The time it takes to follow and go through multiple web sites and blogs takes tangible time, and since most sources publish or give coverage to more than one topic, one gets to browse and scan through lots of useless content just for the sake of finding what is relevant to his specific interest. Even in the case of power-users utilizing RSS feed readers, aggregators and filters, the amount of junk we have to sift through daily is nothing but impressive, so much so, that those who have enough time and skills to pick the gems from that ocean of tweets, social media posts and blog posts, enjoy a fast increasing reputation and visibility online.

Photo credit: dsharpie and franckreporter mashed up by Robin Good

Real-time news curation, or what I call “newsmastering“, is the art of finding, aggregating, filtering, selecting, curating and republishing high-quality news stories on a very specific theme, topic, or for a particular audience interest, problem, passion.

It grows out of the need to make sense of this very need to filter and make sense of the enormous amount of information that is available out there and that keeps increasing by the hour.

Real-time news curation, is also an emerging, new online professional role, the news curator, or newsmaster in sorting, editing, enriching and picking the most relevant news and stories on specific topics-themes.

Traditional newspapers curated news content from their associated news wire agencies, affiliated news bureaus and direct reporters, to create a bit-of-everything top-down/broadcast characterized by a mass-communication approach.

In the case of real-time news curation, it is the user who selects his preferred topics and his trusted curator / newsmaster and then subscribes to it via a feed, social channel or newsletter.

As individuals become increasingly more media literate they increasingly select their personally trusted news curators on specific topics, rather than relying on the more superficial and generic information streams provided to them by traditional news channels.

Thematic and topic-specific news channels have greater affinity with the natural flow of information on the Internet. They intercept and provide valuable news information to those specifically interested in them, filtering out the junk and picking up the most relevant items.

This, I believe is the direction in which we are haded and the modality in which human beings will keep themselves updated in the near future.

If until yesterday you have relied on generalists on main TV channels and newspapers to “present” and report to you the news they got themselves from other sources, wouldn’t it be a step forward if now you could get:

a) The specific type of news you wanted

b) from those trusted ones you believe to be “in the know“ in your field of interest?

That’s right; individual experts or small teams who curate topic-specific news channels by selecting the best of all the news out there on the topic they have built authority and expertise for (while disclosing and providing you with a link for each and every source).

This three-part guide is dedicated to explaining and illustrating what these emerging news curators do, what is the difference between them and automatic aggregation, what skills and tools they require and what their future is going to look like. More specifically:

• What real-time news curation is,
• why it is going to be so relevant,
• how it came to be,
• how it is done,
• what tools and skills you need to do it,
• what are the tools and technologies needed,
• which are the existing services and tools,
• which is the ideal news curation system features set,
• what is the future going to look like.

Here is everything you need to know to understand how we are going to manage the information overload and what real-time news curation, or newsmastering, is all about.

The Problem

No matter whether you see it as “information overload” or “filter failure” the key fact here is that there is so much information being produced out there, that it is next to impossible to follow or keep up with just about any specific topic, without spending considerable amounts of time looking at irrelevant stuff.

That is the the essence.

To make the issue even more frustrating, no matter how much junk you go through, you may still be missing on some important news story or product announcement just because there are so many sources to look up and it becomes physically impossible to scan them all.

There is indeed much more food than we can chew.

Duration: 23′ 51” – Clay Shirky on the concept of “filter failure” at Web 2.0 Expo NY

And so, we start relying on a few trusted sources to do the heavy lifting for us, and to bring back to us what we really need not to be missing.

These trusted sources may be blogs, RSS feeds, Twitter channels or Facebook contacts helping you find what is more relevant.

The theory goes that by following people who have your same interests, you can learn from what they share online.

But, the theory here has gotten quickly ahead of the practice, and following such people, while it does provide the opportunity to discover some great things, and have somme good exchanges, it forces you to have to digest and wade through a much larger number of information items with little or no relevance to you.

Is that sustainable?

I don’t think so.

Why?

Key Reasons Why Managing The Information Flow The Way You Have Done Until Today, Is Not Good Enough

Here some very good starters:

1. The information tsunami keeps growing daily,
2. there are new blogs, Twitter channels and news sources launching every day,
3. there is an increasing amount of personal, serendipitous, but also distracting, colloquial content
4. there is a growing amount of spam and marketing push masked as blog posts or press releases,
5. on Twitter and other social media channels, there are a large number of unverified news and stories pointing to low-quality or even missing pages,
6. it is hard for a newbie to distinguish a reliable trustable source from a marketer or spammer,
7. Crap detection is a rare skill among users and too much low-quality content sifts through unless properly checked,
8. titling and meta information is often misleading, ambiguous or just not clear enough,
9. you can’t be there always. You can’t check the news 24 hours a day, seven days a week,
10. unless you have some advanced skills it may be difficult for you to find new relevant sources of information and news from the ones you know, unless they are the ones to promote them
11. relying always on the same sources tends to limit your view and awareness of other new ideas and opinions in your field of interest,
12. news stories need to be contextualized – sometimes the relevance of a story for you can only be found by reading the story and extracting something else, than the main call, from it.

Given the above, how do you go about keeping yourself updated on your specific field of interest, without wasting a lot of time by having to follow too many blogs, feeds, Twitter channels and Facebook friends who are often not talking about what you are specifically interested in?

The Natural Remedy – The Spontaneous Evolution of Online News Curation

How Did We Manage So Far? From Google to Social Media

Google News

New blogs, online newspapers and magazines, social media networks. How did we manage to follow them all anyway, up until now?

In the beginning it was Google, who offered you a helping hand by playing the middle-man between your specific needs out there. “Are you searching for something? Here is a web page that can help you with this info“, Google would reply.

But when it came to starting to “organize“, sort and “make sense” of everything else being published online, what is happening in a certain market, or staying up-to-date on a specific topic how does Google help you achieve that?

Google News? …hmmmm, not really.

“…In the attention economy, with its millions of daily status updates and billions of Web pages vying for our time, how do we best allocate that scarce resource? One solution has been algorithmic: Sites like Google News source the best stuff by technical means, but fall short when it comes to personalization…”
Pete Cashmore
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/12/03/cashmore.web.trends.2010/index.html

RSS Aggregation

And so we got into RSS. Each one becomes his own self-directed curator, by subscribing to his preferred sources and feeds and by reading what he likes best.

But that got us in more trouble.

By utilizing RSS readers – aggregators you have yes stopped the daily tour of your preferred web sites, but you have gotten into serious more trouble as now you get all of the content coming from all of those different web sites being democratized into your RSS readers and making each article, look like every other one.

The consequence is that there is now more wading through stuff that is unimportant to you than ever before.

Many of the RSS feeds you subscribe to contain a lot of personal stuff, replies and comments that add little or nothing to your craving to find out and learn more. Furthermore following many of these RSS feeds requires serious time and attention. Two personal assets that are increasingly valuable as they become scarcer and scarcer.

Topic-Based Aggregation

Further on, we have tried “thematic” or “topic-based aggregation” based on a pre-selected number of quality sources publishing content on specific topics. This type of aggregation has introduced some benefits for those wanting to get only the latest from the most popular, authority sites, in a fast and easy fashion.

Relevant examples have been the early “fully automated” Techmeme, AllTop, Topix.net and similar sites, including Google News.

All of these topic-based aggregation sites have indeed been an improvement over the original situation, and they have indeed saved us time, but at the same time also this type of solution has kept bringing in just too many unrelated things, making no effort to curate, edit, sort or group news content in any better way than the most basic one.

Persistent Searches

Even those expert publishers and newsrooms who have started utilizing RSS feeds based on “persistent searches” to scan and catch what was happening outside their well known resources, have frustratingly found out how difficult it is to obtain any kind of clean useful results.

The problem when you start aggregating content coming from unknown sources by using specific keyword searches is that, notwithstanding how many filters you use, it remains very difficult to filter out articles that are created exclusively for marketing or link building purposes, duplicate content, spam, press releases and all of this junk material which, for the most part, you don’t want to wade through.

Social Curation

Then, more recently, we have started to rely on someone else.

Our friends and network contacts. A trusted circle of blogs and online friends sharing their discoveries on Facebook, Twitter and other social media.

And when those few people who have interests similar to ours are in the hundreds or thousands, the job becomes even more difficult.

Many of those you follow on Twitter or Facebook may post frequently about issues and stuff that is not directly to your specific interest. But you keep following that person, because you respect their view on something and you want to know what they say or point to when they talk about it. And by doing this we surrender to a growing flow of titles, links and posts which, to be really honest, we have zero interest for.

So not only we feel frustrated but now you need to spend even MORE TIME sifting through lots of irrelevant content, to find the few stories and resources that really interest you.

Personal Curation – Blogs

At the most basic level, bloggers represent the first generation of self-organizers of the network. If we exclude Yahoo! initial honorable effort a similar one (e.g.: ODP), there is nothing else, that comes close in scope, to what the universe of bloggers or noosphere, has been able to achieve.

Bloggers have been first to scout new independent sources, alternative voices, and who have pointed links to new ways of looking at any issue. They, more than any other group, have brought, among much useless noise, the true emergence of effective meta news sources that originate, filter and aggregate valuable content online.

