I now have three “primary” computing devices: a MacBook pro, an iPad, and an iPhone. The gap at is immediately apparent to me, and that I think is an interesting opportunity is the disconnect of the user experience moving between each of the devices.

The individual devices have great UX. But as I move from one form factor to another most apps make the UX feel disconnected.

Example: I use an IM application on all devices. But if I start s conversation on my MacBook and then pick up my iPad to go into the living room, or my iPhone to run to the store my conversation is broken. The chat history does not follow me, and even worse, multiple devices will remain logged on so a new IM will register on multiple devices.

I think with all of the new and innovative form factors now finding adoption momentum, there is a good opportunity for frameworks to be built to support the movement of the UX in a seamless way across devices.

Pushing data into the cloud, or having a good sync system is a great start, and I’d love if my various apps had better sync capabilities. But can we sync the UX of applications. Can product developers break out of the paradigm of an application living in a single instance of a process. Can UX be elevated to it’s own entity with app instances being merely a view into the current session.

Should my word processor always start from zero when I open it? Or should it return to it’s previous state? If I’m editing a blog post on my laptop and I decide to move to my iPad, should I dare to expect to continue where I left off seamlessly?

It’s a hard problem to solve from a logic perspective, and its a lot of plumbing to write for app developers. Maybe someone will think through the business rules and create a framework we can all build on.

If you are that person, I’d love to talk with you and support you. What do you all think?

You need information; news, entertainment, research, or something else. Traditional media has become more corporatized and influenced by advertising dollars and politics. The web is following suit with major players bubbling to the top, advertisers directing content, and search empires telling us where to go. Blogs have been touted as the grassroots solution for free and unfiltered information. Is it true?

Unfortunately, I don’t think blogs are as grassroots as we think. The blogosphere is not set up to be egalitarian, it is set up for competition. The blogosphere is a competitive landscape between publishers, viewers, and advertisers. These elements are common with traditional media; media many consider corrupted. And it’s these common elements that will lead to the corruption of the blogosphere. And it’s already begun.

A few of the problems:

• Blog searches use voting systems of pingbacks just like PageRank. These systems cause certain sites to bubble to the top and stay there.
• Pay per post services. These services pay people to write content and to link to other pages.
• Advertisers paying for product reviews. Self explanatory.
• Advertisers driving content, indirectly. Write the correct content, key words and key phrases and you’ll get popular ads on your sites.
• Search Engine Marketing. Again, write the correct key words and key phrases and you’ll get better search engine placement.
• Advertising networks that have sprung up to join blogs under a single banner.

I have been interested in the ideas of User Generated Content recently. Yes, I know it’s a concept that’s been around for a while and it’s being more and more formalized with the Web2.0 “thing.” But, let me try and draw some concepts out of it. Let me know what you think.

There is a scale of user generated content, and where your service is on the scale means different things. Here’s how I think of it.

Contributed content type.On one end of the scale is metadata on the other end is original content.

Metadata is about the categorization and ranking of data. Services like Digg, or StumbleUpon, or del.icio.us. The content is not generated by the community. The community provides metadata around the content such as ranking and categorization. The content being ultimately consumed is not generated by the community, the final consumed content is external to the community. 

On the other side is original content. This includes blogging in all its forms and services like Flickr, YouTube, Craigslist, and Wikipedia. Original content is where the target consumption is generated by the community. Often times, such as the case of YouTube, the community generated content also includes user generated metadata.

Dynamic nature of the content. Content generated by a community can be very dynamic or very static.

Static contentis characterized by content that is generated once and never changed. This includes most type of content that is generated by communities. Ranking systems, photo sharing, and video sharing. The target consumed content is very static, only the metadata is dynamic.

Dynamic contentis characterized by content that is in continual flux. A wiki such as Wikipedia is a great example, where the target consumed data is always changing through community modification. It can change slow or fast, but the target content changes. Potentially, some social networks can fit into this category as the target content to be consumed is a user profile and people are continually updating their profiles with new information and messages.

Governance of content and community.There are two sides to governance and control of a community. On one side is totalitarian, with a strong centralized administrative group. On the other side is community governance.

The overall trend is moving towards community governance. With user reporting systems and the ability to change content at the forefront of many new web applications. There is still a central administrator to most user contributed content web communities and that may never change. Craigslist is a great example of community governance. Even MySpace with the ability to report a message as Spam utilizes community governance.

Direction of communication.It is often said that Web1.0 is a one way conversation and Web2.0 is a two way conversation. User generated content follows a similar concept. With user generated content the conversation is characterized in two ways: One to many or many to many.

With user generated content the community is both the source and the consumer. Either it’s one user providing content to the community or it is a collection of users generating the content for the community. Static content is one to many, dynamic content is many to many.

The world of user generated content is exciting. It decentralizes the generation of content and provides inherent mechanisms for editing and governance. It empowers users to direct their own experiences. It can be the ultimate in democracy of content.

Remember the EFF Blue Ribbon Campaign in the 90’s? Remember the Black World Wide Web protest? I recently stumbled upon the EFF Blue Ribbon Campaign again and found they are active in something very close to us, blogger rights. The EFF is working to bring awareness and I’d like to echo their message. As a blogger or blog reader, you have rights that you should know about and protect.

You can visit the EFF Blue Ribbon Web Sitefor detailed information. As a new blogger and long time blog reader it seems that a lot of the concerns are not yet material. And searching Google I’ve found no real blog rights violations in the US, definitely questionable things in other countries though. But, as with everything regarding civil rights we should be vigilant and pay attention. I think the spirit of the effort is worth supporting. As such this site is now displaying the blue ribbon campaign logo.

If you have any news articles or resources on the topic, please comment and share.

I’ve seen a trend in blogging. To be popular you have to write about popular items with enough meat to inform but short enough to not lose reader attention. You have to post with a medium frequency, enough to stay fresh but not so much as to overwhelm. You have to give a personal touch, but not so much that you lose credibility.

There is a spectrum of published content from micro-blogs, to blogs, to something closer to traditional publications. Let’s look at it graphically.

The spectrum goes from short posts to long posts; less research to more research; less formal to more formal; fast post rates to slow post rates. The sweet spot is right in the middle, it provides valuable and desired information frequently, in a short enough posts that do not deter user attention.

The center of the spectrum is where the popularity lies. It’s what the majority of the blogosphere is and you can see by the top Technorati blogs that it’s the frequently updated popular news blogs that dominate the top rankings. Bloggers who write traditional blog posts (meatier than micro-blogs but less formal than a researched article) gain the highest rankings and most page views.

To be a popular blogger you need to be in the middle of the spectrum. Keep balance… medium length posts, a mix of pop news and insights, clear writing but not stingy, concise but not boring, authoritative yet friendly.

There is a lot of competition in the blogosphere; but maintain a balance by posting original content promoted by pop subjects and you are on the right track.