The Power of Imagery

In keeping with the spirit of this blog, and while trying to understand the importance of images versus words in visual design, I took a little journey in search of the perfect site to conduct my own analysis. I started with websites designed by musicians, thinking that there might be more interesting illustrations and visual content in musical sites as compared to say, a government-run website. So, I looked at an artist that I like and found a home site for the artist on My Space

See home page-Wyclef Jean

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Although I liked the subliminal messages implied by the representational use of the Brooklyn Bridge, (Brooklyn = real, gritty, but cool) I wasn't sure if a MySpace account was really authentic web design, so I did a search for the best musical artist website and I found an article Wikipedia article that told me there was a MTV Video Music Award for Best Artist Website design given out only one time, in 1999, to the musical group Red Hot Chili Peppers.

While the present website for the Red Hot Chili Peppers has a very interesting minimalist representational style, using a spotlight that focuses on a roll of film, it uses only three links as navigation to the pages titled: Drive-In, News and Log-In. Although the Drive-In link takes the viewer to a few additional navigational pages, such as the Stadium Arcadium (their 9th album) page, I still didn't feel as if this site provided enough contrast for an interesting analytical exercise.

So, I returned to my original idea for comparison, the government agency website. Admittedly, I had certain assumptions about government-run sites, namely that the text would overpower the visuals and that a greater use of text over visuals = boring website. Sure enough, this assumption proved to be true on the first site I looked at; the IRS home page.

This IRS site is primarily text-based with very little visual content, or useful icons. The navigation was easily accomplished, but the site itself was very tedious to navigate, with the eyes of the viewer having no particular point of focus. Tell the truth - the IRS site makes you want to either escape quickly or go to sleep, right?

So, in search of a better example, I left this site and traveled into outer-space , courtesy of NASA. Wow, what a site! This site has everything - an almost equal blend of representational and informational material, including interactive learning tools, artist's renderings and beautiful photography, videos, charts, iPhone applications, Twitter feeds, and over 40 NASA blogs!

The NASA site has very effective visual imagery, including icons that use the symbols of the actual object to lead to more detail via icon links, such as a shuttle icon that takes you to the history of shuttle mission, information about the shuttles, etc.;

The wayfinding and navigation on this site is probably the most impressive aspect of the NASA design, with a seemingly endless selection of links to NASA information. After spending over one hour on the site, I counted over 500 active pages and icons. I could easily spend an entire day

just exploring this site!

During this process of site analysis, I did learn several new things: some of the content analysis would be obvious to anyone - for example, how the tremendous power of the visual content on the NASA site engages the viewer, and makes you want to continue to explore, in contrast to the IRS site. But other lessons were more intuitively processed: the use of the heavy text without visual leads made the navigation of the IRS site difficult, with no clear wayfinding process illustrated.

The heavy text also made my eyes tire more quickly, and I quickly lost interest in trying to find new pages, as the end result of using this wayfinding felt more like a chore. In contrast, the NASA site did not feel tedious at all; in fact, it felt like an adventure of discovery.The very effective use of the latest technologies made the NASA site appear fresh, but formal, savvy without immaturity. In the NASA site navigation, you almost feel as if you don't need words very much with the representation material, and that the words are being used more as a crutch, but when you get into the informational material, words become more important.

Social Bookmarking

What Is It?

The term, social bookmarking, describes a way of collecting, sharing, organizing, and managing data on the world wide web.

Earlier generations of people created libraries by buying books, keeping or loaning the ones they liked, and organizing their collections by favorite author, topic, etc. These yesteryear book collectors spent a great deal of time and effort locating specific books and manuscripts, and once a unique item was found, it belonged to just the one collector who discovered it. Today’s electronic readers have developed a way to collect useful or desired information contained on websites and have learned how to keep their favorite information sites easily organized through the use of social bookmarking.

Similar to regular internet bookmarking in the way it allows the reader to locate and save interesting sites to their own personal computers, social bookmarking has developed an enhanced way of sharing information with others by allowing the reader to insert unique id tags into all of their searches, and allowing users to organize those searches into collections which can then easily be shared with others. In this way, simply knowing another user’s ID allows access to their collections, which creates a dynamic, ever-evolving pool of data and information.