So, what it appears to the many superficial onlookers as a universe of mindless writings (blogs) is nothing less than the initial phase of a complex and orderly process whereby humanity at large takes control of filtering, gathering and re-organizing his own know-how an discoveries.

Newsmasters may indeed represent the second layer of filtering that we can now apply to this ocean of content and information …and newsmasters, as it appears, have been indeed emerging and quietly working at this nouvelle craft, for quite some time now.

(Robin Good – The Birth Of The NewsMaster: The Network Starts To Organize Itself – February 19, 2004)

Just about any online publisher who has been spending time selecting and picking out great content and resources for his readers has been doing the basic part of what is now called content curation.

Starting with the early blog times, and even before, some people have spontaneously been sharing their favorite articles or have been collecting selected resources into special lists to help those interested in those topics to make sense of that space or to keep themselves update on new discoveries and tools.

Some have started archiving these inside social bookmarking directories like Delicious, Reddit, StumbleUpon or Diigo, while others have started posting them to their favorite social media sites.

Now that social media has become the first publishing and communication ground for many people, serendipitous sharing of news and information has become one of the main spontaneous activities that people do on social platforms.

But even with blogs doing a great job of this, following a good bunch of them does not solve the problems we have met earlier. There is a lot of stuff that we are not interested in that we have to wade through.

Why These Basic Curation Efforts Are Not Enough

This first layer of curation, that we get out of blogs, social media and other independent sources is already something very valuable that helps each one of us organize and make better sense of all the information out there.

But still, it is a bit chaotic.

Isn’t it?

Here are a few reasons to consider:

1. Content is organized in spontaneous and unexpected ways. It is not easy to know or anticipate who will curate what or when,
2. you still need to follow a lot of sources to be able to spot most of the relevant news that interest you,
3. you can’t avoid having to receive some overlap of news content provided by these sources,
4. some of this content is mixed with personal content or private replies gone public,
5. all of this content is often de-contextualized and it can’t be appreciated without actually going back to the source,
6. It is difficult to detect original sources from reposted, reblogged or retitled stuff,
7. credit is not always honored,
8. quality of curation ranges from simple re-sharing to valuable commentary addition, title improvement, tagging, referencing to other content and more.

The Emerging New Frontier: Real-Time News Curation / Newsmastering

Imagine instead someone or a small team that is dedicated, full-time, to scout, spot, uncover and bring back to you all of the best information, resources and new tools on a certain topic – theme and who also goes about not just verifying and checking these sources but “curates” them by titling, commenting, adding additional information and grouping them with other relevant news stories.

It is by looking at the difference between the typical part-time serendipitous curation and the dedicated work of a skilled individual or newsroom team that you can best appreciate the true difference between what has been a popular, spontaneous activity for most active online individuals, and a new emerging news publishing role which carries lots of opportunities and positive implications (I have written and referred to this role as the “newsmaster” and to its process as “newsmastering“).

Some great examples of news curation at work have already become popular and highly-respected news sites and business information services, among these SmartBrief, The Drudge Report or the new, human-curated Techmeme, but I ‘ll have more of these models in Part II of this guide.

If I had to make a statement about real-time news curation, I would probably say that I see it as one of the most disruptive new emergent roles of the media professional. So much so, that I have strategized many of my business activities around this very concept.

But don’t listen to me.

Here are some other voices:

In the attention economy, with its millions of daily status updates and billions of Web pages vying for our time, how do we best allocate that scarce resource?

One solution has been algorithmic: Sites like Google News source the best stuff by technical means, but fall short when it comes to personalization.

In 2008, the answer revealed itself: Your friends are your filter. With the launch of its Facebook Connect program, Facebook allowed sites to offer content personalization based on the preferences of your network.

Meanwhile, Google’s Social Search experiment is investigating whether Web searching is improved by using information gleaned from your friends on Twitter, Facebook, Digg and the rest. Increasingly, your friends are becoming the curators of your consumption, from Web links to movies, books and TV shows.

Professional “curation” has its place, too: Who better to direct our scarce attention than experts in their fields?

Pete Cashmore

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/12/03/cashmore.web.trends.2010/index.html

“[...] the digital realm too needs curators. Information overload makes it difficult to separate junk from art.

It requires a certain finesse and expertise – a fine tuned, perhaps trained eye.

Google, memetrackers such as Techmeme and social news sites like Digg are not curators. They’re aggregators – and there’s a big difference.

The call of the curator requires people who are selfless and willing to act as sherpas and guides.

They’re identifiable subject matter experts who dive through mountains of digital information and distill it down to its most relevant, essential parts.

Digital Curators are the future of online content.

Brands, media companies and dedicated individuals can all become curators. Further, they don’t even need to create their own content, just as a museum curator rarely hangs his/her own work next to a Da Vinci. They do, however, need to be subject matter experts.”

Steve Rubel

http://www.micropersuasion.com/2008/02/the-digital-cur.html

Let me further explain.

The solution to the ever-expanding tsunami of news and information coming at you every hour is the one of using an intermediate layer of human filters, as originally suggested by Stephen Downes, to act as collectors-hubs and topic-specific curation agents for a theoretically ever expanding universe of interests and themes.

I call such human filters and curators “newsmasters”, as their job is mainly one of finding, aggregating, selecting, editing and publishing the very best and value-rich news on a specific topic.

The deliverables newsmasters generate are “newsradars”, hand-picked stream of news on a specific theme.

A newsradar is a constantly updated thematic channel of highly relevant web references that are gathered in accordance with specific, persistent search criteria. Newsradars can focus on anything: topics, people, opinions, products, news items, events or passions. The constant updating of the channel is accomplished by leveraging the persistent-search, aggregation and filtering capabilities built-into RSS technology couple by the ongoing skilled and attentive work of a human newsmaster curator.

In other words: newsmasters are an emerging class of self-elected and professionally appointed news curators who create unique value by working exclusively on finding, aggregating, filtering and curating topic-specific news channels.

It’s as simple as that.

“The mistake made by the early advocates of push – … – lies in the idea that ‘brand’ will replace intelligent filtering. Brand fails because in order for something to be a brand, it must appeal to a large mass of people. But if it appeals to a large mass of people, it will invariably disappoint people looking for something more specific. The early advocates of push tried to promote existing brands, and readers found in push nothing they couldn’t find in mass media.”

Stephen Downes

How RSS Can Succeed – Feb. 24 2004

Let me help you now, review, see and make sense of the positive sides of news curation by summarizing for you what I see as being the key beneficial points, both for the user-reader as well as for the newsmaster in such a curated universe.

What Are The Benefits of Real-Time News Curation?

Key Benefits For Users

1. Saves tons of time
   People can subscribe specifically to your news selection if your focus matches their specific interest and save tons of time in not having to scan each and every news story from all the sites that cover their interest.
2. Guarantees the ability to stay updated on a specific topic at all times
3. Creates a trusted information source that can be relied upon for business
4. Enables the ongoing discovery of new news sources and market / topic / actors
5. Provides a channel in which diversity and varied opinions and more valued than anything else
6. Creates a “trusted” relationship with the curator-newsmaster as he builds its reputation and credibility not on advertising and commercial partnerships but on its integrity and ability to provide true value at every step.

Key Benefits For Curators – Newsmasters

1. Creates unique value not available elsewhere
   Providing your original filtered news selection of what is to be read out there on a systematic basis can be of great value to your readers.
2. Increases your authority on a specific topic
   When someone starts being a resource for news to others he gains in credibility and authority in his field of interest. Just like for newspapers, people view the ability of selecting and identifying relevant news to publish a high-authority trait. Who do you perceive as having a greater command of a topic? Someone who writes a news story for a news company or someone who picks up the best news from all of the authors of all the news companies?
3. Benefits your SEO
   Newsradars are the love of search engines which are always looking for fresh, new, high-quality content, possibly on a specific topic.
4. Supports alternative business and monetization models
   Newsradars can be used in a number of ways to provide both extra value to your readers as well as to create more content on a topic, introducing a new content space for sponsorship, enriching an existing guide and more.
5. Provides new opportunities
   By realizing the value that news curation can bring to your activity, you may be able to free up a significant new time and energy which you had frozen into other less effective content production activities.
6. Helps the system scale
   The newsmaster helps the system scale, provides higher quality and more relevant content to be accessible by a greater number of people, does the dirty job of categorizing, ordering and separating news according to specific audiences and interests.
7. Helps others stay informed and updated on their most-sought after topics
   Helps you help those who are really interested in a specific area to learn more, make sense, and be much better updated on what is actually happening.

Conclusion

Not everyone needs to be a front line reporter or a blogger.

There is a need for news-jockeys to look at this ocean of information and select the important from the superficial, the original from the cloned, the fresh from the replay.

Instead of going out there to generate more content, consider how much value can be provided by simply selecting and organizing the very best that is out there.

