RasterWeb!

I first looked into microformats long ago, and while it looked interesting, I really didn’t do much about it. That’s fixed now…

I’ve added an hCard to the contact page, and the geotagged data on each post is now marked up using the appropriate geo stuff.

It was pretty simple, and I really should have jumped in sooner. Anyway, I think a savvy corporate web designer could easily sneak this stuff into places under the radar, since it’s all under the hood anyway. A little class declaration and bango! You got semantic markup…

In listening to Steve Jobs introduction of Apple’s latest Mac mini with it’s Front Row capabilities,
I heard Steve mention audio, video, and photos. This makes sense, because in this new “digital lifestyle” we are facing a multimedia world, and who cares about text when you can have pictures and sound?

We do… That’s who.

I suppose most people sit in front of the television and don’t want to read. If you put it that way, I’d agree. But what I want – at a minimum – is the metadata. The “info” if you will, as it’s labeled on my Moxi’s remote.

When I first got involved in what was later to be called “podcasting” I think I made a mistake in attempting to force people to subscribe and download without providing a web presence for each bundle of passion. My thoughts at the time were along the lines of “this is how it can work, try it” but I may have fallen short on my thinking.

In contrast, the videobloggers have endless debates about what a defines a videoblog, with most saying it’s video on a blog, with an RSS (with enclosures) feed you can subscribe to, and the normal features of a blog, comments, permalinks, textual descriptions, etc. Right on. (I’ll assume right now that people who do “video podcasting” think somewhat similar thoughts.)

In iTunes most of the metadata, the stuff surrounding a podcast or videoblog post are lost. How do you easily see the tags people used? Get to the permalink? Comment on it? Support the creator with a donation? Luckily, many of these problems are being solved by the new breed of media aggregators like FireAnt and Democracy.

These new aggregators do not just toss the text and present you with audio or video, they make sure that the text (the metadata) is included and presented to you to act upon. Obviously when using Front Row on your TV, following hyperlinks might not be ideal, but seeing the metadata would be, just like I do with the Moxi when I press that “info” button.

Dammit! Let’s not lose that text!

I always enjoy the ramblings of those 37signals folks, even though in the past I’ve often though that many of the things they suggest would not work in the companies that most of us work at. I may have been wrong…

See Getting Real, the book. In the introduction we have this bit:

Getting Real starts with the interface, the real screens that people are going to use. It begins with what the customer actually experiences and builds backwards from there. This lets you get the interface right before you get the software wrong.

Since the last big project I worked on had huge functional specs that were largely ignored, I’m starting to thing that we would have done better with pictures and mockups and actual working pages showing how it should have looked and functioned. Instead what we were left with was a horrible mess of an application that does not work.

The one thing that worries me is that at my last job, we did design the interface first before there was working code, and the results then were not too much better. The developers complained about trying to work the design into their applications. Obviously a team (or person) doing everything, all aspects of design and development can work around this problem. That’s probably the lesson to be learned here.

As a footnote to all of this, you might also see What Corporate Projects Should Learn from Open Source, which is also of value for those of use trying our hardest to work smarter against all odds.