community on Facebook can talk to the same on Twitter.

Rubel notes that the New England Patriots have recently established a major presence on Facebook, and the new Fan zone already has over 120,000 followers.

This is all very much in the spirit of the Real Time Web and the growing importance of Activty Streams. For more on these topics, see Chris Messina’s posts here and here.

glenn

Categories: Future of News Media, Social Media Tags: , , , ,

The Real-time Web

August 23, 2009 Leave a comment

With the explosion of interest in Twitter, there’s been a fair amount of buzz about the Real-time Web. Here’s some links of anyone wants to learn more about this topic:

glenn

Categories: Future Web, Real-Time Web Tags: