connecting*the*dots

If you happen to be someone who thinks all this 2.0 hub-bub about social tagging and meta-data is confusing, I’ve found the perfect domain for us to reverse engineer together.

In order to get us on the same page, why don’t you first hop on over to Musicovery — an online radio site with an extremely interesting interface — and play around for a bit (be sure to explore all of the feature found on the controller).

Just don’t forget to come back! I promise that we’ll have some fun and you might even learn some geeky information architecture stuff.

Welcome back.

Okay, so how brilliant was that experience?

I don’t know about you, but discovering music based on my current mood fills a huge void in how I currently listen to music. Before discovering Musicovery, the closest I could come to replicating such a dynamic experience in iTunes was by creating a playlist for a specific genre and shuffling the playback.

And that just doesn’t do it for me. (more on the genesis of genres later)

Essentially, everything that Musicovery is doing is made possible by leveraging the relationships between meta-data applied to discrete information objects. So, are you up for digging further into the underpinnings of this puppy to figure out how it works and possibly come up with a few meta-data driven enhancements to the current user experience?

I’ll take your silence as a yes. Alright, let’s get to it then.

Old School, Structured Meta-Data

Deconstructing music (as an information object) is pretty straight-forward, as each song comes with standardized attributes that neatly fit into industry-wide delivery and marketing mechanisms (which were established well prior to the explosion of the dynamic nature of the web).

Okay, first, let’s list the most commonly exposed and explicit attributes of a song. My top six would be:

• Artist name
• Song Name
• Album name
• Release Date
• Track Length
• Genre

Now, while the first five attributes are all explicitly defined — the artist’s name is the artist’s name, etc. — the sixth attribute (genre) is only explicit when viewed through the lens of the music industry’s nomenclature levers (a song that I consider to be hip-hop, someone else might call rap, while the music industry itself might label it as pop).

By managing the evolution and edification of genre nomenclature, the music industry uses these silos to market acts with a much greater degree of certainty in matching the expectations of the customer because the music industry is creating those very expectations themselves through this process.

Deep, huh?

So back to deconstruction; let’s see how Musicovery is leveraging these primary attributes (if at all):

• Each song displays the artists name
• Album name isn’t exposed
• The controller interface allows the user to narrow results by decade or specific year based on the release date
• Track length isn’t exposed
• Genre is displayed prominently in the controller as the primary filter of returned songs

Two of the six most prominent song attributes aren’t being used, yet there’s a preponderance of controller functionality left to discuss.

Something else is going on.

Meta-Data In The Digital World

The aforementioned attributes of the song object have been around forever; they are the core identifiers for a song and always will be. As I mentioned before, the music industry has become extremely efficient in managing the relationships between these attributes across an expanding universe of songs — it’s their lifeblood. This particular set of meta-data fit the strategy of the analog age of information — where meta-data was constrained to the physical dimensions of the record’s liner notes or the pages of an industry magazine.

Now, in the Information Age, there are truly no limits to the amount or types of meta-data that can be generated; the only limitation — from a practical, business perspective — would be in how these new attributes fit into the domain’s value equation.

So, because the folks behind Musicovery have focused on creating a radio application that exposes music in particular ways (other than shuffled programming or human dj’ing), it’s a solid bet that they’ve expanded upon their meta-data set.

The Nitty-Gritty Attribute Model

In order to return a song by clicking on a specific spot in the mood or dance interfaces, the quadrants need to be explicitly defined to hook up with corresponding attributes applied to songs in the Musicovery universe. So what type of attributes would we need to add to each song? Here’s one approach:

Mood Interface

• Dark to Positive attribute scale (-5,-4,-3,-2,-1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
• Calm to Energetic attribute scale (-5,-4,-3,-2,-1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Dance Interface

• Dance (-) to Dance (+) attribute scale (-5,-4,-3,-2,-1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
• Tempo (-) to Tempo (+) attribute scale (-5-,4,-3,-2,-1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

The range could be much more refined than 11 data points — theoretically, it could be as refined as equating to the number of pixels that reside in the actual interface — but due to the current size of the song universe (it seems limited, as I get repeat results somewhat often) and the already subjective nature of assigning such attributes to songs, this degree of differentiation would probably suffice.