“The old model was “one to many” (NBC -> viewers). The new model is “one to a few” (YOU -> your friends and followers). That means there is an overwhelming explosion of content being created (Twitter feeds, blog posts, Flickr photos, Facebook updates) and most of it is interesting to a very small number of people. But, mixed in with this cacophony of consumer content, there is contextually relevant material that needs to be discovered, sorted, and made “brand safe” for advertisers.

Curation is the new role of media professionals.

Separating the wheat from the chaff, assigning editorial weight, and — most importantly – giving folks who don’t want to spend their lives looking for an editorial needle in a haystack a high-quality collection of content that is contextual and coherent. It’s what we always expected from our media, and now they’ve got the tools to do it better.

Yes, that’s right, the future of media is better, not worse. It’s more detailed, multi-faceted and nuanced.

Curation is the sibling of aggregation, a word that the web has know for a while.

Aggregation means gathering; finding all videos with the key words “Easter Supper” in them. But as more devices like cell phones are used to create content (video of a hotel room, a tweet from a rock concert, an audio post from a political protest) gathering no longer adds value.

In fact, aggregation can equal aggravation.

Strangely enough, curation shifts the balance of power back to brands and publications. While anyone can make content, the decision to gather it, and present it by trusted content curators has more risk, and therefore more value.”

Steve Rosenbuam
http://www.businessinsider.com/can-curation-save-media-2009-4

“We need passionate experts of all kinds to be able to wrap their future-looking goggles and to see those individual stories as a map rather than a set of individual road lines.” (Robin Good)

Coming up in Part II: Aggregation Is Not Curation
and in Part III: News Curation Method and Technologies

Recommended Readings

• Content Curation: Bringing Order to Information Overload
  by Christy Barksdale – PR 20/20 – April 8, 2010
• The Content Strategist as Digital Curator
  by Erin Scime – A List Apart – December 8, 2009
• Content Curation: Why Is The Content Curator The Key Emerging Online Editorial Role Of The Future?
  by Rohit Bhargava – MasterNewMedia – April 24, 2010
• Why Feedback and Filters are Necessary in Social Media
  by Howard Greenstein – Mashable – July 1, 2010

Originally written and “curated” by Robin Good with the editorial help of Daniele Bazzano and first published on September 7th, 2010 on MasterNewMedia as “Real-Time News Curation, Newsmastering And Newsradars – The Complete Guide Part 1: Why We Need It“

Photo credits:
The Natural Remedy – The Spontaneous Evolution of Online News Curation – Prevention
RSS Aggregation – juliengron
Persistent Searches – Jay Simmons
Social Curation – Silex Technologies

Can information architecture principles be easily put to good use when trying to help your readers find relevant content on your site? When your web site is so full of content that a simple search box won’t do the trick anymore, what can you do to structure and make all of your content more easily accessible?

Photo credit: Ndul

By employing sound information architecture principles you can develop a content organization and navigation strategy that allows your readers to easily locate what they are looking for while having a rich and enjoyable user-experience.

For example visual site maps and visually grouped search results are much better approaches to help a user find what he is looking for than traditional linear text-based search engine result pages.

The information provided is exactly the same, but it’s the way the information itself is presented, organized and connected to your navigation system which provides two very different user experiences.

And these type of challenges were the ones encountered by Stefano De Caro, Nicoletta Di Blas and Luigi Spagnolo a team of content and information architects, when asked to design an interface and content navigation system capable of handling a huge amount of data belonging to the Italian cultural heritage archives.

Following their successful work, the team decided to prepare an in-depth report where they explain and illustrate their fascinating research and content design journey. Their goal is to help more people understand how information architecture principles can be effectively utilized to structure the content of a web site and how these same principles can help you repurpose information in ways that make it more easily discoverable and visually-intriguing for your readers.

While Part 1 of this report dealt more with the theory and the challenges behind the design of a large cultural web site, Part 2 explains what are the actual steps you need to take to organize and present information in simple and engaging ways without overwhelming your final readers.

Here is Part 2 – Information Architecture: How To Help Users Find Relevant Content (Part 1)

In Search of Novel Ways To Design Large Cultural Web Sites

by Stefano De Caro, Nicoletta Di Blas and Luigi Spagnolo

Information Architecture Put To Use

Fig 1: SEE-IA design strategies satisfy fundamental requirements of the user experience.

Findability, serendipitous discovery, “at a glance” sense-making, playful exploration, branding and communication strength, as well as, of course, usability were considered critical requirements for the web site (Figure 1).

To tackle this challenge, we introduced SEE-IA (SEarch-Enhanced information architecture – pron. “see ya“), an integrated set of interactive and RIA-enabled design strategies that leverage existing search patterns, such as faceted search, and properly integrates them with engineered information architectures, to support important requirements for the user experience (see Figure 1) in large, content-intensive web applications.

The combination of search mechanisms and information architecture has already been exploited, but quite exclusively on digital libraries, archives and the like only, where information retrieval is the main user experience and therefore findability is the main requirement.

The novelty of SEE-IA lies in the fact that it blends faceted search (empowered by RIAs) with information architecture, supporting not only findability (see goals 2 and 3) but also serendipity (goal 4), “at a glance” sense making (goal 1), and playful exploration (goal 7).

Strategies for properly communicating introductory content over a collection of information are also proposed (goal 5) and for enhancing branding and communication (goal 8).

1. Simplify Content Hierarchy

The first steps of a SEE-IA design are the same as those of a “traditional” information architecture.

But instead of plunging into levels and levels of hierarchy, the designer stops almost at the surface, rather concentrating on:

• Communication issues (definition of the relevant facets, as well as of the collections of homogeneous or heterogeneous items to search into, e.g. “cultural venues“, including “museums” and “archaeological sites“),
• visualization strategies for facets (e.g. tag clouds), and
• search results (interactive maps).

The idea is that the hierarchy of the web site can be simplified by designing in advance its first levels only (corresponding to the main sections) and delegating the creation and customization of the deeper levels (the group of topics) to search mechanisms.

As already mentioned in the background section of this paper, faceted search permits simulating dynamic access structures.

Does the user want to find museums in southern Italy related to Magna Graecia (Italian Greek colonies) civilization? No problem.

1. Select “museums“ from a “type of cultural venue” facet,
2. “Southern Italy“ from the geographical facet and
3. “Magna Graecia“ from a cultural facet (e.g. showing the main civilizations and periods of Italian history).
4. If “soprintendenze“ (local branches of the Ministry) are interesting too, add this value to the “cultural venue” facet, eventually getting a customized list (Figure 4).

The user can select the above facets in the any desired order, getting results after each selection in a quick, highly reactive way.

These results turn out to be navigation hints that steer the interaction, like… in a dialogue!

Thus playful exploration and serendipitous discovery are supported, as well as the search for something specific.

2. Visualize Search

An effective visualization of both facet values and results is crucial for allowing “at a glance” sense-making.

We propose to use tag clouds to visualize the facets’ values, and interactive maps and lists for the results.

2.1 Tag Clouds

Values belonging to particularly relevant facets can be displayed as tag clouds, where the font size of the term is proportional to its relevance.

Moreover, the size of the terms changes as interaction moves on and new selections are made (see figure 3).

2.2 Interactive Maps

Fig 2: The interactive map offers the user the possibility to select the type of cultural venue (museums, soprintendenze or archeological sites: B), the geographical area (C), and the cultural dimension (D). Results are shown in the map (A) by means of circles, the color and size of which tell “at a glance” the type of venue and its relevance to the user.

To enhance “at a glance” the understating and communication strength of a web site, one option is the use of maps where results are geographically displayed.

But, instead of coupling exact locations and items (that would result in a mess – were the items too many and too closely located), results are shown by means of markers, the size and colors of which are signs on their own.

For example, in our case studies, three kinds of venues can be explored (museums, “soprintendenze” and archeological sites). Each of them is visualized by a marker (a circle) of a different color.

Moreover, the circle’s size correspond to the number of results (which is also explicitly stated by a number in the middle of the circle itself – see figure 2).

The results of the “faceted search” can be visualized in more than one way, in order to improve findability.

For example, in our case study, zooming on the geographical area is possible (displaying results at region’s level, down to provinces and the exact location).

2.3 Interactive Lists

Fig 4: Museums and “soprintendenze“, focusing on “Magna Graecia” in Southern Italy. An interactive list (A), with introductory information (B), an interactive tooltip (C), and search history (D), is provided.

Traditional lists with a sequence of items are another possibility (figure 4).

The user here is allowed to sort and group items according to the same criteria of the facets.

2.4 Groups of Items

Groups of items; for example, “museums and archeological sites of Magna Graeciain Southern Italy“, are an important way to suggest to the user where relevant information is.

A mere list of items, however, is often not sufficient.

A “traditional” information architecture usually provides a meaningful introduction, by explaining; for example, what Magna Graecia was.

A “traditional” search engine would instead provide a mere list of items (hopefully suitably ranked), leaving to the user the task of making sense out of it: Dynamically created groups of items, such as a list of search results, may be relevant, but also “disconcerting” if not properly introduced.

Since it is obviously impossible to plan in advance an introduction specifically tailored for a group of topics that is dynamically created, we propose to associate a brief explanatory text (and image) to each facet’s value.

