Evan Carroll

An open letter to Web professionals

Many Internet professionals understand semantics and share a dedication to standards-compliant and semantic HTML markup.  But there isn’t a widespread understanding of the Semantic Web amongst professionals.  We, as professionals, think the Semantic Web is related to the semantics we build into our HTML documents.  This is a good start, but it isn’t everything.  Many of us think that the Semantic Web is for academics and isn’t relevant to our work.  As an academic and a professional, I couldn’t disagree more.

The problem is that we are tacticians.  We think in terms of how we can use the available technology to solve business and personal challenges.  We need real examples to help us contextualize the power of the Semantic Web and inspire us to put its technology to work.

At its core the Semantic Web is about transitioning from a web of documents to a web of data.  Data is at the core of every Web site.  It might be meticulously organized in a relational database, or trapped in HTML, with limited machine readability.

As Web professionals, we love data.  The mashups that littered the Web 2.0 landscape are impressive.  They are ahead of their time and as such require many developer hours to create and maintain.  The Semantic Web will enable better, faster and more comprehensive mashups.  This will be possible with common formats (like XML), encoded with rich metadata that uses ontologies (like OWL) to make relationships machine-readable.

The users of Web 3.0 will have unprecedented access to data.  Imagine that you would like to know when you could meet with a friend.  You could go to the Web and query your calendars.  Perhaps you wanted to buy a car.  Imagine a Web where every car buyer and every car seller could connect.  No need to visit multiple sites, because you can query the entire web of data.

But how will this work?  It’s simple, but not easy.  Content creators will post data using RDF (resource description framework).  That will contain metadata that clearly defines the data available and how it relates to other data. Using the metadata defined in the RDF and the relationships regulated by ontologies, users will be able to query the data with a common language (like SPARQL).  And as more data is available, additional applications will be built to help users do this, so that these technical details are transparent to end-users.  The best part is that this won’t require intensive relational databases.  It’s will be possible with flat files, distributed across standard HTTP servers.

For this endeavor to succeed we, as Web professionals, need to embrace Semantic Web technologies and help make this possible.  It’s to our benefit, and it won’t happen without us.

Motivating users with badges

As a UXD and especially one who works for a advertising agency I’m often faced with the challenge of motivating Web site visitors to do something that they ordinarily wouldn’t do. Perhaps its as simple leaving a comment or as significant as spending money, but there’s always a goal. In the business we refer to it as the “call to action.” Recently I have encountered several online services that use badges as a form of motivation. Users earn a badge by completing certain activities and are recognized with a visual element that appears on their profile page.

My badges on Foursquare

One such service, Foursquare, asks mobile Web users to check in whenever they arrive at a new location. Users can choose to alert their friends or even Tweet about their new location. This is one of the many location-based social networking services that are coming into popular use. Foursquare has adopted badges as one way to motivate users to check in. Examples include the “Adventurer” badge for checking in at your 10th unique location or the “Local” badge for your third check in at a particular location. These badges give you nothing more than a visual reward on your profile page. It’s similar to how a Scout earns a badge for completing certain activities. Other sites like StackOverflow have used the badge model to recognize users for good contributions to the site. Here the goal isn’t to increase participation, it’s to increase the quality of participation.

Online forums have used a reputation or karma score for some time now. Unless somebody started using a forum at its inception it quickly becomes more and more difficult to catch up with others. Badges are distinctly different in that they are attainable even by new users. Having badges at multiple levels of difficulty (StackOverflow does this explicitly) allows new users to get into the game and “catch the bug,” if you will. The quest for more badges becomes addicting and their participation frequency increases. I like to refer to this as the “win-all-you-can” principle.

Let’s extend this idea a bit further. I think this can be used outside of social networking and to great effect. What if a corporate intranet was treated like StackOverflow? Users could receive badges for helping with the maintenance of the site. An “Organizer” badge could be rewarded for adding tags to an article or a “Cleanup” badge for flagging out-of-date content. High levels of participation could even be rewarded with monetary compensation. While this sounds a bit hokey, it may be just the thing that brings social participation to typically asocial sites.

So what do you think? Is the stretch too far? How about other ideas for badges outside of the social-networking space? Comment it up, folks.