Now, let’s take the mood interface and chop it up along these lines to visualize how each song could be found in this manner:

That’s pretty much it.

So while there are numerous choices one could make in the presentation (depending on the size of the song universe, the visualization would span out to neighboring squares to present a full return, etc.), in order for a song to be accessible by any aspect of the Musicovery interface, each song object would simply need to have the following structured data applied to it:

• Artist name
• Song Name
• Release Date
• Genre
• Dark to Positive attribute scale (-5,-4,-3,-2,-1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
• Calm to Energetic attribute scale (-5,-4,-3,-2,-1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
• Dance (-) to Dance (+) attribute scale (-5,-4,-3,-2,-1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
• Tempo (-) to Tempo (+) attribute scale (-5-,4,-3,-2,-1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
• A Billboard ranking (0,1) in order to display whether the song was a hit or not

Most of these data points could be data entry for a trained monkey, but the scaled meta-data is such a subjective determination that the resulting experience will vary from person to person.

Aside from scouring for top, authoritative talent like Kennedy (eh, for early 90’s music) and pay her thousands upon thousands of dollars to “moodize” and “dancize” each song and then splash her grill on the interface to pimp the brand, what else could we do to improve the resulting experience?

If you know me at all, you know where I’m going with this.

Why have only one person or team from one domain attributing mood or dance settings to all music, when the openness of the web has already proven models for empowering each user with the ability to add their own meta-data to the mix if they should chose to do so?

Open Up The Gates

Way back in the day, Launch.com (now Yahoo! Music) was the king of the internet radio scene. And while I dug being able to subscribe to other user’s services through their social network, my favorite feature, by far, was the ability to rate my music on a 0 (never play again) to 100 scale, in increments of 1.

Sure, maybe 101 levels was over the top, but future playback of my favorite music was amazingly accurate. Now, what if Musicovery allowed this same type of two-way interaction?

Here’s an example scenario:

I just clicked on the mood interface between the energetic and dark nomenclature. The first song that returned was Joe Cocker, With A Little Help From My Friends.

Really? Dark and energetic? I don’t think so. But as it is, I can’t affect the centralized intelligence of Musicovery. I just have to take their recommendations at face value.

Now, what if we were to add user input into the song interface?

Once we added our perspective on mood, the system could return the results to the information object and use the input in two ways.

• The meta-data could be lumped into all user feedback to present a more representative mood interface — the wisdom of the crowd if you will
• It could also be used to present personal mood results, from a toggle setting in the interface

If the song universe was large enough, we could add a similar rating control that Launch employed, so not only would our mood expectations be met, we’d hear our favorite songs more often as well.

Fun stuff.

Can flickr be any more fun without spinning in circles before exploding into fiery, shimmering glitter dust?

For those of you not in the know, geo-tagging is when you apply specific (or general) geographical tags to an object in order to identify its location. flickr has done an amazing job out the gate with this puppy, as the drag and drop interface is so good, so very easy to use.

(click here for a full-sized interface screenshot)

I’ve spent this entire evening digging back through my photostream, eyeballing maps and looking up the addresses of specific places where I took my shots. Some are easy to find (my house, M’Coul’s), while others are a bit of a challenge (wedding pictures, scenic shots), but it’s a fun exercise either way.

My question to Stuart and crew: This is going to become socialized at some point, right? (UPDATE: The map just appeared in my Explore tab! More here.)

I mean, how fresh would it be to be working your map and easily flip from how you’ve experienced a location to how someone else has? Essentially, take the concept behind the tag globe icon and apply it as a metaphor within the map interface, opening it up as another exploration tool? (I realize that I’ve just described a lot of the functionality of Plazes, but it already relies on people uploading geo-specific flickr images of hot-spot locations to their interface… hm, another Yahoo! acquisition, possibly?)

