HTML 5: Less, Yet So Much More

With Google I/O in full swing yesterday, one thing is apparent: we are on the cusp of a new HTML standard. It's slated to be a really versatile and shiny standard. It's a standard that promises to work for, and not against developers. It's been a long time coming, but for the first time in the standard's history, it's also being developed in conjunction with XHTML 5.

Ian Hickson and David Hyatt, from Google and Apple respectively (yet another loose link for internet-company-synergy-conspiracy theorists to look into) are the final say for the standard have the first say, whose first working draft was released on January 22 of last year. As with any massive implementation or change to a standard that drives thousands of internet technologies and just about any content that touches the public internet, developers expect this doc to be a work-in-progress for years to come.

In the meantime, there will be gradual rollouts of new/revised standard's features, including (and in no way limited to):

• <audio></audio>
• <video></video> (think YouTube, sans plug-ins…)
• Drag-and-Drop API
• Browsing History API
• <canvas></canvas> (Dynamic, scripted rendering of bitmaps – 2D drawing for the win)

Just that shortlist is enough to peak my interest, as PHP, JavaScript, Flash, etc. are currently deployed for handling those types of content. A major goal of the changes was to make it easier for HTML to natively interact with other third party APIs – and since it's being designed/edited by someone who works for the publisher of just about every useful API that I use in my day to day life (maps, docs, mail…) – I think there's enough evidence to say that this implementation of HTML might finally get it. I haven't been this excited about HTML since Lissa explained it all.

 EDIT: Thanks to Ian Hickson for correcting me. As an editor for the standard, they have the first say, but the overall development team can override these choices.

How the Pickens Plan Recruited 1.5 Million Volunteers in Nine Months

Along with Heather Lauer of Tribe Effect, I will be participating in a Personal Democracy Forum conference call this Thursday (May 28) from 1-2 pm EST on the topic of “How the Pickens Plan Recruited 1.5 Million Volunteers in Nine Months.”  The call is open to all members of the PDF Network, and you can RSVP here.  Below is a summary of the talk from the PDF website.  I’m looking forward to sharing some of our lessons learned and I hope everyone can participate!

Since its launch in July 2008, the Pickens Plan, a blueprint to reduce America’s foreign oil dependence, has recruited 1.5 million online supporters, built a 200,000 person strong social network (push.pickensplan.com) and produced over 1.1 million emails to Congress and the administration. The campaign won Campaign & Elections’ Reed Award for “Best Use of Social Networking Technology” and the AAPC’s Pollie Award for “Public Affairs Campaign of the Year.”

This Thursday, the team behind the Pickens Plan online program will share detailed insights of how they did it. From 1-2pm EST on May 28th, internet strategy consultants Todd Ziegler of The Bivings Group and Heather Lauer of Tribe Effect LLC will discuss “How the Pickens Plan Recruited 1.5 Million Volunteers in Nine Months.”

To join the call (and get the opportunity to pose your questions directly to Todd and Heather), you’ll need to join the PdF Network.

Once you’ve signed up, you’ll be able to RSVP for this and any of our other upcoming calls with such experts in the tech and politics space as Amanda Rose (Twestival), Eric Frenchman (McCain campaign), Steve Grove (YouTube) and many more.

Oh, and if you’re coming to the PdF Conference in June, your PdF Network membership is included in your registration.

Conference Attendance Optimization

I was in Las Vegas last week to participate in an ACG Intergrowth panel about how the rise of the social web is changing the way we network.  David Teten, the author of the book the Virtual Handshake and CEO of Teten Advisors, was one of my fellow panelists and also a featured speaker at the conference.  In the talk he gave, David introduced me to a concept he calls Conference Attendance Optimization, which is his process for making sure he gets the most possible ROI out of the conference he goes to.

After selecting the conference you want to attend, David suggests getting a list of conference attendees in advance.  If you can’t get a full list, I’d suggest putting together your own list of probable attendees by going through the speaker and sponsor list and making some educated guesses based on previous conferences. Once you have the list, go through it and identify the people you want to meet.  Then get in touch with the folks you are targeting in advance of the conference to arrange a short (15 minute) meeting during breaks or after hours.  This process will help ensure you meet everyone you want to at the conference and maximize your time at the event.