This text can be used as a tooltip before making a selection (see Figure 4-C) and as an introductory text after the selection is made (Figure 4-B); the combination of the single terms’ explanations can be used as a sort of introductory text, that although not specifically tailored could still greatly help users make sense of their browsing experience.

Eventually, some groups of topics could be pre-planned and therefore deserve ad hoc introductory texts if they emerged as relevant according to the web site’s usage statistics or if the curators deemed them interesting.

A combination of search mechanisms and (partly pre-planned) information architecture will emerge over time.

3. Focus On Context and Orientation

Once users locate a set of items, say for example, “museums and archeological sites, about Magna Graecia in Southern Italy“, a number of typical actions may follow:

• Glancing through the index of items,
• selecting one item and looking at its details,
• navigating to the next item (guided tour),
• navigating from one item to a related one (hypertext navigation),
• navigating back to the index for selecting another item, etc.

To support these activities, “context” and “orientation” are critical.

If traditional, well engineered information architectures are very good at this, search engines, in general, are not.

In SEE-IA, dynamically generated groups of items are “first class citizens“. They can be experienced with rich interface elements such as modal windows and consolidated navigation patterns (like indexed and guided navigation: See Bolchini and Paolini, 2006) so that:

• The passage between the two types of navigation is natural and
• the orientation, i.e. the user awareness of the current status of navigation, is still ensured.

A search history (like the one show in figure 4-D) can be introduced to let the user go back to the previous steps of exploration, listed as links in inverse chronological order.

Dynamically generated sets can become “temporary indexes“, valid only within the current session, or can be saved, becoming a stable feature of a customized version of the web site (available to the users who generated them).

As far as links and hypertext navigation are concerned, there is no difference between the predefined set of items and the dynamically generated one.

Customized information architecture is what we are aiming at, and what is provided by this application.

The Pros of Information Architecture

Fig 3: Browsing Archeology (Museums and Soprintendenze) in Italy. Northern Italy (A), with Romans (”Romani“) being the most important civilization, and Southern Italy (B), where Magna Graecia (”Magna Grecia“) and Italics (”Italici“) civilizations emerge as relevant too.

The benefits for the user are:

• Findability: Expert users can easily locate the venues of the type (e.g. museums), geographical area and cultural characterization (e.g. “Italics“) they are looking for.
• Serendipity: Non-expert users may discover cultural dimensions unknown to them, or unexpected locations relevant for a cultural dimension (say ‘Etruscan’).
• At-a-glance sense-making: Users (whatever the level of expertise) may immediately grasp where venues (of the different types) are distributed in Italy, and their cultural characterization.
• Branding and communication strength: Users receive a strong communication message, i.e. the richness and wide distribution of the archeological patrimony of Italy (one of the intended “brand” goals for our case study).
• Playful discovery: Expert and non-expert users are both likely to “play” with this engaging interface to discover cultural information.

In addition, there is a remarkable educational effect: Users acquire knowledge not only from predefined contents but also from something that emerges dynamically from the interaction and visualization themselves.

For example, if they select the Northern area of Italy, “Romans” is the most important cultural dimension, while “Italics” is poorly represented (Figure 3-A).

Selecting the Southern area, “Magna Graecia” and “Italics” emerge as relevant too (Figure 3-B).

Or if they look at the cultural dimensions for Northern Italy, they may be surprised to discover that Celts are there. This is a piece of information they do not get by reading a text, but rather by playfully interacting with the application.

Serendipitous “learning by doing“, which is so typical of games (Gee, 2005), is thus supported.

Of course, a fundamental pre-requisite for this playful exploration is a quick and reactive interface: That is why the use of RIAs is “mandatory“.

The Cons of Information Architecture

After having illustrated the positive impact of SEE-IA methodology on user experience requirements, we focus here on the feasibility and reliability of implementing web applications based on our approach.

This new generation of web sites can be implemented using and extending reliable, existing tools, such as proprietary or open source content managements systems, as we did for our case study, where the EzPublish 4.0 open source CMS was employed, with the proper customizations.

AJAX frameworks and lightweight open source tools like Simile Exhibit can be employed as good starting points for implementing faceted search and rich interactive visualizations.

Search servers like Apache Solr can ensure high scalability, allowing multi-faceted searching on thousands of items contemporarily.

The high flexibility of SEE-IA makes it suitable not only for new web applications “designed from scratch“, but also for existing web sites penalized by a too rigid and complex hierarchical organization.

It is possible to apply the SEE-IA design strategy to simplify the overall hierarchy by reducing the number of levels and by reusing the metadata coming from the existing classification criteria (and additional metadata, if required) for building dynamic, multi-faceted navigation structures.

RIA-based solutions on top of the redesigned information architecture will provide at-a-glance and deeper understanding, communicative impact and user engagement.

Conclusion

In this paper we discuss the creation of a new generation of (very) large content-intensive web sites, coupling “traditional” engineered information architectures (offering strong organization, powerful navigation, context orientation, etc.) with features provided by search patterns and advanced interfaces.

For the users, benefits are the possibility of easily locating what they are looking for, and most of all, the chance of engaging in a rich and educational experience where “learning” comes not only from texts, but also from the interaction itself.

For designers and developers, SEE-IA dramatically simplifies the problem of designing complex information architectures and allows them to concentrate on the communication/cultural issues directly.

Future research will consider the following aspects:

• Integration of other already existing search patterns, such as query suggestions while typing in a search box.
• Adaptive combination of facet values in conjunction or disjunction, depending on the context: While in some cases combing in conjunction is desirable (e.g. “search for museums that have both Greek and Roman artifacts“), in others a disjunctive combination is more suitable (e.g. “search for museums in Italy or in Switzerland“).
• Dynamic transition structures and other advanced semantic search patterns based on semantic relationships, allowing users to dynamically explore related contents (even sets): E. g. from the list of museums in Northern Italy, to the list of the Roman bronze statues in them
• Customization of the visualization tools, for example allowing the users to decide what facets they want to visualize as tag clouds
• Application of SEE-IA in other contexts, like the social web; we are currently working on interactive filtering of discussions about a cultural “narrative” for the Cantonale Museum of Lugano.

End of Part 2 — Part 1 here

Originally written by Stefano De Caro, Nicoletta Di Blas and Luigi Spagnolo for Archives & Museum Informatics, and first published on April 21st, 2010 as In Search of Novel Ways To Design Large Cultural Web Sites.

About Stefano De Caro

Stefano De Caro is General Director for Antiquities within the Italian Ministry of Culture, as well as a University lecturer, archaeology researcher and editor of several scientific journals in the cultural field. De Caro has been awarded honorific distinctions from Italian and French state officials for his cultural merits.

About Nicoletta Di Blas

Nicoletta Di Blas is a researcher with the Department of Electronics and Information of Politecnico di Milano. She currently teaches Communication Theory for Politecnico di Milano (Como campus) and Communication for Cultural Heritage for the University of Lugano (Switzerland), at the TEC–CH (Technology-Enhanced Communication for Cultural Heritage) master course.

About Luigi Spagnolo

Luigi Spagnolo has taken his Master of Science in Computer Engineering for Communication from the Politecnico di Milano, graduating with honors in 2008. Since 2009 he is a doctoral student in computer science at the Politecnico di Milano. He works at the HOC-lab of the Department of Electronics and Information of the Politecnico di Milano, collaborating at design and development of the new website for the Directorate-General for Antiquities of the Italian Ministry of culture and at other web projects.

Photo credits:
Tag Clouds – Bill Lindmeier
1. Simplify Content Hierarchy – Clipart
2.4 Group of Items – picpics
3. Focus On Context and Orientation – Sgame

Where can you find royalty free music As you probably know, it is illegal to use copyrighted commercial music when publishing video clips online. For example, YouTube has developed a copyright-protection system that immediately detects unlicensed uses of copyrighted music tracks inside videos published online and silences them or blocks them from public viewing. So, how can you get a nice background music to place on your videos without infringing the law? The MasterNewMeda research team comes to the rescue with this guide listing all of the best services on the web to get or download open and unrestricted royalty free music.

Photo credit: enot-poloskun

Royalty free music means that you either download music tracks for free or you pay a one-time fee to gain access to music. Then, you can do everything the original artist allows you to make with it and for as many times as you want.

When music is royalty-free, the rights on the music tracks you download / purchase are generally regulated by Creative Commons licenses, which specify exactly what you can and cannot do with that music. For example, there might be some restrictions regarding commercial use, adaptation or redistribution placed by the original author. Therefore, video producers are strongly encouraged to read carefully the licenses associated with each track.

To go straight to the point, there are two main reasons why royalty-free music can be very useful for professional web publishers:

1. License-free: You can forget all about music industry-related hassles like mechanical rights, public performance royalties, synchronization and transcription rights, publishing rights, neighboring rights and master use rights.
2. Publish-friendly: You can publish video clips which utilize royalty free music and avoid having to worry about breaking copyrights, doing illegal things or having your video taken down and silenced.

But where can you find such free music tracks for your video clips?

Major music distributors like Amazon, Apple or Microsoft are definitely not your best choice, as these big companies focus mostly on big mainstream performers who distribute only copyrighted music tracks.