The Business Of Mashups

When I interviewed/presented at A9 last June, they were in the midst of that highly publicized “send a college student around in a van to take pictures of every block of every city” campaign. The idea being that seamless visual context of a business location on a Yellow Page business interface could be both useful and fun.

Well, sure, but the most useful? I approached the interface challenge from a bit of a different angle.

My presentation ended up clashing with what I perceived to be their primary context scenario for the product (people finding particular businesses with city block pictures). I argued instead, focus first and foremost on improving Yellow Pages search results and try to get businesses to “tag” their particular inventories to expose their goods to the A9 engine. Simply put, lead with the most useful user scenario, not with the eye candy of street scenes, which can always come later.

Now, flickr is, and should be, all about enhancing eye candy (finding it, sharing it, etc.); enabling people to find geo-specific businesses that have what they need is someone else’s business model.

See where I’m going with all of this?

Imagine how sick of an API this geo-tagging feature would be for a Yellow Pages product — one completely optimized to the teeth with a killer business tagging interface, providing exponentially more degrees of findability than simply scraping language from the business name, description and reviews found on the business interface itself?

Say a kid, fresh on campus, is looking for a local Chinese food restaurant and stumbles across the smartly exposed collection of quarter-mile range of images on the business interface of a Yellow Pages service. I can imagine the following conversation busting out:

Dude, check this out! ‘Swallow Balls‘ Haha. I’m getting that for Joe, he’s such a ball swallower. Ha! Oh man… they even serve scorpion? Okay, we have no choice, grab your chopsticks, we’re so there!”

Viral goodness of flickr madness; good for you, me and Mr. Chen.

Gnar, dude.

The Consumerist
Ma Bell To Shut Down New Orleans WiFi

One of the surprising acts of compassion and competency that came out of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was that the city began providing a free WiFi service to business owners and residents whose phone service had been wiped out. The 512 kbps service allowed many business owners to begin struggling back to their feet and corporate sponsors like Yahoo and Google were in discussion to expand the service in the coming months.

Well, no longer. Telecommunication lobbyists from Bell South have put the lean on New Orleans, demanding that the free service be outlawed. Apparently, it violates a law that prevents the public sector from competing with the telecommunication sector. By law, then, cities can provide no more than a 128 kbps service to citizens.

“The vendors, the BellSouths of this world, are not only going to force us back, making our existing Wi-Fi illegal, but also they want to close a loophole for emergencies so that we would not do this again,� says Greg Meffert, New Orleans’ chief information officer. But Greg’s no lily-livered pansy. “If I have to go to jail, I guess I will,� he said. “If they really want to play that game, I guess they are right. But we simply cannot turn off these few lifelines we have to our city and businesses.�

[…]

More sources

• FactoryCity - BellSouth to New Orleans: Let Them Eat Cake
• Sploid - Telecoms out to kill NOLA’s free WiFi
• WebProNews - Telecoms Better Keep An Eye On The Big Easy
• Red Herring - WiFi Fight Brews In Big Easy

(via missrogue)

Moderated and kicked-off by Tantek:

Microformats Process:

• Pick a simple problem and define it. No frameworks.
• Document what existing web pages are doing and find patterns for a specific microformat
• Trying not to create standards or formats.
• Brainstorm a set of fields to define microformats
• Post findings, get feedback and iterate.

A Microformats Exercise

• Create your own hCard
• Publish it to your site
• Add a link to hCard examples

Mark Norman Francis, Yahoo! Sr. Developer London, wants to create semantic meaning without the delay of us building the Semantic Web. hReviews will return 7 figures of results in local European searches (for restaurants, films, etc.), while the current Yahoo! film reviews have 4 or 5 figures of results.

Jeremy Keith, web developer, wanted to get his SXSW plans up on his page and add geo-coordinates, so he created a microformat page and mixed it up with the Google map API. I think I speak for all non-developers when I say “holy fuck.”

I copy and pasted my plans into a blog post and manually linked them up from my iCal feeds. Anything more that that would’ve made me nutso. But the point here is the microformats themselves, not this particularly geeky application (Jeremy, you soo outrank my geek factor).

