Shop Local's SmartMedia in Action

Dynamic and interactivity of embeddable widgets has been on the rise in 2007 (expanding on yesterdays (wordy) post). A Spanish firm recently got funding to expand marketing for their banner ads that support full eCommerce experiences -- inventory browsing, shopping carts, shipping info & credit card transactions. (I can't find their name right now, sorry.)
A similar piece of functionality that was out prior to that announcement is ShopLocal's "SmartMedia" product. Here's a video I shot of it in action back in March, as it appeared on USA Today.

You can see how I surf through the published coupon inventory of specific Walgreens, and even navigate to another state.
Especially for sites where users create content by interacting with Internet software (video editing tools, Amazon or OpenList favorites, custom maps now on Google, etc), providing users with their own embeddable extensions of their own content, for placement anywhere they want, is clearly where things are going. Sticking into your MySpace or FaceBook is one option. But look for objects like these on the thousands of rinky-dink websites in the coming year.

Widget Dissected (anatomy of my pages)

A few trends lately have left me queasy with "dissection."

Forget corporate buyouts of the 80's.

A widget is supposed to be a piece of (something) 'independent, with liberty and justice for all.'

For example: weather.

How can you campare the weather.com magnet of 1999 with their Flash maps of today? Yet, one was a widget... Meaning, the first could be stuck on my (crappy) website. The other... couldn't, so why would I care?

Widgets are (increasingly) what's cool: extending your functionality to a guy you met in a bar named "Herb" who has a website...

Dude, I'm on 40,130 websites. I... (convert Farenheit to Celcius, but with a cool green goo thermometer.) My first 10 users lead to 10,000. Who CARES if you know my name? I'm an Ultimate Widget (UW).

As an UW, I don't even need a household URL.

When the guys at my credit union realized who I was, they put me (my widget) on their website. (Look ma - I'm a non-profit!) I jest.

Facebook has 2,500 W's, but my buds in Boulder are UW. (It's a status.)

If the Internet is "access to information," yet UW is "access to engaging functionality," then the Internet is evolving from "a library" toward "My Ace Hardware."

Maybe. You tell me:

...is the WWW (3rd W = web of pages) evolving to the

...WWW (3rd W = widget, where you stick the nutty thing on your homepage, personal page, or public page and it handles each user / friend of mine differently?)

 

As users, I think we're still swimming in the idea.

As publishers, I think we hardly grasp it. (Sure, we use Flickr or YouTube to enhance our blogs... but do we demand 'embedability' from epicurious.com?)

As web pioneers, do we create this for the fray, looking to be the middle men in the distribution of functionality (the way 'web builder tools' unabashadly make publishers out of all our 3rd cousins?).

 

Do each of the top 10 websites unabashedly turn each of us into arbiters of their functionality? Yes, you may have added “Google Search” to your website, or Technorati search to your blog. How about the next 90 of the most popular sites? Can you add a Mercury News feed to your page, or mobile identity?

 

Widgets are a re-think of the Web, emerging.

 

Stay tuned: my next widget will watch Your Guppies (live) in (Oregon) tanks, via live cam, and you can post it to your home page and give away the babies (as social bio widgets). Guppies, reinvented, for the new Internet.

Geo-pulsing: from Digg to my Cannon (sigh)

I posted about the ThisNext & Twittervision “social pulsing” maps before.

Just came across this version of Digg (BitTrees.com/DiggMap), evidentially just somebody’s experiment. Not as good (for various reasons) but it’s exciting to see this format getting more popular. Digg just doesn’t have the same “location” sense. (Who cares if Doug, in NY, just Digged a CNN article.)

After almost a decade of yearning for a GPS-enabled digital camera (photo meta-data has long supported lat-lon) now it’s hard not to imagine a SharpCast map mashup photo-sharing platform with a time- and geo- component. (SharpCast adds invitations, friend list management, and permissions to the standard online photo album & PC-to-PC synching.) Why not browse back through your family’s photos on a map UI (a slideshow for each push-pin), and see your friends’ on the same map (different pin colors)? Imagine filtering for “1999” …and the map?

Guess I should just settle for the GPS-enabled camera, eh? Can an iPhone do that? Maybe someone like ULocate can partner with Cannon Digital, and force it into the geo-jungle.

 

 

Planning a Trip Using... Maplets

There’s a nice post by Thai Tran on Google’s Lat-Lon blog, “Planning a trip using Google Maps.” He features “Prague,” so of course, I read it...

He advocates two mapplets, WikiMapia’s and the hotel search tool (yes, maplet) from Booking.com.

I recommend them both. (Photo above, courtesy of the Booking.com maplet).

Wikimapia’s content is a quintessentially wiki… a bit of a mess, like all things civil but non-corporate.

I was disappointed when Google announced the maplet program, highlighting their “search for movie show times” (near an address) then promptly disabled that maplet. My friends at Google Earth were surprised when I showed them. It was a Moviefone killer, so no surprise I guess. (Now I hate Moviefone – the lesson of the happiness machine, I guess.)

For me, this is another step toward me navigating the world armed with a map and data. Note: those are separate. Maps aren’t the information – they’re the user interface. I need to layer onto the layout different things from moment to moment… (why does everyone have check boxes for “gas stations” but never “WCs?”)

Can’t wait to see every sort of business category, soccer club and historical society under the sun begin promoting their content as map layers (maplets, for the moment).

Tran, let’s meet up in Prague with a “Slavic History” maplet powered by local enthusiasts. (Now that would make a night at a pub.) For now, we’re stuck with Mapy.cz (picture below: the hotel mapped above, appears here, in a map from the 1600’s…). Cheers.

