Automobiles - It's All About the Image

A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after.

- Peter De Vries

For the last 19 years, I've been relegated to mom-mobiles so I could drive around my four kids and their friends. But now that I have two young adult drivers, I found myself looking for a small, fuel-efficient car to do my everyday driving. The question was, what car to get?

I started looking around on the road for cars that I liked. I saw one that had the Kia logo on it, so I went to the Kia website. Turns out the car I saw was the Kia Soul.

When I go to the website, I don't just see a picture of the car. I get a flash "tour" - I can rotate the car to get different views, along with images of the interior and options. The website designers also made sure to include important facts on the image - things to make me keep looking - like the economical base price and the 5 star safety rating. With cars, it's all about image, isn't it? Speaking of image, if I could afford a Mercedes, here's the car I see on their international website.

Nice, huh? Just a little out of my price range, though...

Images, illustrations, symbols - we're surrounded by them every day to the point where we don't even know that we know them. I mean, we all know the automotive manufacturer symbols: Mercedes-Benz, Honda, Subaru, Chevy. They are some of the most recognized symbols in the world.

Let's look at another company that's famous for its look and logo - Apple, Inc. Apple frequently changes their homepage design, but on the day I visited, here's what it looked like.

Pretty striking, huh? It's still got the Apple look and feel - lots of white space, clean, uncluttered. All your navigation is done by clicking on the images on the screen, or by using the unobtrusive menu bar at the top of the page.

They have a link to the popular Mac vs. PC ads, but again, the title is unobtrusive. They offer a video for the iMac, but they don't force you to play it every time you visit the page. So not only is their logo famous, but their look and feel immediately tells you it's Apple, and their navigation is simple and streamlined, using lots of linked images.

Another company that has a famous logo and look and feel is Target. I don't know what it is about Target commercials, but I always know it's for Target even before they display the logo at the end. And it's not that they're always red and white - they're not. It's just something about the images, the music, the whole combination that lets you know it's Target. And of course you don't even have to see the name Target - all you have to see is the famous bullseye at the end and you know you're right.

Social Bookmarking - Building New Networks

Whenever I found out anything remarkable, I have thought it my duty to put down my discovery on paper, so that all ingenious people might be informed thereof.

- Antonie van Leeuwanhoek

What is all the hype about social bookmarking? Is it a new way to find useful information on the web, or is it just another way for people to occupy their time?

Social bookmarking is what sites like del.icio.us and digg.com are all about. The basic principle of social bookmarking is that people mark sites with descriptive tags. But the tags are shared with everyone else who subscribes to the social bookmarking site you are using. So instead of having private bookmarks in your browser, you can share your bookmarks with others. And as more and more people share their bookmarks, we start to develop ratings for information available on the web.

Say you’re feeling a little down and you want to see if there are any funny blogs you can read. You can log into your social bookmarking site and search for the tag “funny”. Now you can choose from one of the blogs other people have found funny, and if you think it’s funny, you can add your own tag, too. What if you have a favorite blog and you want to see what other people think of it? You can search for that blog and see how it’s been tagged, and even add your own tags. Because we the people are doing the tagging, there’s even a new term to describe what is evolving on these social bookmarking sites – “folksonomy” (a combination of folks and taxonomy) describes how the information on the internet is categorized based on what people like you and me think, not based on some expert sitting in a library or lab somewhere.

Some people might feel that social bookmarking is a “disorganized collection of personal preferences,” and to some extent that might be true. As my professor said, someone could tag my blog with the keyword nudity. It would probably get a lot of hits, but those viewers would be pretty disappointed. Similarly, I might find a website really interesting, but no one agrees with me. If that’s the case, my tag will sink to the bottom while more relevant, popular tags gain strength. In that respect, then, social bookmarking can be called a “democratic taxonomy that allows the community to peer review the content of the Web.” The entire concept of folksonomy implies that categories are built on the strength of people’s agreements about classifications. Questionable classifications will disappear under the weight of the classifications that receive support from the most users.

As someone who’s interested in social network analysis, I can see a parallel between networks of people and networks of social bookmarks – social bookmarking tags are creating new networks of information. For example, if a friend of mine tags my blog with keywords such as blog, typography, and feminism, my blog will suddenly get exposure to a whole new group of people: those interested in typography and those interested in feminism. It’s kind of like that “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game – before, my blog was only read by my friends and my professors. Then suddenly its exposed to new audiences because a friend told another friend, and so on, and so on...

Speaking of which, if you want to see my bookmarks, here's a link.

Web 2.0 - Fact or Fad?

The computing field is always in need of new cliches.

- Alan Perlis

There are a lot of companies, websites, and products that are touting themselves as being “Web 2.0.” If you’re like me, you’re not really sure what makes something Web 2.0, so let’s take a look at how some others have defined it.

According to Tim O’Reilly in his article “What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software,” Web 2.0 is a new way of looking at the world-wide web. First, the applications that can be considered Web 2.0 don’t just work over the web, they use the web, so that the web becomes a “platform.” Software doesn’t need to be downloaded, which means that the application can be improved and immediately updated based on user feedback.

Another significant difference in Web 2.0 software is that it relies on its users to provide information. One obvious example of this is Wikipedia, the encyclopedia written and edited entirely by its users. But lots of other Web 2.0 applications use this same principle – think about how Amazon tells you that people who bought what you are buying also bought these other things.

Tim O’Reilly sees the control and presentation of data as a crucial part of any Web 2.0 company. For example, did you know that there were actually a number of companies selling online music prior to Apple’s iTunes? None of them offered the user experience that Apple designed, and that’s why almost everyone uses iTunes.

Those are some of the highlights of Tim O’Reilly’s definition of Web 2.0. Do I agree? Well, mostly. I remember back when I was working at Digital Equipment Corporation (and I know I’m dating myself here), someone said to me that our generation (hers and mine) saw computers as work. We had to be system managers in addition to users - in those days, computers didn’t have nice user interfaces and error recovery procedures. But our kids saw computers as something to use to get a job done. I think the same can be said of Web 2.0. The internet originally started as a file sharing system, and people had to work hard to get it to do anything. Now, we don't look at what the internet does but what we can do with it. And it’s no longer limited to just techies – anyone can have a blog or a web page. Anyone can share photos or opinions. Anyone can publish information (whether it has value or not).

I think one of the most exciting prospects of Web 2.0 is that many sites are actually built using information contributed by individuals, not paid experts or people with a stake in the outcome. Take for example the website ShareTrip. It's built out of individual travel blogs - people who've gone somewhere create a blog of their trip on the site, which you can then review to get information for your own trip. The ability to read real reviews by real people is, as the commercials say, priceless.

Tim O’Reilly's focus when he wrote his article on Web 2.0 was business. But I think Web 2.0 has made its biggest impact on individuals. With Blogger and GoogleSites, just to name a few of the obvious choices, anyone can start a blog or web site. This freedom even filters down into the educational community, where teachers can encourage their students to share their work on Web 2.0 sites. Even this blog was created as part of a class assignment, although it's so much fun that I'll keep it up even after the class is over. And there are even specialized sites out there for sharing educational experiences. Teaching cartoon drawing? You can let your students create comics and share them with other users at Pixton. Want to practice a language? Go to MyHappyPlanet where you can make new friends while you practice.