Chris Messina, flock, sees the web as an event stream, a social space and an actual data-storage space. When you build in microformats to search, flock (and outside developers) can leverage “round-trip attention:”

• Blog posts with links to people
• Lists of people and their blogs
• Your contact info and favorites
• Concerts and movies reviews
• Upcoming events

flock can use these semantic information to create relational experiences in results. The more times a flock user comes across markup information about specific people, places, things, etc., flock can capture and present back to the searcher a filtered picture of that person, place, thing, etc.

Q&A

- claimID is gathering individuals publishing service spots and generating centralized hCards.

- Structured Blogging has a Wordpress plugin that supports a ton of microformats

- “Roach Motels are so 1.0″

The reviews are in: We, the people, are in the drivers seat.

Newspapers are already hemoraging readership, as the web has created an extremely rich bazaar, allowing us to shop for unbundled content at every turn, while unbundled advertising models begin to sprout up to support this evolution. Well, get ready for the online replicas of the print world to begin to sweat even more. Following on the heals of the mass appeal of social wisdom sites such as slashdot and digg comes a revolutionary hybrid of mainstream media, citizen journalism and participatory editing: Newsvine.

Taking the aggregation features of a Yahoo! News, the collaborative properties of a digg and the citizen media aspects of blogging, Newsvine is staged to completely redefine the news. Why? Because the common man now has stake in the game.

Old School

Top/down delivery of content, beginning with organized knowledge, is a modern construct. Since the advent of television, these organized silos of knowledge have been optimized over the years for advertising to take advantage of explicit media buys — matching business audience demographics, psychographics and geographics to channeled, programed, bundled content. Great for advertisers and the networks/publications, lousy for the “consumer,” as we end up consuming more messaging and less news or interests which match *our* needs and desires.

These constructed, mechanical relationships define false, explicit edges of our culture, which in turn raises the value proposition of media and news organizations simply by standardizing on such lexicon. This standardization of topical interests — unknowingly bought into by the public as what is *real* — enables a sussinct universe of sales and stories, broadcast on television news and pumped through newspapers, serving as the ying to the entertainment media’s yang.

A metaphor: Is it easier to entertain and pacify a child within a theme park or the natural environment of a forest?

Somewhere between the crafted, paced, 4/4 movement of greased industry palms rubbing against one another, lies our percept of reality, consistently bombarded by messaging and it’s representative experience. So while we struggle with this understanding of our surroundings, back in the news room, editors — the field managers of this construct — find themselves under the thumb of the financial steerings and pressures of this propped reality. Their indoctrinated intuition places reactionary constraints on the types of stories generated, the depth of coverage, even the language the writer chooses to employ.

The innovators and early adopters of the web… we’re basically saying, “Fuck that noise.”

New School

Bottom/up constructs, enabled by the personal publishing revolution, delivered with flexible subscription technology such as RSS, have empowered individuals to publish cheaply within our own crafted domains.

• RSS allows us to digest information passively (in a centralized location), instead of actively (surfing the decentalized web), which greatly increases our level of input and conversely, fine tunes our understanding of the world, which is represented by our output (blogging, conversations, actions, etc.)
• Those of us who publish our own information objects, apply meta-data to increase the potential of findability, both now and in future interfaces
• Many of us participate with folksonomies, helping make our POV of all information semantically rich and contextual to our neighbors interests, our future grandchildern’s recollections of us, even the desires of a family on the other side of the planet
• We create multimedia objects to compete with elite vehicles of capital, and fuel them through the same tactical approaches

This participatory environment is one aspect of the Web 2.0 phrase that gets tossed about. It’s enabling us humans to share our creative impulses with others, helping to constantly define and then redefine the world around us through our personal representations of both explicit and implicit lexicon.

This is an open paradigm, a transparent journey, based in accelerated trust and faith in one another.

So when these two worlds meet — old school vs. new school or modernism vs. post-modernism or proprietary vs. open source — the truth of hierarchy and the truth of individual POV’s collide. Guess what remains?