My Journey

I recently created my own account on Delicious.com, one of the original innovators of social bookmarking, and I was pleasantly surprised by how simple it was to use and how easy it made the process of sharing data files, simply by adding another user to your list. I would like to share some of the things I observed during my Delicious odyssey.




In my virgin foray into the wilds of social bookmarking, I selected sites that are of personal interest to me in the areas of design and communication. (One particularly enjoyable piece of information concerned the difference in trichromates and tetrachromates color detection ability - See 100 Million Colors , and be sure to take the Ishara vision test!). Although the navigation was a bit disorienting at first, I gradually realized that I was trying to find sites that would provide personal illumination, rather than sites that might be of interest to others. In this way, it is easy to see how social bookmarking can serve as personal self-directed study tutorials, although the aspect of sharing is probably the most important quality social bookmarking brings to the table.
and Cons of Social Bookmarking

In my recent bookmarking experience, using Delicious was a positive experience as it allowed me to get a better idea of the popularity of various specialized sites, saved time in bookmarking sites I would like to explore in more detail and gave me a better sense of organization for my saved content.

On the more cautious side, using Delicious, and being aware that others would be able to view my bookmarks created an added awareness of the perceived value of certain of my choices, as I considered the worth of my choices as they might be perceived by others with similar interests. As I navigated the Delicious site and learned more about social bookmarking, I found myself considering the working applications of the idea behind the term folksonomy. Folksonomy, a way of tagging information with a user name or title, is both the blessing and curse of social bookmarking because it gives the user a powerful tool for organizing data without a firm structure or naming classification schema.

In his podcast on Web 2.0 for Designers, educator Ken Ronkowitz compares the folksonomy naming techniques to those used in science, but unlike the scientific principles behind taxonomy classification, folksonomies in social bookmarking have little recognizable guidelines, order or hierarchy, other than that given to each tag by individual users. This contradiction in tagging highlights the need for social bookmarking sites to adopt a modern web version of content tagging similar to the Dewey Decimal System type of classification. This could help reduce the chaos and disorder of misspelled or incompletely labeled information, at the same time that it promotes and enhances a new level of shared group communication.

This brings me to what I consider to be the most exciting aspect of social bookmarking, which is the potential it holds to become a valuable tool in building a "mega-brain" of smart data sources for personal and public use. As new content is created daily by users and added to existing information on the web, special interest groups are developing wholly original repositories of data, a veritable treasure trove of research material, scholarly writings and teachings on a myriad of subjects.

According to some sources, the enormous ancient Egyptian Library of Alexandria , known even today for the valuable contribution it made to the education of the world, grew so large because each visitor to the city was required to surrender any book or manuscript they carried over to the Royal Archives to be copied before they could resume their journey.

Social bookmarking may represent the first foundation stone in a medium that may someday assume the virtual equivalency of the ancient Library of Alexandria, in terms of the wideness of its scope and the influence it may play in the future of the virtual education of its contributors.


Library of Alexandria reproduction

Common Terms in Social Bookmarking

• A structured classification system created by a user or user group.
• A website design that uses a means of organization to manage and control data changes on the web.
• A reciprocal connection between websites.
• Keyword(s) used to that is associated with a given piece of data.
• A term used to describe web applications and sites that enable users to readily share and exchange information on the W3.
  
• Popular Social Bookmarking Sites:

Web 2.0

The Second Wave

Web 2.0 represents a natural evolution in the development of web technologies, a second wave in an ocean of possible usages of communication technologies which began with the creation of the original Web 1.0 format.

Developed by the innovative coming-together of user platforms containing software applications, servers, powerful databases and other tools, Web 1.0 concepts were used to process public content on the World Wide Web. As the Web 1.0 technologies began to gel and include the input of more users, these platforms led to an exceptional way of processing information. Using both recursive loops and uni-directional styles of incremental changes to produce innovative new functions, this incarnation is more popularly known as Web 2.0.

