The Holistic Web

I’ve been thinking a bit about the pros and cons of using a Taxonomy vs a Folksonomy. For those not up with folksonomies (spelling?) then read this to explain all.

A folksonomy makes a heap of sense on the internet where there is no central governing body, and even if there was, it would probably be widely ignored. However, internally to a company, it’s a different story. Does a folksonomy make sense, or is a taxonomy a better way to go?

So, I came up with this list as I was thinking about it. I’m sure it’s far from complete. Post additions as comments and I’ll update the post as appropriate.

The question I’m really getting to is: can a folksonomy work in a corporate environment? And I’m not talking about at Microsoft where the audience is, on average, more sophisticated than the general public. I’m talking about at any large organisation. My gut reaction says a folksonomy would be a bad way to go, but I can’t seem to come up with the reasons to justify my gut. Would you use a folksonomy for an internal corporate taxonomy?

Well, I don’t post directly about specific projects very often on my blog, but I do sometimes, and this is just such an occasion.

I’ve been working on and off for about 3 or 4 months on a little project that’s just gone live - http://techtalkblogs.com. At the risk of blowing my own trumpet, the idea was mostly mine (in a brain storm session Frank and I had), and I managed the bulk of the project, together with the wonderful Lena & Matt at Wunderman, and Nick from Procuity who did a superb job coding the aggregator under a horrible time line.

There’s a whole lotta stuff that we wanted in there that didn’t make it for various reasons (timelines & budget mostly), and a bunch more ideas we’ve had since playing with it, but maybe we’ll pull some money together for a 2.0.

Get in there, start voting! The more people vote, the better it works.

So we all know, web pages should load fast. It’s web design 101. Make your code lean, your images well compressed, etc. I’m not saying anything new here. In fact it’s one of those maxims that is so well established it’s almost ignored. It’s too simple, it’s too basic, in this world of CRM, search engines, viral marketing, etc, who really spends that much time worrying about something so simple as fast pages. We’re too sophisticated for that. Right?

Well, maybe focussing on fast loading pages has been overlooked a bit. I saw a thread at Webmasterworld entitled Optimized Pageload Time Increased CTR & Income. It’s not an especially well written thread or anything. What it does have is a string of people all saying “we did X to speed up our site (where X was normally changing the hosting environment or location), and revenue increased as a result”. The people are mostly talking about advertising income, but advertising is just one goal of a site. Surely the same principle would apply to lead generation, ecommerce, or whatever else it is your site is trying to achieve.

That thread has caused me to stop and think - is there anything I can do to speed up my sites? Are my hosts good enough? Do I host in the same country as most of my visitors? Is my code optimised? Do I have gzip enabled? (I just turned on gzip for one site this morning). Food for thought, sometimes it’s good not to ignore the basics.

On the surface of it, I’m the sort of person that online sellers of music (iTunes, Napster, etc) dream of.

• I’m a music junkie - I absolutely love music
• My tastes are eclectic and I almost never buy from local CD shops - they don’t have my stuff. A large online shop often does (try finding the latest Animal Collective CD at the local HMV shop, no problem at napster.com)
• I listen to music almost all day, every day, and almost always on a PC, so a digital format is the most convenient for me
• I have a high speed internet connection

A perfect combination, right? Yet, I have never bought any music from any of those sites, and don’t plan to.

DRM is the reason. I don’t get too hung up on the politics of DRM, although there are some very legitimate concerns around restrictions of fair use rights, etc., and those issues definitely need to be thought through. My concern is far more simple and logistical. I simply don’t trust DRM to work.

I have a theory which is completely unproven. My theory is that within 5 years, over half of DRM protected music purchased in the last year will be unplayable. This could be for a number of reasons.

• Some DRM policy was violated (moved computer too many times, etc.)
• Something happened to the certificate to make it unusable
• Files were lost/deleted/corrupted, and there weren’t proper backups
• Something else I haven’t thought of

So, I basically just don’t trust DRMed files. Time may prove me wrong, we’ll see. In the mean time, I’ll stick to either CDs or high bitrate non-DRM file downloads. The latter of course drives me to independent music, which means those most hoping DRM will save them are in fact having the opposite effect. But the death of the record company is another post altogether…

In Australia there seems to be a race on at the moment in the local search space. I know local search has been in the US for a little while now, but there’s been no serious attempts in Australia. http://www.truelocal.com.au seems to be leading the pack, but others are close behind.

What bugs me about local search is it seems to be a technology focussed solution to a much broader problem. Now, don’t get me wrong, local search by itself is kinda cool and mildly useful. But it’s not taking things much further than a yellow pages approach to things - let’s organise stuff in a directory by area. The web can do so much more!

My thoughts are when people are making simple purchases, they are interested primarily in one of 3 things: distance, quality, or price. Local search solves the distance problem only. Quality is best solved by user input. It’s a new way of thinking about things - no one has ever reviewed the local doctor before, and you can be assured that many local doctors won’t be happy about it. Price is shopping comparison sites, much like Froogle and similar sites.

So, why no merge the 3? “Show me the cheapest place to buy a panasonic cordless phone within 10Km of my house”. Or, “show me the best quality plumber in the North Sydney area”. I don’t know about you, but I’d use a service like that!

Complex products are a bit different. I’ve tried to tackle that one personally at my site about Shopping Carts (a little hobby I run in my spare time). Fairly typical of complex products, people are more interested in features, quality or price, distance is less important (obviously a generalisation, but true in many cases).

And I’m not pretending it’s an easy problem to solve. Google seems to have most of the pieces in place, I wonder if they’ll pull it together?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of designers. Over the years I’ve been in the web business, I’ve worked with many designers, written my share of design briefs, and been involved in the normal design interactions that most people in the industry get involved in. I would say in my experience that less seasoned designers tend to focus on prettiness, more experienced ones tend to focus on usability, not that usability & prettiness are always exclusive.

One thing I’ve never heard from a designer (and I’ve worked with some pretty senior people) is about how the design can help improve business performance. I’ve been reading a lot lately about how the design of a landing page can have an enormous impact on the ability of that page to convert visitors to the desired action. That’s well established and proven, there’s no doubt that changing the design can substantially change the conversion rate.

What I have never heard is a designer say “but if we put this content here instead, you’ll get greater conversions”.

So my question is, if design is critical to increase conversions, but designers aren’t doing it, then who should be doing it? There’s a few possible answers I can think of:
1. Designers should be. Maybe there’s a 3rd generation of designers who have moved past usability and onto business performance. That does make a radically different role for the designer, they will need to be far more integrated into the business than before.
2. Conversion specialists. I’ve never heard of these people, but maybe there’s a role for them. Heck, if someone said to me that for $5,000 they could improve the performance of a page by 50%, and I’ve got a $50,000 ad spend driving traffic to the page, it seems like a no-brainer.
3. Producers. The traditional “people who do things that no one else does” of the online world. As everything else falls into their bucket, why not this?

My money is on all 3. The better designers will become more aware of it, but not be specialists in it. Still, a good designer will be able to avoid the worst mistakes. A new class of specialist will emerge, perhaps sitting in the bigger online agencies, or as independent consultants. They’ll work on the big boys, the ones with money to spend to squeeze that extra 5% of performance. And producers, like designers, will pick up the basics.

This all more or less mirrors the growth of search engine optimisation as an industry. Perhaps SEO companies will branch into conversion optimisation? Who knows. It does seem a natural fit.

Still mulling this over in my brain, so let me know if you have any thoughts….