Loosing Site

The following is a comment I left in a SideWiki on Phil Windley’s Technometrica article “Claiming My Right to a Purpose-Centric Web: SideWiki“.  I’m repeating it here as I’m basically quite proud of it. 

I’m intrigued by the question of ownership of engagement and discussion. I’m seeing a lot of successful bloggers expressing a lot of outrage, and yet normally receiving comments is something that bloggers love, excepting spam, unless it’s really good spam.

As I’m typing this I don’t see what I’m doing as a defacement. My comments are clearly divided from your site. They are in a separate part of my user interface that I have chosen to switch on. When I publish they will appear:

- on one of my blogs
- on my Google Profile
- in my FriendFeed stream
- in my Twitter Stream

These are locations where I like the text that I’ve written to appear.

My choice.
My control.
My browser.

Sidewiki is not the first 3rd party technology to enable the annotation of site, and it won’t be the last. It has a high profile and a high distribution because it’s embedded in the Google Toolbar. It’s not unique, but it is a nice implementation that complements traditional threaded comments. You’ll note that this comment is about a highlighted phrase. That’s a very useful feature for those of us who like to fact check, or to limit our expressed opinions to the narrow scope that we’re comfortable with.

I’d really urge your readers to try before condemning.

Tags: Sidewiki, ownership, conversation

In about two weeks time Google will start crawling, indexing, and displaying in search results any Google Apps documents that are published and linked to from a public web site.

In about two weeks we will be launching a change for published docs. The change will allow published docs that are linked to from a public website to be crawled and indexed, which means they can appear in search results you see on Google.com and other search engines. Please note that this only applies to docs which you explicitly publish using the ‘Publish as web page’ or ‘Publish/embed’ option, and which are linked to from a publicly crawled webpage. This doesn’t apply if it’s only set to ‘Allow anyone with the link to view (no sign-in required)’. If you don’t want your published docs to be crawled, then you can un-publish them by doing the following:

Published docs will be crawlable soon – Google Docs Help

This is an excellent opportunity for press releases, reports and presentations to find a wider audience. It’s also means businesses might want to pay more attention to the themes used in their documents, incorporating their own branding elements.

Google Docs Help: Styles In Google Docs – a knol by Google Docs Guide 2 via kwout

Some have expressed concern that private or draft information will now be viewable by the public. Though I’m sure far more are unsurprised by the meaning of the term “publish”.

Tags: Google, apps, docs, publish, search, crawl

It’s really useful when designers describe how their built their sites, especially when the site is for a small business. A beautiful example is the revised Blue Anjou site:

Blue Anjou :: Home via kwout

Dirk has a succinct description of how it was put together over on the Concrete 5 forums.

I finally migrated our site from our ‘old CMS’ to C5. Using a modified version of the Superfish plug and the Image Slider. Also 960 Grid CSS framework.Custom Google Calendar block of my own making which is working pretty well and uses Textile filter to supply links to C5 pages.

concrete5 :: Finally Live on C5

Visually I like the way the home page, though quite dense, fits perfectly with the sites nature. The cork bord theme makes me feel like I’m already inside a friendly relaxed studio. I like the discount voucher top and centre, and the instruction to “Breathe” under the prominent list of today’s classes. Beautiful and usable.

Tags: yogastudio, design, concrete5

I’ve been using Google Fast Flip for a few days now, and quite like it. It’s close to the feel of browsing through a magazine or newspaper, with the eye briefly skimming each article as it comes through.

Google Fast Flip is a web application that lets users discover and share news articles. It combines qualities of print and the Web, with the ability to “flip” through pages online as quickly as flipping through a magazine. It also enables users to follow friends and topics, discover new content and create their own custom magazines around searches.

Features : Google Fast Flip – Google News Help

This works really well with traditional journalistic writing that has an inverted pyramid structure as I can get the gist from the first few paragraphs.  I like the feeling of serendipity encouraged by flicking through articles from different sources that I ordinarily wouldn’t have found – like this article about a Skype lawsuit from the Christian Science Monitor.

I nice to see such a variety of reading tools developing, with Fast Flip, Issuu and Veri exploring richer interfaces and different discovery processes.

Google has launched Sites, a product developed from its 2006 JotSpot acquisition.

Designed for team based site building and collaboration, the application can be used to build intranets, projects spaces, on-line classrooms and generic web sites.

Welcome to Google Sites via kwout

Sites are built from combinations of:

• Web pages with WYSIWYG editing and version control.
• Dashboards composed of collections of gadgets.
• Dated announcements that act as internal blogs.
• File Cabinets used for storing and describing binary files.
• Sortable Lists.

Pages can be enhanced with gadgets that integrate with other Google services:

• Calendars
• Documents
• Picassa web slideshows
• Spreadsheets
• Spreadsheet Forms
• Presentations
• YouTube
• Google Video

Specialised gadgets help with navigation

• Table of Contents
• Recent Posts
• Recent Uploaded Files
• Text Blocks

Any standard gadget from the iGoogle directory can be embedded in a page, as can Google Mashups and bespoke gadgets built on top of the Google Gadget API.

Sites has a small collection of themes. Additional options give a more refined control over backgrounds, logos, color schemes and fonts. The visual appearance will be adequate for many applications, but will not be sufficiently distinctive for sites that require strong branding and highly distinctive visuals.

While Sites is best suited to intranet/workgroup use, the easy integration with other feeds and services makes it a platform worth considering for public facing content driven applications, particularly those that integrate data from a variety of sources.

Official Google Blog: Bringing it all together via kwout

Integrating well with Google Apps for Teams, Google Sites is in direct competition with Microsoft Sharepoint. It again uses a bottom up marketing strategy, allowing workgroups to introduce technical solutions linked via company email addresses.