A truthier truth.

Newsvine has taken a position of mixing mainstream feeds with user submitted, tagged and collaboratively greenlit content. Even more revolutionary, they’re mixing the standardized embedded lexicon of our culture — topical categories — with the co-occurance generated wisdom of the people creating relevant content living within such silos (see below)

The secondary navigation points are all dynamic, altering over time as the co-occurance of tagged objects within a topical category shifts. This is how I think — how I search, discover, build my own archive in this blog — so in and of itself, the concept doesn’t blow me away. What does blow me away is that by simply placing this paradigm next to, say, The New York Times, Yahoo! News, my pseudo-innovative hometown Greensboro News & Record and a blog aggregator like Greensboro101 (disclosure: I’m on the advisory panel), none of these domains can compete if Newsvine gains a participatory, critical mass audience.

Think about it: Newsvine provides AP feeds (like a Yahoo! News), yet allows anyone to seed *any* story, from *any* site (like digging or del.icio.us tagging). Let me try to clearly paint how disruptive of a strategy this is.

• With only the AP feed, Newsvine could potentially evolve to become a successful News aggregator
• The addition of the digg and del.icio.us features completely change the game. Newsvine now becomes populated by the very content from the news sites (New York Times, News & Record, etc.) that it’s competing against for advertising
• The better the content, say, a New York Times produces, the more likely it’ll end up in Newsvine, but with more context (meta-data) and a thriving, participatory readership.
• Content will begin to be valued differently at a New York Times — as prices might become reduced at the domain, while new, shared models will be created at sites like Newsvine. Good for the Times, as they have a new market for revenue, but it will effect their organizational structure. The big advantage for Newsvine: they don’t have to completely readjust due to their recent entry into the arena and their nimble stature (compared to large news organizations)
• Community blog aggregators could possibly fall to the wayside, simply due to the fact that people can seed their own local posts, as well as their neighbors, and leverage unbundled advertising services. The very concept of “community” will be redefined on much more granular levels, moving towards a flickr existence, as explicit tags begin to define groups of interest

The Final Touch

Mike Davidson obviously knows what he has here; not only an opportunity to provide a rich, participatory environment for the redefinition of what news means to us as a collective, a community and as individuals, but this service could very well challenge the embedded constructs of media and the contradictions of Adam Smith capitalism.

Heavy.

In the final analysis, if Newswire succeeds, it’ll be because of the participatory nature of people. So if Davidson really wants to make his mark on this planet, he’ll not only decide to share advertising revenue with the organizations and the content creators themselves, but the swarms of participating editors — editors removed from the burden and balancing act of management, reduced simply to individual citizens focused on making our communities that much more aware, educated and inclusive. If an incentive program can be devised along these lines– some type of a micro-payment structure based on Karma points and click-throughs for both editors *and* authors– he’ll be responsible for creating the Mechanical Turk of the media world.

If he heads in this direction, or others evolve his concept down this line, media as we know it could absolutely cease to exist. Reputable journalists will become more enabled by freelance opportunities, as news organizations will need to drastically reduce their overhead because advertising money won’t be channeled into one out of six corporate funnels.

Then we’ll more easily find the opportunities to 2.0 the hell out of government.

———-

(Big ups to Kent Bye over at The Echo Chamber Project for refueling my tank last night on the way home. 5 hours of ECP podcasts will get you into this type of groove. Go check out his amazing project)

As social tagging begins to catch on beyond the early adopters, content and commerce domains are opening up their information architectures to empower their consumers to tag, creating exponentially greater degrees of faceted, semantic relationships between their information objects.

Amazon is already in the lead to extend this open paradigm into the commerce space with object tagging and Mechanical Turk (a program which could seriously disrupt peasant-class wage pay around the world). Amazon’s past innovation isn’t a guarantee for future success, but their recent moves prove to be a good sign.

