Mon

Mar 31
2008

Nat Torkington

Nat Torkington

Radar Roundup: Web

  • Active URLs (Ned Batchelder): OmniTI have done something clever with their URLS—turned them into active verbs: their testimonials are at URLs like /helps/ning, their jobs page is at /is/hiring, etc.
  • What's This Fascination with Ad Networks (John Battelle): I had breakfast at ETech with jbat (who runs the Web 2.0 Summit) and got a braindump of his thinking around web-based advertising. His end-game is fantastic: brand marketing as a value-adding interactive experience on the net rather than a proliferation of small text splash. He's beginning to blog his thoughts in the leadup to his conference on Conversational Marketing (as he calls this interactive brand marketing).
  • Debategraph: anyone who has tried to have a conversation online with a lot of people will welcome any attempt to bring order to the chaos. Debategraph is a wiki debate visualization tool with RSS feeds, open modification, and more.
  • In Japan, URLs Are Totally Out (Cabel Sasser): the founder of Panic Software talks about a trip to Japan where he realized nobody gives URLs any more, instead they show the search terms in a searchbox that will give their site. I saw this last year in New Zealand, where an airshow was advertised with huge black and white signs that just read "GOOGLE AIR SHOW". After briefly being confused ("man, is there ANYTHING that Google isn't doing?") I figured it out. Only problems I can see are that you're at the mercy of PageRank or you are committed to outspending whoever else wants to buy that keyword.
  • Mail Trends: utility built for GMail but extended to any IMAP-capable server that lets you graph trends and activity in your email. First step to seeing a mail program that gives us insight into our email. Next step is to have the mail reader use that insight to manage our inbox. Are you listening, Mozilla Messaging? (see also 21 ways to visualize and explore your email inbox which has a high number of spam-related visualizations but is still worth checking out)


tags: link list, web 2.0  | comments: 4   | Sphere It
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Comments: 4

  David Price [03.31.08 07:17 AM]

Hi Nat,

Thanks for thinking about us and linking to us. As well as enabling people to collaboratively map and make sense of individual debates, our goal is to build a global map of semantically interrelated debates as a global creative commons project.

We want to raise the quality and transparency of public debate by making the best arguments on all sides of any complex public issue freely available to all, and continuously open to challenge and improvement by all.

Central to this is Debategraph's ability to handle the multi-dimensional character of real public debate; rather than simply collapsing the intrinsic complexity of public issues into a simplistic, two-dimensional for- and against- structure.

David

  David Ascher [03.31.08 08:04 AM]

Hey Nat, thanks for the pointer. We (Mozilla Messaging) are listening, but have you seen the Seek extension for Thunderbird (http://simile.mit.edu/seek/)? It includes Timeline (from the same SIMILE group at MIT), which is an interesting visualization library meant for the web which Thunderbird can use of course.

  Nat Torkington [03.31.08 01:27 PM]

@David Price: Thanks for the clarification. I have a question: what defines success for such a broad goal? In other words, what lets you know that your software is on the right track vs the wrong track? It seems that your goals at the moment are stated in terms of technology: "it will do this, it will do that" but not in terms of measurable outcomes for debates.

  David Price [03.31.08 06:13 PM]

@Nat Torkington: Thanks it's an excellent question, with a subtle answer and a more straightforward answer. Much like a spreadsheet helps us to make sense of a larger mass of quantitative data than we can easily fix and process in our heads, Debategraph helps us to understand and process complex choices efficiently and effectively in ways that haven't been possible hitherto. With this in mind, the primary indicators of success for us are not the outcomes of debates per se, but improvements in the process of reaching the outcomes. With the underlying perception being, that if we can improve the process by which the choices are made, we will improve our chances of reaching better outcomes.

Many of the potential indicators of success in this regard involve qualitative rather than quantitative judgements; however, if you are looking for a strong quantitative indicator of success, I would suggest that we will see substantially reduced transaction costs in an area of social interaction in which the transaction costs are spectacularly high.

The more straightforward answer -- the one that amalgamates all the qualitative judgements, into a quantitative indicator of success -- is, of course, volume of use. And, in this respect, having launched earlier this month, we are just starting out. The initial signs are propitious though, and, in the sprit of the question, we would welcome further feedback from you and our fellow readers on the places where you sense where we are currently on the right/wrong track.

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