Answer: Freelance Filing Agents

My first start-up ever was a high-tech replacement for a paralegal staff. It went down in spectacular flames, but not before sticking me with a riddle about Internet search that I hadn’t expected. It wasn’t an Internet startup.

Flash forward twelve years, to last week. Google’s move to get Joe Public to help catalogue small businesses (and, pay them $10 per) strikes me as the first potential answer I’ve seen for this riddle.

The start-up was in 1995. Mosaic was out, and “Internet search” was already almost the ubiquitous buzz-term it is today. A techie-minded paralegal I knew had, upon thumbing through the twentieth box of paper files on a legal case, decided to solve this “problem” (career opportunity) with a tool. By harassing various engineer friends, and leasing $300k-worth of equipment, he was able to double-side scan pages (2/sec), OCR the image, build a search engine index, then burn it all onto a CD with the software to do the searches right from the CD. A text search delivered the scanned image. One CD could hold 20 boxes of paper. Any PC you put the CD in would load the software and let you search. And it only involved five disparate software products (OCR was one) and a few months of script writing to get them to (generally) work together.

So, the kink: the legal community was, in 1995, one of the only groups of savvy search tool users. It was called Lexis-Nexus, and it had been around since the 1970’s.

“What if I’m looking for a letter that was written in October of 1987?” An attorney might ask. “How do I set date-range parameters on my search query?”

Answer: You can’t. But it’s BETTER! This is NEWER! It’s like Yahoo (we said in 1996)! It’s a text search.

A Lexis-Nexus subscription cost thousands of dollars – and it needed to, to pay a staff to hand-code 16 fields per document entered (date among them). That required humans.

Paralegals were the in-house equivalent: they read everything, then built up a database of terms referencing each artifact. That wasn’t a Yahoo!, it was a Lexis-Nexus.

We went down in flames, even though every lawyer I pitched it to wouldn’t believe it until they saw it, and then they were gaga. It still didn’t solve their business need.

So, when’s the last time you Googled the oldest ice-cream parlor in Boston? Or for fine dining that’s kid-friendly? How about a florist that’s independently owned and operated?

I’ve watched for twelve years, watched even the yellow pages search paradigm fall short (an exception), and wondered what could ever get us over this hump – how could an Internet search engine support the parameter searches that Lexis-Nexus offered THIRTY years ago?

If Google (or competitor) were to add more fields than “description of products or services” – probably informed by a taxonomy relevant to that type of business – the search experience they powered could evolve.

But it’s the next step that’s more interesting.

What if this model (currently to gather local business info and photos) were extended to all other kinds of information?

1. Google crawls for a base index

2. Human agents (or owner/authors) deepen the info by filling in a form of questions (agents do it for a fee)

3. New search parameter options become possible, tailored to the type of content being searched

I could search for photos of butterflies that live in Brazil (where a butterfly expert paged through photos of “butterflies” and answered “native to”)

…for cocktails first published in Esquire in the ‘40’s.

…for the oldest ice cream parlor in Boston.

Blogging in Education

An amazing teacher I know at PS1 here in Denver is looking at ways of engaging her high school students in thoughtful dialogue – using the Internet.

This teacher already “friends” (and is “friended” by) some students in MySpace, even though it sounds like that site may get blocked this year from their campus.

She also “texts” by cell phone with students. (“For a few of them, that’s the only way they’ll let me know they can’t make it to class…”)

So we were discussing blogs and blogging, and she was thinking about how to get kids to thoughtfully dialogue. It occurred to me that a new tool that emerged from the Boulder-based start-up incubator program Techstars might be exactly what they need: Intense Debate. It allows you to track the comments of registered users across other blogs, and even subscribe to them in RSS.

So, this teacher could have each student blog about the subjects at hand, and also require students to read other students’ blogs and post comments. The teacher could then easily track both what each student (one at a time) has contributed across all the forums, and all the topics. And yes, give them feedback and an evaluation (ie, grade) based on that. Sounds like they’ll probably do it. Pretty neat.

 

 

Pulsing Maps: A New Social Feeling

There’s a ‘social tipping point’ for websites: once we think everyone else is there, we check it out. The result is, of course, that most sites have to fake it until they make it.

I came across a page concept last week that I found addictive as entertainment – maps that show where users are physically, as they do things. It refreshes every ~3 seconds with a new user.

I suspect this concept has a real value. Even after we all get tired of watching, there’s one thing this communicates: people are here, using this, right now. It gives the feeling / illusion of big-time adoption.

As an experience, it’s like sitting in the mall, watching people walk by, seeing what they bought and occasionally asking them – hey, where’d you get that?! What is that? It’s neat!

Yes, it’s a social thing.

ThisNext, an ecommerce website with stylish items, lets you watch what other people are shopping for.

TwitterVision shows you what people are “tweeting” – about half the time in other languages, depending on where the sun is.

PS – I discovered this really cool sink that’s a fish tank watching other people shop – and later, when I went back and viewed it, I noticed someone in Hillsboro, OR had seen me look at it, and they were looking at it.

Embeddable Google Maps

It's getting easier and easier to organize and share information over the Web. (Yeah!)
I took a trip to Prague in July (a beloved city I've returned to more times that you would believe).
Google custom maps are now embeddable (announcement). Here's one I've started sculpting with the details I find myself repeating to friends who go to Prague. Yes, this was where i was vacationing...


View Larger Map

Combine it with a slide show like below, and it's pretty easy to share rich details from something like a vacation.
I haven't uploaded photos from my July trip yet, but i think i might make a Photobucket slideshow, like this:

This was a crazy hail storm we got in Denver, that ended up flooding part of the building I work in. (Nice!)