Independent, or indie musicians are instead the best direction to look into. These are the guys who often release their music under a CC license, as they find that making tracks available for free or for a small fee is a much better way to earn a reputation and a strong following of fans.

Luckily there is a growing number of royalty free music services on the web that will help you find the music you need, no matter which kind of artist, genre, duration time or quality you need to match your video production needs.

To help you rapidly identify your ideal music track licensing service, the MasterNewMedia research team has searched, identified and collected all of the best resources available online in this space. We have also prepared a mindmap showcasing all of the free music services presently in this space, as well as a comparative table illustrating the strength and weakness of each one of these offerings.

Here are the specific criteria that MasterNewMedia has identified to test and compare these royalty free music services:

• Free / paid music tracks
• Music tracks format
• Commercial use
• Registration-free
• Pro price and extra features

Here is the guide with full details:

Royalty-Free Music Services – Comparison Table

Royalty-Free Music Services

1. Jamendo

   

   Jamendo is an online music community where musicians publish their songs in a royalty-free fashion under a Creative Commons license. Jamendo is free to join and you don’t even have to register to download music. Tracks are available either in the MP3 or the OGG file formats and you can download any song by receiving a link at your email address or using P2P sharing networks. If you need to use Jamendo music for commercial uses, you can do so by joining Jamendo PRO, where you can pay a variable rate to gain unrestricted access to every track depending on your multimedia project.
   
   http://www.jamendo.com/

2. Opsound

   

   Opsound is a royalty-free music service where you can download free, open music tracks without even registering. All music tracks submitted by indie artists are licensed under a Creative Commons license and are also available for commercial use. Please note that Opsound strongly encourages every commercial use of tracks on the site to be regulated with the artist herself. Downloads are either available in the OGG or the MP3 file format. No Pro account is available.
   
   http://opsound.org/

3. Dig.ccMixter

   

   Dig.ccMixter is a service where you can browse the music archive of the ccMixter community music site, which offers a vast selection of royalty-free music tracks released under a Creative Commons license. You can find and download free MP3 music tracks for either personal or commercial use. On the download window of some music tracks you can also access cc-licensed project files or samples of single instruments that you can use to create your own remixes or music projects. Registration is not needed to download music tracks. No Pro account is available.
   
   http://dig.ccmixter.org/

4. Royalty Free Music Library

   

   The Royalty Free Music Library is a large archive of free, open music tracks that you can purchase and download to use in your video productions. Songs cost $39.99 each, but discounts are available if you buy multiple music tracks. Every song is available in the MP3 file format and it is openly licensed to be used inside audio / video projects, but not to be shared, transferred or sold. Registering to the site is compulsory to purchase music tracks. No Pro account is available.
   
   http://www.royaltyfreemusiclibrary.com/

5. Free Music Archive

   

   The Free Music Archive is a royalty-free music resource on the web where you can download open and unrestricted music tracks to enrich multimedia projects like video clips. You can also share all music tracks you download, but you are not allowed to remix or sell them. Commercial use is not allowed. Registration is not necessary to download songs, which are distributed in the MP3 file format. No Pro account is available either.
   
   http://freemusicarchive.org/

6. MagnaTune

   

   MagnaTune is a paid royalty-free music archive where you can purchase and download independent free music for a $15/mo fee. You can use all music tracks available from MagnaTune to complement your videos and to also publish your clips online. You are only required to provide attribution to the original author and to MagnaTune when your video is up. Music tracks are available in one of the following formats: MP3, WAV, OGG, VBR, AAC and FLAC. Commercial use is also allowed, you just have to pick the correct license when downloading your music. Registration is required to purchase and download audio tracks. No Pro account is available.
   
   http://magnatune.com/

7. AudioJungle

   

   AudioJungle is a royalty-free music service where you can purchase and download free music tracks to use in your video clips. There are music tracks available for as low as $1. The regular license of AudioJungle allows you to use the music in your video projects, but not to resell any of the tracks or your video clips where the tracks are featured. If you need a commercial license, you have to switch to an Extended License (prices vary depending on the music track you choose). All audio files are available in the MP3 file format. Registration is compulsory.
   
   http://audiojungle.net/

8. Music Bakery

   

   Music Bakery is a royalty-free music archive where you can purchase and download free music tracks from independent artists. Music tracks start from $29 each and are available in the MP3 format. Every song you purchase can be freely used inside original video clips or other kinds of multimedia projects. Commercial use is also permitted. Registering to the site is needed in order to buy songs from Music Bakery. A Pro account is not available.
   
   http://musicbakery.com/

9. NeoSounds

   

   NeoSounds is a vast library of royalty-free music tracks and sound effects that you can purchase and download for multimedia works like video clips. Songs are all contributed from professional musicians and producers. Music tracks start from $4.95 each and are available in the MP3 file format. Commercial uses where your video is sold under 10,000 copies are also permitted. Registration is mandatory to purchase NeoSounds royalty-free music tracks. A Pro account is not available.
   
   http://www.neosounds.com/

10. PremiumBeat

    

    PremiumBeat is a royalty-free music service that offers free, unrestricted music tracks to purchase and download. Prices start at $29.95 per MP3 track. All songs belong to professional composers and artists. There are four types of license available, but the first one, Standard, is already sufficient to grant the rights to upload and publish your clips on a video sharing site. No commercial use is allowed. A Pro account is unavailable and registration is mandatory to make all purchases.
    
    http://www.premiumbeat.com/

Originally prepared by Robin Good and Daniele Bazzano for MasterNewMedia, and first published on Sep 1st, 2010 as “Royalty-Free Music: Where To Find Free Music Tracks For Your Video Clips“.

How can you leverage information architecture to improve content findability and facilitate online content exploration on your web site? Making all the bits of your content you have published easily findable to your readers is not an easy task, especially when you have a large amount of content items that needs to be indexed and made searchable.

Photo credit: Ndul

A team of Italian information architects tried to address this exact problem as it tried to define and plan the content structure and information-finding solutions needed to empower the new web portal from the Directorate General of Antiquity of the Italian Ministry for Culture Heritage, which is planned to go public in Autumn of 2010.

The challenge for Stefano De Caro, Nicoletta Di Blas and Luigi Spagnolo was to cope with the huge amount of data that belongs to the Italian cultural heritage and to present this data in the clearest, most immediate and visually-compelling way possible, while meeting simultaneously the diverse needs of normal website visitors, the Italian Ministry and stakeholders.

After a thorough research, their research analysis made it clear that a standard web search functionality would be unsatisfactory when a very large amount of data content to be indexed and made searchable, because the search function requires that users’ requests (carried out using keywords) match precisely the keywords that the website originally utilized to define its content articles. If no such match is established, information tends obviously to remain unfound.

What is needed instead, is a way to aggregate similar and contextually-relevant results that users could be interested in. By looking at things from this perspective it appeared that the best way to achieve this goal was to seriously consider the adoption of some so-called Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), which are web applications that adapt in real-time to users’ inputs, choices or past preferences.

The implementation of RIAs was employed also to leverage “serendipitous discovery“, the act of stumbling upon unforeseen interesting pieces of content, and “faceted search“, the ability to search for a customized group of relevant topics that is spontaneously generated upon user input.

As information overload remains a major concern for website owners and publishers, websites need to be organized in a way that leverages information architecture principles so that they help you, the website owner, make them become more accessible for your readers while providing information within a richer, more engaging experience.

This in-depth report, republished here on MasterNewMedia in two parts with permission from the authors, may serve as a good source of inspiration to develop an effective strategy to deal with large amounts of content needing to be made easily findable in an easy, intuitive and visually-engaging experience for the final user.

Here is Part 1 of this in-depth report: (Part 2 next week)

In Search of Novel Ways To Design Large Cultural Web Sites

by Stefano De Caro, Nicoletta Di Blas and Luigi Spagnolo

Introduction

A web site, in all domains and in cultural heritage in particular, is meant to support a variety of communication goals, like:

• Providing practical information,
• offering an “at a glance” understanding of what the permanent collections are about,
• supporting a pleasant and enticing exploration,
• allowing the user to locate a specific piece of content, as well as
• promoting the institution’s brand, some selected pieces of content (shop-window effect), etc.

As long as the site is small, “traditional” information architecture can cope with these needs.

But when the site gets large and information-intensive, the traditional structure starts “cracking” as layers upon layers of navigation are added, and disappointment becomes a common user experience.

Straight search engines have provided a reasonable solution to support just one of the above goals: Allowing the user to locate a specific piece of content.

In this paper we illustrate how Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), combining lightweight information architecture with advanced search paradigms (like faceted search) and interactive visualization strategies, can be used to better support a number of communication goals.

The examples are taken from the new web site for the Directorate General of Antiquity of the Italian Ministry for Culture Heritage (to become public in Autumn 2010), where both a huge amount of content (the Italian archeological heritage) and a variety of users’ profiles (from scholars to amateurs and tourists) are managed.