How Social Tagging Works

Folksonomies change the dynamics of generating useful index pages by centralizing human perspectives expressed through single or compound descriptive terms into navigable indexes. It’s the equivalent of a dynamic, open-ended thesaurus, eliminating the need to manage the static creation of valued relationships, as co-occurance stitches together threads of information like newly created and evolving synapses in the brain.

The usefulness of these visible, semantic relationships to the person searching for specific content or products is quite possibly the most sticky form of extended discovery not generated through database algorithms.

I mean, forget dropping out of my mental model to browse topical navigation or stopping to search for an explicit term or phrase; when I engage with a domain such as flickr or del.icio.us, my desire to stay within the domain is increased simply because the language I use to define my world through tagging simultaneously allows me to peer into the world of like-minded folk (ergo: folksonomies).

Tagging creates community through the overlap of perspective.

While this extends conversation, it can also impact the sales potential of commerce sites by adding another layer to collaborative filtering, which Amazon has already acknowledged through their advancements in tagging. Now, extend this concept further into the realm of consumer contributions with industry and one can envision the incentive for business to slightly open their gated approach of mass manufacturing in this age of personalization, allowing customers to participate in defining what a company produces by simply tagging their existing objects.

• Tagging builds community
• Tagging increases the findability
• Tagging can give customers a transparent stake in the process of creating services/products/content

Back To The Interface

Try thinking about tagging interfaces on a few distinct levels:

• Interfaces which display common tags from across a particular domain need to be designed to maximize their semantic relationships.
• Object-level interfaces need to be re-crafted to both accommodate the display of previously applied personal tags and tags applied by the community.
• Management screens, which can give ownership of personally applied tags to the people that spend their time generating them, need to be compiled from contributing domains across the web for individuals to manage and, potentially, collect residual dividends related to sales generated from exposed tags.

I recently stumbled across an interesting site that leverages the API of del.icio.us tags. Kevan Davis created extisp.icio.us to scrape user tags and visually represent them using only words or images:

My good friend, DeWitt Clinton, created Delancy, which leverages the open nature of del.icio.us, providing an enhancement with the ability to manage tagged objects by personal click-through popularity:

Kevan’s enhancement focuses on re-presenting information in a way that presents our constantly evolving association with the world outside, while DeWitt’s enhancement focuses on adding feature value, assisting us to quickly find our most used bookmarks.

This type of innovative, open source development reflects the same type of creative energy that non-developers posses — people that are becoming hooked on tagging, hooked on participation.

Sharing Interfaces, Creating A Usable Web 2.0

Now that Silicon Valley is reaping the rewards of innovative open source development—observing hundreds of prototypes across numerous types of applications—how long will it be until these companies begin to act in a similar fashion? Yes, I’m talking about open collaboration.

TypePad enables me to tag my posts by assigning categories, but the management screen is a simple list, one that doesn’t allow me to easily create more manageable sub-categories (I’d probably group my tags by proper names, places, titles, descriptors, etc.). Mena, it’s becoming painful for me to manage my 200+ tags; how about TypePad teaming up with del.icio.us to use their management screen?

del.icio.us does many thing well, including their flexible interface for managing tags by give user created groups of tags nicknames. So simple, but so powerful. Why aren’t domains like TypePad, flickr, Flock, etc. bartering with del.icio.us to leverage this successful interface—one that thousands of early adopters are already using and loving — while providing their own best practice proprietary interfaces or code in return?

This level of collaboration amongst businesses is an example of what would allow companies to focus on developing more focused innovation, enhancing development cycles, reducing resource allocation and most importantly, providing best practice consistency across applications where possible. Toyota recently leased the technology of its Hybrid engines to Ford and other automakers.

How much quicker would a usable and useful Web 2.0 network be created if companies operated in such a manner?

The collective intelligence of humanity seems to be amped to contribute. Are we ready for them?

First off, thanks to the good folks at Adaptive Path for granting me an invite to review the *alpha* version of their first web service, Measure Map. Onto the review…

Usefulness: Interaction Design

Knowing the Adaptive team, I’m sure they did their homework in modeling design personae and context  scenarios to drive their interface, function and behavioral requirements, yet being that this version of Measure Map is an alpha release, it would be a little unfair of me to review the usefulness of the service as if it were completely mature. That being said, here’s my review as a potential design persona, representing an archetypal mix of blogger, designer, marketer and technologist.