After the conference is over, David suggests sending follow up emails to the folks you meet as a way of keeping in touch and continuing the conversation.  David is also a big proponent of executives and companies methodically maintaining contact databases of the people in their network.

I think David provides a very useful framework for planning your conference attendance.  I think it also scales well based on your personality, function in your company and appetite for networking.  An employee whose primary function is sales might schedule 20 meetings with potential customers.  A graphic designer attending an educational conference might only target two to three industry leaders whose brain they want to pick.  In putting together my personal list as a sort of jack of all trades type, I’d focus on reconnecting with people I haven’t seen in a while and on meeting people in person who I’ve only met virtually (there are a ton of them).

How you optimize your attendance is really up to you.  The important point here is to develop an actual strategy in advance that ensures you are getting the most out of the conferences you attend.

Do you have any conference attendance tricks of your own?

Wolfram Alpha is intriguing, but will people use it?

The much hyped “computational knowledge engine” Wolfram Alpha launched over the weekend to what can only be described as a mixed reaction.  I played with it for a few hours and came away with two primary thoughts:

1. Wolfram Alpha is something completely new, and that is fascinating.
2. Everything about Wolfram Alpha is going to be compared to Google, and the engine will suffer due to the comparison.

And now for something totally different.

Wikipedia has been around forever, but I still occasionally go on Wikipedia binges where I’ll search for something and then end up following various links and learning lots of things I didn’t intend to.  Wolfram Alpha inspires similar explorations.  Starting from the examples page, here is a list of some random things I learned about as a way of showing what the engine is like:

• AIDS deaths in Africa
• Largest countries by population
• Stats about my birth day
• Weather forecast for today in Washington and the weather in 1995
• The current time in London
• The distance from San Antonio, TX to Washington, DC
• Current exchange rate between dollars and pesos

Pretty cool, huh? I love Wolfram Alpha’s user interface, with its focus on visual search results.  And I love the way it encourages you to explore.

Will people use it?

While I find Wolfram Alpha fascinating, there are certainly idiosyncrasies.  You will simply not get results for a great many of your searches and you will run into strange results at times.   The site is clearly not yet a finished product, and this will frustrate some.

But I think the biggest challenge is the point of reference many users will bring when using the new engine.  Most of the reviews I read focused on comparing Wolfram Alpha to Google, and found it lacking.  Indeed, it seems that the first thing a lot of people did when playing with Wolfram Alpha was search for their own name, which isn’t really the point of the tool.  Fast Company sums up the problem pretty well in its article titled “Wolfram Alpha Isn’t Google, so Stop Comparing Them.”

Unfortunately, this is easier said than done.  Google is so dominant in the search space that a service interruption recently caused a 5% drop in overall Internet traffic.  Most of us have used Google so often for so long that if you put a search box in front of us and ask us to type something, we can’t help but compare the results we get to Google.  Google is our defining search experience.

In my mind, Wolfram Alpha isn’t really a Google competitor, any more than Wikipedia is.  I see it as something totally new, that can enrich my search experience when used as a complement to my daily Google use.  This shouldn’t be seen as Wolfram Alpha vs. Google, as I don’t see it as a zero sum game.  Unfortunately, I think most others do see it as an either/or proposition, in which case it is going to be difficult for Wolfram Alpha to truly catch on among general users.

What do you think?

Protecting The AP’s Intellectual Property

Back in January I started the Master of Information Management program at the University of Maryland, and one of my classes this semester was about information policy. One of the main assignments was to write an issue brief about a contemporary topic, and my classmate Ryan Sydlik and I focused on the new Associated Press initiative, launched in April this year, to better protect its intellectual property from online content scrapers.

Our AP Intellectual Property brief (click to access the report) is posted in The Bivings Group research section where we post our other research. This brief compliments our studies about how the news media uses the Internet.

In our brief we discuss:

• the tactics that the AP has announced it will use to protect its intellectual property,
• how companies like Google and Yahoo! fit into this controversy,
• how the current economic downturn has exacerbated the needs for news organizations to protect their intellectual property,
• the importance of "The Link Economy" that the AP is taking a risk of upsetting, and
• how fair use and DMCA notices might play into the AP's legal strategy.