Why Search Is Unsatisfactory For Content Findability

A cultural heritage web site is meant to fulfill a number of sophisticated communication goals. Some of them are quite obvious; for example:

• Offering an effective overview of the content (What is the permanent collection about?),
• supporting a pleasant and enticing exploration (Show me something interesting!),
• allowing the user to locate some specific pieces of information (Who painted Monna Lisa? What are the opening hours?), etc.

There are other stakeholder goals which are less obvious but still very important, like promoting the institution’s brand (e.g. “We are young and innovative“) or putting forth, as in a shop-window, some selected pieces of content (e.g. the highlights section).

As long as the site is small, “traditional” information architecture can cope with these needs, but when the site gets large and information-intensive, the traditional structure starts “cracking” as layers upon layers of navigation and transversal paths among them are added.

Disappointment becomes a common experience for the users, who feel lost, like the visitors to the “Library of Babel“:

“When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness.

All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure. (…) As was natural, this inordinate hope was followed by an excessive depression.

The certitude that some shelf in some hexagon held precious books and that these precious books were inaccessible, seemed almost intolerable.” (J. L. Borges (1941)

The search function has proven an unsatisfactory solution, as it is only capable of locating some specific piece of information, providing that the user can precisely identify it (i.e. use the same keyword the site uses), while all the other communication goals are hampered by an overloaded and strained information architecture or some extravagant communication strategies.

Let us see two examples.

1. The Louvre Museum Database

The Louvre web site offers access to its database of works on display: The Atlas.

Let us imagine searching the Atlas for “women portrayed by women“.

• The combination “women painter / s“, gives no result.
• With “women paintings,“ three results are there:
  • “The Death of Sardanapalu“ by Eugen Delacroix;
  • “A Singer and a Theorbo Player Performing a Duet“, formerly known as “The Singing Lesson by Caspar Netscher“; and
  • “Betchu and his family“ (image missing), a painted limestone from ancient Egypt.

  Strangely enough, are there only three paintings in the Louvre somehow related to women? Should not Mona Lisa at least be there?

• A new combination, “woman portrait” gives 25 results. None of the artists is female (and by the way: Mona Lisa is still not there!).

The advanced search is of no help.

We can select the “category of work” (painting), but the other fields (like “artist“) do not fit our purpose.

But we know that the Louvre does display “women portrayed by women“, like for example the portrait of Catherine, Countess Skavronsky, by Elisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun.

2. The Metropolitan Museum of New York

The Metropolitan Museum of New York’s web site puts on evidence, in the home page, a new work of art every day.

An interested user is given the possibility of browsing the guided tour (next-previous) of all the featured works of art.

The point is that… There are 28,196 works (information retrieved on January 25, 2010). What kind of communication goal are they fulfilling? How can the user effectively explore this huge set (let alone find something specific)?

Rich Internet Applications Vs. Search

It is clear that, in order to effectively cope with a huge amount of content on one side and the need to support a number of communication goals on the other, a new approach is required.

In this paper we illustrate how Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), combining lightweight information architecture with advanced search paradigms (like faceted search) and interactive visualization strategies, can be used to better support a number of communication goals in the case of large, information intensive web sites.

None of these elements is new on its own, but the way they are designed (in view of a varied set of communication goals) and combined provides a highly effective solution.

The examples are taken from the new web site for the Directorate General of Antiquity of the Italian Ministry for Culture Heritage (to become public in autumn 2010), where both a huge amount of content (the Italian archeological heritage) and a variety of users’ profiles (from scholars and professionals in the field to amateurs and “ordinary” tourists) are managed.

An Historic Overview of Information Architecture

Standard Web Sites Have a Hierarchical Structure

According to traditional information architecture (Rosenfield and Morville, 2006), the part of a web site that allows access to information is usually hierarchical, i. e. structured as a tree, where the root is the home page.

The web site core contents – also defined by Paolini and Bolchini (2006) as topics – (e.g. detailed information on artworks and exhibitions in a museum web site) represent the leaves of such tree and can be “appended” to more than one “branch” (Weinberger, 2007).

The topics can be in fact grouped homogeneously according to several criteria (e.g. for artworks, “all the masterpieces“, “by subject“, “by artist“, etc.), with the aim of providing several ways for gaining access to the same pieces of content.

Such “groups of topics“ (Paolini and Bolchini, 2006), together with an introductive content (e.g. for “Leonardo’s Masterpieces“, a brief introduction to Leonardo Da Vinci’s contribution to painting), constitute the access structures (the branches of the tree) to core information, and therefore are used to build up the overall navigation of the site.

If the access structures are many, to reduce information overload they are grouped into one or more levels of hierarchy (this means that the outer, thinner branches are joined to thicker branches of the tree), ending up with a single taxonomical “sitemap” that encompasses the whole information architecture of the web site.

For large web sites, however, the overall hierarchy resulting from the design process is not completely satisfactory (Crystal, 2007): Users cannot easily locate what they are looking for, and interesting pieces of information are buried under levels and levels of navigation (Weinberger, 2007; Morville and Callender, 2010).

The Limitations of Search In Organizing Rich Information

Search engines – both external or within the web site – are often the only way for users to find what they are looking for.

Continuing the tree metaphor, search can be considered as an automatic mechanism that “generates” the branches from a heap of leaves (Weinberger, 2007): Search builds dynamic access structures (Sacco, 2006) to contents that are not pre-planned by designers and are (or should be) tailored to the specific needs of the user.

Mackinlay & Zellweger (1995) show how, already in the earlier years of the web era, search and browsing were considered as the two faces of the same medal: Navigation was in fact seen as a way for dynamically building queries on the database and exploring the results.

As web engineering and web information retrieval developed and, in a certain sense, “diverged“, such an assumption was put under discussion.

Ojakaar and Spool (2001) and Spool et al. (2004) claimed that keeping users from using search was a best practice for usability and findability, as if search was a dangerous shortcut for designers, a sort of “diabolic temptation” they had to resist!

Indeed, a total reliance on traditional textual search (in Google’s style) is far from being an optimal solution (Yee et al., 2003; Spool, 2004) for a number of reasons:

• The user may have a generic need,
• difficult to translate into a specific search query (and does not receive any good hint from the search engine); moreover,
• the overall communicative “message” promoted by the web site may not be conveyed.

In other words, the balance between push (contents that are offered by the web site without explicit demand) and pull (contents accessible on demand only) would be too much moved towards pull (Morville, 2007).

However, in those years search was changing.

The New Approach To Content Findability: Faceted Search

New “exploratory search” (Marchionini, 2006) approaches emerged, also supported by rich interfaces (see next paragraph), transforming the search experience into a richer dialogue between the application and the user, and characterized by iterative refinements, as in the original “berry-picking model” by Bates (1989).

In particular, a better balance between push and pull can be reached with faceted search (Sacco, 2006; Tunkelang, 2009), also frequently known as faceted navigation (Yee et al., 2003; Hearst, 2009; Morville and Callender, 2010), a pattern increasingly employed for exploring collections of multimedia contents, and based on the progressive application of filters that the system combines together.

By clicking on links (as in normal navigation), the user selects a combination of metadata values belonging to several classifications called facets. Each facet corresponds to a particular orthogonal dimension.

E.g., for an artwork, there may be the following facets:

• Medium: Painting, sculpture…
• Subject: People, landscape…
• Technique: Oil, watercolors…
• Style: Impressionism, pop-art…

Traditional web architecture also includes multiple classifications (the “groups of topics“).

The difference is that in faceted search the user is allowed to freely combine dimensions coming from different facets, thus creating personalized groups of topics (e.g., expressionist paintings illustrating landscapes).

How To Implement Faceted Search: Rich Internet Applications

“Rich Internet Applications“ (RIAs) are web applications with interfaces that are comparable to desktop applications, in terms of responsiveness and complexity, while in fact they are not.

Different from plain XHTML pages, single elements of RIA pages may change interactively, according to users’ inputs or other events, and with animation effects, without the need of (re)loading the whole page from the server.

Technologies for implementing RIAs include:

• AJAX and
• Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Flash, as well as
• JAVA applets and
• other browser plug-ins.

RIA-based tools like Simile Exhibit (Huynh, Karger and Miller, 2007) can be used to implement faceted search and advanced visualization of results, even though they are currently suitable for collection of some hundreds of items only.

Why Going Beyond Web Search Is Important

A web site is typically aimed at supporting a number of communication goals.

A user may want to:

• Make sense of something “at a glance“,
• search for a specific piece of information,
• put in relation pieces of information (painter – work of art – artistic movement – similar works of art etc.)

Moreover, a user would gladly welcome the chance to:

• Stumble into unlooked-for pieces of content (”serendipitous discovery“)
• create customized “groups of topics“.

“Serendipitous discovery” is partially supported by the strategies like the “highlights” section (also called “director’s choice“) or the guided tours section. The second is not supported at all (being the “my museum” section a totally different – and definitely more cumbersome – way of gathering the user’s favorite items).

Eventually, there are the stakeholder’s needs.

An institution, when communicating to its audience via a web site, may want to:

• Create what we may call a “shop-window” effect about its content;
• entice users to “stay and play” with the content (playful exploration);
• convey the institution’s overall brand (e.g. “we are young and innovative“) and some intended messages (e.g. “richness of content“).

