Workshop 2 - Social Computing, Best Practices

By computing, I thought they were to introduce some “algorithms” for computing/collecting users’ online behaviours. However, it turned out to be a general discussion about current status of the web. Maybe I am too much a “practicalist”.

One thing I found I can brag about is that I could finally get ideas on most of the issues being discussed…even though they’re mostly well-known news, the who acquried who with billions stories. Because of that, I didn’t learn a lot new from it, except that YouTube’s copyright headache, (now forwarded to Google), might not be as fatal as I thought. Instead of suing online video sharing services, the media corps. tend to take the advantage to market themselves via these platforms.

After the point I heard this, there was nothing notably important.

Lunch Buffet

There is lunch buffet every day. Some people went there around noon just to get a free lunch. But I don’t like it at all.

Whatelse

There is actually a lot more interesting workshops. There was an all-day long hands-on AJAX tutorial, covered both the basics and Dojo toolkit. However, most workshops were about IBM products/technology/concepts. They had some really nice one-day hands-on tutorials on most IBM software products. The only problems is that when I tried to register, they were full! Hmmm….next time, if ever, I’ll be an early bird.

CASCON 2006 had spanned 4 days of last week and I was able to attend two workshops, out of some dozens.

Like any conferences, I found it not that a fascinating event, but yet there is always something new you would find useful or inspirational to hear about. I did.

Workshop 1 - Writing for the web

The workshop introduced audience some “facts” about online user behaviours and I found those are good matches of myself.

Some examples/facts from the workshop hand-out

Characteristics of Web Readers

• Impatience
• Lack of time and leisure
• Purposefulness/Goal Orientation

Web users like

• Facts
• Well Designed sites

…dislike

• Marketing/overly hyped language
• Scrolling

How user approaches Web pages

1. Flit from page to page, scan for content they found informative
2. Scan in the page for microcontent (headers, titles, linktext, highlights, etc)
3. Users scan in “E”/”F” patterns (focus on first few lines, eyeballing from left to right, then scroll down a bit and scan from left to right again)

A brief note

From these examples, we should have been able to summarize some useful techniques to facilitate readers’ scanning works.
For example I put a section title for each few paragraphs so that readers can briefly get an idea of what I’ve been covered. It’s not 100% effective but it would help.

Why should writers allow users to scan their articles (i.e. allowing users to bypass the “great entry I’ve written”)?

If you don’t provide readers a good scanning mechanism, they will skip the entire entry all together and move along. Again, users are “time-starved” (Gerry McGovern) and would not be loyal to every single entry you wrote.

User can “sniff out” the Scent of Information (Jared Pool)

This is the single most interesting term I’ve heard from the workshop. As user scan, they will stop at certain pages that they think has the “scent” they expected. Then as they drill down into each candidate pages, the pages that have “stronger scents” will be picked. However, if they lose the scent, they will go backwards (or quit).
It’s an abstract analog of how users find their information out of billions of pages, but you know what he is talking about once you hear it.

Some Sources

• K. McCaskill and L. Strbling
• Gerry McGovern
• Jonathan Follett
• Mary Knittl
• Jared Spool
• Jakob Neilson

-End of Part 1-

See the dummy paragraph below. It’s been divided into two columns displayed side-by-side, just like the columns you see on newspapers. One general problem with blog articles is that the lines are too wide in width. Human eyes cannot cover a “screenful” of information, so it’s neccessary to separate an article into approporiate columns. That’s also why you don’t see a page of news without columns on any newspaper or magzine.

Right now I need to specify how should it be divided explicitly when I am composing the entry, because analyzing the post structure, could be really exhausting and before I can prove it could be done in P time, I’d not touch it. God knows where should I set the break mark and it’s not breaking any p elements, lists, specialized divs, so just keep my life easier.

A dummy Paragraph

I am envious

Enough is enough! There’s been quite a lot coverage all over place already so I will not do any redundant work, but to express how envious I am on the $1.65 billion deal.

A growth from literally 0 to $1.65 b in less than a year, what a miracle benefited from the exploding popularity of web2.0, a yet indefinitely defined term. It’s probably not just YouTube team’s success, but some users too. The video uploader and audiances, all contributed in creating this “ridiculously” huge capital with in the period and successfully converted into real value…

What’s the deal?

Google is bidding on future internet video ads, as analyzed by someone I cannot remember exactly who.

Well, I totally agree with the prediction that companies are moving their ads from TV to Internet. I watch TV as frequently as less than 2 hours every week…I am an extreme example but I think more people will become less “real life social” as I am…(while I am trying hard to get out of the Matrix…). I would be glad if someone cares about people like me, and actually tries to market me, even though I will resist ads. XD.

Good deal?

I don’t know. But buying a video database not immediately means a perfect advertising platform. The content is most important. TV companies could respond with putting their broadcastings online and their professional programs would attract most interests and more importantly, copyrighted programs probably cannot survive on YouTube or any other video sharing services any more. YouTube could degrade to a “funny family videos” collection.

Complaints

Ack! Well, maybe I am too shy to SEO my blog entries…don’t wanna stand at the front of search engines.

No! It’s a lie. XD.

Right, I’ve learnt to dynamically load content, even posts, for reasons like minimizing bytes needed to transmit, such and such…then I found myself a victim of that “advantage”/”best practice”…

• First of all, it’s impossible (yet for me) to keep accurate track of page clicks….because all the posts after the first load are via HTTPRequest Object;
• Secondly, because of above, the page is not refreshed, and the permanent links are very rarely activiated…the consequencies are neither visitors can easily bookmark/reference the post, nor search engines would be able to detect permalinks;
• And because of the above two, search engines can only find and index my blog index page, but almost never other pages, so literally I am pruned from search engines….

“…I am pruned from search engines…”

That’s the bloody lesson I’ve learnt from it….but…feeling lazy to rewrite the portion of the code…XD….

O well, maybe…I’ll not experiment abusing new things any more…

Solution?

What might be a solution to satisfy both “SEO-ability” and “Minimized Bytes”?

Dirty and Quick…Cookie all my js, header and footer templates..and on refreshing the page, load cookies to fill the skeleton…

…But I guess I will save the hassle by simply ignoring “minimized bytes” recommandation….how much does it cost to transmit a js file when it’s usually cached by browsers by default…