The most intriguing aspect of Web 2.0 technologies, for me, is in its similarity to the neural structures and functioning of the human brain. In the Secret Life of the Brain, scientists describe how the human brain develops neural connections in response to stimuli; the more stimuli it is exposed to, the greater is the degree of neural development. Each neuron uses synaptic links to create millions of other associations which then employ a pruning process that gets rid of infrequently used connections while strengthening the useful links. This very individualized process results in a completely unique communications network in every single human brain. I believe we are in the process of creating a giant unified brain through the constant refinement and creation of web technologies that serve as a trigger stimulus for action and reaction.

Vitamin D Video

As a means of illustrating this idea, I would like to share with you a new software application from Numenta called Vitamin D Video, an application that allows users to track and locate specific people in videos, in much the same way that the human brain is able to perform the exact same task. The website for Vitamin D video states that the software is "based on a new computing paradigm modeled after the human neocortex." As you view the Vitamin D Video demo, imagine how you would look for a friend in a crowded place and try to judge whether you thing the processes are similar.

As we continue this analysis, let's look at Wikipedia, an online encyclopedic compilation of user generated information, where we can see parallels in how the brain develops and then apply that development strategy in our use of Web 2.0. For example, one aspect of learning theory (Bandura's sociocognitive theory) says that people learn through the observation of other’s actions, and in web 1.0 that is basically what we did. We viewed the works of others in a static environment and processed that information, such as our reading of the personal websites of individuals and corporations.

In second part of the Bandura learning process, people take in information, process the information and then develop fresh ideas in response to the new concepts that were created – this is akin to how we now learn by using the interactive features of web technologies, like blogging, social networking and Wikipedia. Web 1.0 began as subject postings on various topics that were created by users, and then these postings were expandec or refined by other users until it has now evolved from a static repository of information into that of a living, ever-changing knowledge base known as Web.2.0.

How do we use Web 2.0?

One general definition of Web 2.0 technologies comes from Harvard professor Andrew McKee and is known by the acronym, SLATES. SLATES stands for: Search, Links, Authorship, Tags, Extension, Signaling, and References.

Using theis template, we can see that the key component used to identify a Web 2.0 site is its interoperability, it interactiveness between the host and the user. Today's wide use of information sharing technologies, such as social networking and video-sharing sites, have made a significant impact on the private lives of users. Once a technology gains popularity from the masses, it soon begins to make inroads into the world of business and I predict, will soon be more strongly felt in the field of education.

As we have seen since the advent of new media technologies, the general pattern of distribution occurs with the production of a product by one innovative person or company; the product is then developed through the interactive uses by the public, and then the product is expanded and promoted by the corporate world to generate profit. Once it has a foothold in the corporate world, the technology or product then tends to find its way into education and government productions.

If we accept as true that humans are flexible living beings who are always involved in a continuous procession of learning, it then follows that web technology is also part of an emergent growth cycle, therefore, Web 2.0 must already be shifting towards a new definition of possibilities.

What do the experts say about the future development of web technologies?

Tim Berners-Lee, the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is credited with describing Web 1.0 as the read-only web, Web 2.0 as the read-write web and Web 3.0 as the read-write-execute web that may come into play in the near future. In this way, Berner-Lee emphasizes the flexibility of web technologies instead of rigid structure, and leads us to understand how the web develops by creating layers of technological advances that build upon the structures already in play.

Technical communications writer and educator Ken Ronkowitz describes Web 2.0 as “what the web is becoming,” a statement that implies the web will continue to change in response to interactive feedback from users and developers. These views support the idea of web development as an evolving, living form of intelligence in the beginning stages of development.

Technical expert and publisher Tim O’Reilly believes that the concept behind the term Web 2.0 represents a “gravitational core” of like ideas and believes that Web 2.0 is still adapting to both internal and external influences. O'Reilly discusses the future of computing as something very different from what we now understand as Web 2.0, by saying "for "Web 3.0" to be meaningful we'll need to see a serious discontinuity from the previous generation of technology." O'Reilly has developed his concept of Web 2.0 to include a "deeper understanding of the dynamics of increasing returns on the web," with the belief that "applications win if they get better the more people use them."