End of Part 1

Originally written by Stefano De Caro, Nicoletta Di Blas and Luigi Spagnolo for Archives & Museum Informatics, and first published on April 21st, 2010 as In Search of Novel Ways To Design Large Cultural Web Sites.

About Stefano De Caro

Stefano De Caro is General Director for Antiquities within the Italian Ministry of Culture, as well as a University lecturer, archaeology researcher and editor of several scientific journals in the cultural field. De Caro has been awarded honorific distinctions from Italian and French state officials for his cultural merits.

About Nicoletta Di Blas

Nicoletta Di Blas is a researcher with the Department of Electronics and Information of Politecnico di Milano. She currently teaches Communication Theory for Politecnico di Milano (Como campus) and Communication for Cultural Heritage for the University of Lugano (Switzerland), at the TEC–CH (Technology-Enhanced Communication for Cultural Heritage) master course.

About Luigi Spagnolo

Luigi Spagnolo has taken his Master of Science in Computer Engineering for Communication from the Politecnico di Milano, graduating with honors in 2008. Since 2009 he is a doctoral student in computer science at the Politecnico di Milano. He works at the HOC-lab of the Department of Electronics and Information of the Politecnico di Milano, collaborating at design and development of the new website for the Directorate-General for Antiquities of the Italian Ministry of culture and at other web projects.

Photo credits:
Why Search Is Unsatisfactory For Content Findability – madmaxer
The Louvre Museum Database – VisitingDC
The Metropolitan Museum of New York – VisitingNewYorkStateSearch
Standard web Sites Have a Hierarchical Structure – Boobie
The Limitations of Search In Organizing Rich Information – pmtavares

What does it take for open business models to become an economy of the Commons? What are the pros and cons of a system based on peer production? How do open business models compare with the traditional economic system based on intellectual property and copyright?

Photo credit: GPRC, remixed by Robin Good

I have recently shot a small number of very interesting videos with Michel Bauwens, the peer-to-peer movement evangelist and founder / publisher of the P2PFoundation and in one of these I asked Michel to share his vision of such economic system.

How does he picture a system based on cooperation and collaborative approaches where individuals create and distribute value to their peers?

As he suggests, the key strategy which allows open business models to gradually migrate to a successful economy of the Commons (which are immaterial goods that are everyone’s property like knowledge, code and design) is the emergence of companies that make use of the Commons and then sell the extra value they add to Commons in the marketplace.

Such business approach does not work by leveraging the same approaches of our present system such as classical job employment, wages and copyright. Instead, the new economy of the Commons grounds itself on three new components:

1. Distributed communities of passionate individuals working together spontaneously on
2. collaborative platform and Internet technologies and by
3. the foundations, for-benefit institutions that make their know-how available for free.

Here is the full video interview (with a full text transcription):

Open Business Models: The Importance of Peer Production – Michel Bauwens

Duration: 11′ 13”

Full English Text Transcription

Michel Bauwens: Hello, my name is Michel Bauwens.

I’m Belgian, I live in Thailand and I founded the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives.

What we do is we study:

• Peer production,
• peer governance, and
• peer property.

In other words, all the modalities where people can aggregate around the Internet using collaborative platforms and produce something of value together. This has an application on business and economics, which I can summarize under two concepts:

1. Open business models, which refers to practices of individual firms,
2. the economy of the Commons is how this new system fits in the broader economy as a whole.

I would like to discuss a few features of open business models.

Open Business Models

First, something about the structure.

What is typical about open business models is that they involve a collaboration between a community, using a Commons.

This means:

• Open code,
• open knowledge,
• open designs, shared designs,

On the other hand, an entrepreneurial coalition.

In other words, companies who make use of that Commons and who try to market some extra value in the marketplace. How does that exactly work?

This is an interesting point, because, of course, this collaboration has a few characteristics that make it different from a classic business model where you hire people, you give them a wage, you protect intellectual copyrights, etc.

Let me review a few of these points together.

1. The Commons

What do we mean by Commons?

This is something that does not belong to anybody in particular, that belongs to the whole community, of participants, of users, sometimes to the whole world.

It depends, you have different types of commons.

This means that it is usually protected by some kind of a license, like the General Public License or the Creative Commons or some other type of license which says that you can use a material, you can change it, but any change will also be part of that Commons.

2. Community

That community will usually be a mix of:

• Volunteers, who freely add contributions for a number of reasons.
• Paid contributors, because these companies that will work with that Commons, that code, or these designs will also hire people to do development work and build a business around it.
• Collaborative platforms – this is a very important point.

  We have to have some kind of technology, a platform which allows people to work together under certain rules.

  3. Foundations

  

• Another aspect is very specific.

  I call it “for-benefit institutions.” These are usually foundations.

  If you look at open software, most of these projects have a foundation:

  • Gnome Foundation,
  • Apache Foundation,
  • Eclipse Foundation,
  • Linux Foundation

  I could go on.

  These are called the FLOSS foundations.

  I am fairly certain that when we have a more mature development of open hardware, that the same structure will be applied.

You don’t have two players. You actually have three players.

You have:

• The community,
• the for-benefit institution which manages the infrastructure of corporation.

  They do not tell people how to work and what to do, but they protect the infrastructure.

• Then you have the corporations, companies and coops that are using those Commons.

Some interesting points.

When I talk about the Commons, I am talking, in this particular context, about immaterial Commons.

What is common is not the products. It is not the cars or the fridges or the solar panels, because they cost money, and you have to find a way to find investment and pay people, at least in this type of society we have now.

We are talking about the things that can be shared for free, because they can be reproduced digitally:

• Knowledge,
• code and
• design.

Companies and Open Business Models: The Cons…

What are the consequences for a company that engages in this type of production?

One of the consequences is that the primary material itself, the code or the designs, are not really marketable, because they are shared with the whole community, they can be copied.

It is pretty hard to sell, because the market, basically, is something that has supply and demand.

When something is in abundance, the market does not quite work for this particular part.

What a company will do is they:

• Will use the commons, add something to it, and sometimes they use something called dual licensing.

  That means that, let’s say, 75 percent of the software is open, and then they will add some extra software that is proprietary.

• Might decide to build derivative services – training, integration, insurance, guarantees – things that businesses want that are around the primary material.

This is an important point. A part of the value becomes free.

This is the point of the book Free by Chris Anderson, which explains why it makes sense today to give away the primary material for free.

You can do that by:

• Protecting your intellectual copyright,
• common copyright, open copyright – which is what I am talking about.

One possible negative consequence of working this way is that you are voluntarily, as a company, not taking up the benefits of copyright.

If you think of a company like Microsoft, or you think about Pharma, they can ask a lot of money above the production price of a piece of software or a medicine because it is stated under a copyright.

A lot of the money they get is not from the value of the product; it is the value of the protection of the product through legislation and the State.

This is something you have to give up when you do open business models and this has certain consequences.

…And The Pros

On the positive side, let’s assume you are competing with a proprietary company who is asking a monopoly price based on intellectual property. It seems clear that you can outcompete those companies, because you don’t have to charge for the property right.

Another advantage is that your research and development, instead of being just the people inside your company, becomes the whole community.

Basically, you are sharing innovation through some kind of a corporate and community commons, where you do not just get one stream of innovation; you get a lot more innovation.

I would guess that another advantage, which is not a certainty but often occurs, is that the market becomes so much larger. Let me explain that.

If you have a proprietary strategy, you have only your product, and you have to pay everyone.

I want to give an example, to make sure that is understood.

• Let’s take the geographical information systems.

  In Europe, every country protects its national geographical data – which is public, it is done by governments – and then they license it to a few companies.

  These companies may make quite some money, but because of the licensing they exclude an enormous amount of other people who cannot work with the same data.

  This is a recipe for a limited marketplace.

  Take the situation in the United States, where the National Oceanic Administration and other outfits decide to have open geographic data.

  There is no licensing fee, and this means that everybody can participate in marketing and creating added-value services on top of this geographic commons geographic data commons.

  I hope you see the point here which is: you can make guaranteed money in a small market, which is perhaps good for these few players who have a monopoly, but it is maybe not so good for business in general and not so good for society in general.

  While, on the other hand, if the open business model works, what you have is a much larger marketplace based on this public and common data. In other words, a lot more smaller enterprises can enter the game because the threshold is so much lower.

• If we look at open-source software, we can give an example of these different dynamics.

  We can take proprietary software – Microsoft and those quite big companies – but let’s take Drupal.

  Drupal is an open-source content-management system.

  I personally do not really know any company that’s famous in Drupal, but I heard from people active in the field that there are tens of thousands of developers working on Drupal.

  You can see the different model.

  Nobody knows the company, yet the economy around Drupal, around the Drupal commons, is a thriving commons and is creating a lot of jobs for a lot of people.

Additional Selected Resources on Open Business Models

• Peer funding
• Open business models
• Open capital
• Open money

Video clips originally recorded by Robin Good for MasterNewMedia. First published on August 19th, 2010 as “From Open Business Models To An Economy Of The Commons“.