Dashboard

Bubbled up to the surface of the service is a default presentation of:

• Number of visitors who have been to my blog today
• Number of links which been used from other sites to navigate to my blog today
• Number of comments left on my blog today
• Number of posts visited today
• Popular posts for today (with an RSS feed for placement on my blog)
• A dedicated messaging area for presenting upcoming features

While the interface satisfies my immediate need for analyzing recent activity when logging into the service—stitching together the decentralized activity of people across the web into a centralized interface for simple digestion—it fails to give me a quick view of who is accessing the blog and where they are traveling within.

My TypePad stats tool may not be chock full of the features found here, but onLoad it does provide me with a display that communicates a narrative of actors and movement. A potential solution would be to display a sliced view of these stats in the lower half of the interface when clicking on an umbrella icon of the large icons at the top of the screen. That would be a smart use of Ajax.

Primary Sections

If Visitors equates with unique visitors, then I’m pretty geeked already. That qualitative recognition is hard to produce, but it seems as though this is what Adaptive has provided, as on they present a percentage statistic of the number of daily visitors who are return users.

The dynamic graph of visitor traffic is extremely useful for a default quick glance of today’s traffic, or by simply pulling on a widget handle, exposing traffic over n period of time. AP also provides a sweet linear navigation devise, which dynamically shifts the traffic view over two week intervals.

Links are broken up into two categories: incoming (including search terms) and outgoing. Incoming links are standard tracks across all services, while outgoing links nicely differentiates from my basic TypePad stat tool. Outgoing links help me understand the movement of my audience, yet for some reason AP decided against displaying movement through internal links. Understanding where people are coming from and what captures their interest to leave my blog is great, but I need to understand how people are moving throughout my own domain.

Typepad produces this stat and I’ve found it very useful. Session interfaces with a cross section of explicit unique entrances, movement and exits might be too much for the free version of this service, but displaying internal links without the stitching would be very useful.

The dynamic graph operates with the same efficiency and usefulness as the previous section.

The Comments interface displays comments left today, with a link to a page displaying comments, and post that "got comments." I don’t understand what the second stat refers to, as my total number of  comments have been tracked and the number here only reflects the test comment I left today.

That being said, the drill-down visitor comment page is a nice quick view of comment activity across my blog. I can only imagine how useful it would be to an owner of a high traffic blog, such as Daily Kos or AMERICAblog.

The dynamic graph operates with the same efficiency and usefulness as the previous sections.

The Posts interface follows the same UI construct of each of the previously mentioned areas. It displays the complete number of posts on the blog, with the number visited today and how the top 10 posts are drawing today (very neat).

The dynamic graph operates with the same efficiency and usefulness as the previous sections.

Secondary Sections

The Browsers page displays stats with browser logos within relatively scaled graphs. Very easy to read and digest. It would be nice to see platforms and resolution stats as well, though.

Stats for the Country of visitor origin are displayed within context a clean world map, with zoom capabilities and rollover country tool tips (a nice feature for a geography refresher, as well as helping bridge global blogging)

The Times that visitors arrived is clearly rendered within a dynamically generated graph, which displays the number of visitors per hour

The usefulness of the overall service is very high, especially for an alpha release. The behavioral and functional foundation is clean, consistent and ready for smart iteration.

Usability:
UI Design | Visual Design | Language| Presentation Layer

The user interface immediately struck me as one with a high degree of clarity, reduced down to a elegant and well structured design. Only primary and secondary colors are used with sprinkled, subtle visual clues, such as the Link area and RSS feeds tying together through the use of orange as a signifier of "connection" or "linking."

Explanatory and functional copy across the service is bold, clearly written and presented with the proper degree of contrast to ensure readability. The Visitor area copy and functionality is a little vague, as it leads me to believe that the number of visitors reflects unique visitors, which would be a great service to provide. I’d only ask AP to reinforce this with more direct copy in the interface if this is actually the case.

Visual displays of quantitative information (previous examples) throughout the service are extremely simple and powerful, both graphically and in terms of pertinent information. The dynamic presentation of graphs and data views doesn’t suffer from latency issues, and the experience is elegant enough to support the future addition of Ajax presentation features when needed. Adaptive did a great job in building this service from the ground up, as each design decision seems extremely well thought out.

How Did Measure Map Measure Up?

Overall, the presentation of Measure Map is a joy of an experience to view, read, manipulate and explore. Bloggers are going to be able to digest this experience with very few usability difficulties. I fall in the advanced camp, so some of my needs aren’t fully supported, but as an alpha release, man, this thing is looking like a home run.

Congrats, Adaptive!

Related reviews:

Flickr & QOOP
Google Reader
Flock
Yahoo! News w/ blog search
A9 Yellow Pages (.ppt | 5.2mb)

UPDATE: Check out some of the other early reviews across the web

Actually, Ofoto was purchased by Kodak a while back, so I guess I’m just being a Web 1.0 romantic. Either way, flickr’s recent announcement of printing capabilities — including partnerships with QOOP (coffee table books and posters), Englaze (photo DVD’s) and Zazzle (customized photo stamps)—just launched them (Yahoo!) straight into the forefront of Web 2.0 business models. The Long Tail possibilities with this service is almost endless.

I had always wondered how an open format like flickr would be able to provide hard prints outside of *your photos* from a legal perspective, but with a simple printing preference setting (the same type of setting you use to make your photos private or public in the first place), to a non-lawyer’s naked eye, it seems like that sticky issue is solved. Of course, you can always still download other people’s “protected” photos, upload them as private images and print them from your set of photos, but that’s true across the web — CafePress provides even more copyright infringement possibilities. I just ran that exact scenario on a photo that I wanted as a poster, but I only did so because it had a “Some Rights Reserved” Creative Commons license attached to it. I’m sure the guy will add a print preference to his images that matches his CC license one of these days.

As for the user experience, the QOOP interface uses interaction elements from both flickr and Yahoo! (great collaboration between teams), making it really easy to use. I had a bit of a problem when I tried to create a poster with multiple images, as the preview seemed to randomly choose which images to use from my selected images, but I’m sure that functionality will be tweaked soon enough as it’s (all together now) in forever beta mode! My only complaint of the service is that the QOOP and flickr logo (above) is automatically appended to the bottom of the poster. Branding an automobile is one thing, branding a poster is a bit tacky.

All in all, it’s some really nice work from Stuart Butterfield and team. I’m eagerly looking forward to more print customization features in the near future.

HearUsNow.org just released a fantastic cartoon/music video to raise awareness about media deregulation and consolidation, which reminded me of a post I dropped inn 2003, a few months after the Iraqi War began, entitled, “Art Prophesying Reality?”

Back then, society (people at parties, the media, popular culture, etc.) seemed more than willing to pigeonhole bloggers as everything from self-indulgent to narcissistic to mindless to geeks. That didn’t slow down the revolution, as many early adopters knew that there was a huge opportunity for blogging to change the way humans communicated between, and learned from one another. There was just no way we could’ve possibly imagined how this ecosystem would come together.

Recently, services such as Technorati, Bloglines, and IceRocket began to make blogs more accessible, with Google Blog Search adding eyeballs and Yahoo! News topping that by presenting blogs at the same level as the MSM as a result of a news query. The blogging ecosystem has finally become more mainstream, extending the reach of blogs beyond the world of early adopters, and providing useful and usable transparency into the mechanics of the inter-connectivity of the muck and mire of human knowledge.

The MSM “Tower of Consolidation” really does have something to worry about, as their ivory tower world is beginning to crumble down around them — whther they want to recognize it or not.

(via Joho the Blog)

UPDATE: It looks like Fox is now trying to force bogus opinion into their local news broadcasts.