About the author

Michel Bauwens (1958) is a Belgian integral philosopher and peer-to-peer theorist. He has worked as an internet consultant, information analyst for the United States Information Agency, information manager for British Petroleum (where he created one of the first virtual information centers), and is former editor-in-chief of the first European digital convergence magazine, the Dutch language Wave.

To know more about Michel Bauwens you can visit these sections of the P2P Foundation wiki:

• Energy and Sustainability -http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Ecology
• Open Manufacturing – http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Manufacturing
• Open Money – http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Money
• Open Design – http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Design
• Open Design projects – http://p2pfoundation.net/Product_Hacking

Photo credits:
Open Business Models – itestro
…And The Pros – Scott Maxwell

Video encoding is the science of codifying the bits of data that make up a digital video recording into a unified whole according to a set of specific standards and parameters. If it sounds techy, it should. In simpler words, video encoding is the process of taking your original movie, as recorded by your camcorder, mobile phone or webcam, and preparing it for delivery in a digital format according to specific technical standards. This MasterNewMedia guide brings you everything you need to know about the key differences between major video file formats / containers and codecs.

Photo credit: Canon

From .WMV to .MOV and from .AVI to .FLV, this guide presents the best information available online on what you need to know about the use and characteristics of the major video file formats, containers and relative codecs.

When you video encode a clip, you are saving your video into a specific “format” much like you can do with a Word document or a digital image. A Word document can be encoded in .RTF or in .TXT, just like an image can be encoded in .JPG or .BMP formats.

Obviously, different types of encodings are good for different applications and devices.

Broadcasting, live streaming, burning to DVD and archiving all require different video encoding parameters while your computer browser, an iPhone and your gaming console have all different expectations when it comes to playing back video files. And this is why knowing a bit about video encoding, video file formats and containers is quite important if you intend to publish and distribute digital video.

In the video universe it is easy to get lost, as the formats, codecs and file containers generate a universe of possibilities and variables that are initially not easy to understand.

If you want to upload and publish a video on YouTube, for instance, you would have to choose specific encoding settings and file formats, whereas your choice would be different if your video clips are to burned on a DVD.

As an online publisher you may already be familiar with some of these issues, but as new technologies like HTML5 and WebM are starting to make inroads, you are going to need to better understand the key differences and the pros and cons that such different formats entail for you.

To help you achieve this goal, the MasterNewMedia research team has prepared a comprehensive guide to bring together all of the “fundamentals” you need to master to fully understand the basics of video encoding, specifically:

• What is video encoding
• Video file formats and containers
• Comparison of video codecs
• Encoding settings for Internet video publishing
• Video publishing settings for YouTube

Here is the MasterNewMedia Video Encoding Guide in detail:

1. What Is Video Encoding?

Introduction To Web Video Encoding

How do you encode a video for the web? Which are the best video codecs available to publish your video clips online? What is a video container? Inside this book you can find a comprehensive overview of the world of video encoding.

by Mark Pilgrim – Dive Into HTML5

How To Compress Video For The Web

If you have a huge video file and you want to compress it, there are several options and settings you must evaluate first. Which video compression settings is best for your specific need? In this article you can find the best recommendations to compress your videos.

by LongTail Video Editors – LongTail Video

Internet Video File Formats and Containers

What are the options at stake when publishing videos on the web? Is it best to use a standard file format or go for a video container? Learn to know and understand what video option is right for you and why in this in-depth article from ReelSEO.

by ReelSEO Editors – ReelSEO

Video Encoding: How To Do It Right

The best file format for encoding your videos depends very much on your video source. This article highlights the importance of understanding and analyzing the source file you have and use the proper settings to have smooth playback and better video performance when encoding.

by Digital FAQ Editors – Digital FAQ

Video Encoding From A To Z

What are the most lossy video codecs and audio codecs? Do you want to insert captions inside your video? Here is a set of selected resources to help you with video encoding.

by Mark Pilgrim – Dive Into HTML5

2. What Video Codecs To Use?

Video Codecs Comparison

A comprehensive comparison table on Wikipedia that highlights the differences between each video file format. Check license rights, compression formats, compression methods and benefits of all options you have when it comes to choose the best video codec for you.

by Wikipedia Editors – Wikipedia

Video Codecs: What To Look For

An efficient way to compare video codecs is to balance quality and file size. Depending on your needs, you might go for a bigger file that provides crystal-clear quality or a low-resolution but snappier file that ensures smoother playback. See for yourself how to make this choice.

by 100fps Editors – 100fps

H.264 Versus MPEG-4

What are the pros and cons of using the H.264 encoding video format against MPEG-4? In this in-depth ReelSEO article you will find all about the comparison between H.264 and the MPEG-4 so that you consciously choose the best alternative for your clips.

by Mark R. Robertson – ReelSEO

Google’s New WebM Video Format

WebM is a new open-source video format developed by Google that promises to revolutionize the world of Internet video. In this article you will learn how WebM is different from other video encoding solutions and when WebM could be a valuable alternative to use instead of other established video file formats.

by ReelSEO Editors – ReelSEO

Best Selected Resources On Video Encoding

K-Lite Codec Pack

The K-Lite Codec Pack is a free collection of video codecs and tools that you can download on your computer to play all popular movie formats and even less-known video file formats that your standard video player refuses to start playing.

by Codec Guide

The WebM Project

What do you need to watch WebM videos on your computer? How do you publish WebM video content on the Internet? How do you integrate the WebM technology into your video encoding application? Find all the answers to these questions on the official website of the WebM Project.

by WebM Project

3. What Video Container To Use?

Video Container Formats: A Comparison

A comparison chart on Wikipedia of all the most popular video containers formats that highlights all their most important features like subtitle management, metadata, menu support on DVD discs, and more.

by Wikipedia Editors – Wikipedia

Video Encoders Compared

There are lots of software to encode videos, but which one is best? In this chart you can find a thorough comparison of three very popular video encoding software tools: Compressor, Handbrake and Avidemux2.

by Wikipedia Editors – Wikipedia

Best Video Codecs For RAW Video Data

RAW data are data which has not been subjected to processing or manipulation, like for example the footage you record using your camcorder. In this article you will find an overview of the best codecs to manage this type of data: MJPEG, DV and Huffyuv.

by ErMaC and AbsoluteDestiny – AnimeMusicVideos

Video Container Formats and Codecs

If you are new to video encoding methods and definitions, in this article you will find a non-technical explanation of what is a video encoding format, when to use video containers against standard video file formats and what is video compression.

by Mark R. Robertson – ReelSEO

iPhone and iPod Compatible Video Formats

Do you want your videos to play on the iPhone, iPod or iPad? In this article from iLounge you will be presented with the best video formats and settings for making high-quality videos that are fully compatible on Apple devices.

by Jesse David Hollington – iLounge

4. Best Video Encoding Settings When Publishing On The Web

Encoding Video For The Web – ReelSEO Webinar

Encoding Video for the Web – Duration: 85′

In this ReelSEO webinar and embedded presentation you will learn what are the best strategies to create high-quality videos using the H.264 codec which ensures optimal smoothness and performance when you publish your video on the Internet.

by Mark R. Robertson – ReelSEO

Encode For YouTube

How To Encode and Upload HD Videos

Do you want to upload your videos on YouTube with a top-notch quality? This article will help you understand the best encoding solutions to create an engaging experience for your users using HD videos.

by Cinetech – Squidoo

How To Optimize Your Video Uploads

Learn in this article what are the best audio and video specifications to encode gorgeous-looking HD widescreen videos for YouTube. Stand out from other video publishers like you by refining your video uploading and video encoding skills.

by YouTube Help Editors – YouTube Help

How To Make YouTube Videos Look Professional

This article shares the proper steps to take for optimizing your videos for YouTube and how to avoid the most common mistakes that video publishers make when putting their video clips on the web.

by Cinetech – Squidoo

5. Video Encoding Tools

Video Conversion and Encoding Tools and Services: A Mini-Guide

In this MasterNewMedia guide you can find a comprehensive overview of the best free, commercial and professional video conversion and encoding tools available on the market.

by Michael Pick – MasterNewMedia

Free Video Rippers, Encoders and Converters

If you want to produce gorgeous videos for the web but also stay within a budget, the founding editor of LifeHacker, Gina Trapani, prepared a showcase of the best free software tools to rip, encode and convert your video clips.

by Gina Trapani – Lifehacker

VP8 Encoding Tools For WebM

If you want to experiment and get your hands dirty with Google’s new WebM encoding technology, what you will find in this article is a list of the best free and commercial VP8 WebM encoding tools available on the web.

by Christophor Rick – ReelSEO

HTML5 Video Encoding Tools

If you want to learn how to encode your videos to those formats that work with the new HTML5 video tag, inside this article you will find the best tools and services to work with Ogg Theora and H.264 MP4 video codecs.

by Christophor Rick – ReelSEO

Originally prepared by Robin Good, Daniele Bazzano and Elia Lombardi for MasterNewMedia, and first published on August 16th, 2010 as “The Video Encoding Guide: Codecs, Formats, Containers And Settings Explained“.

Photo credits:
How To Compress Video For The Web – superdumb
Internet Video File Formats and Containers – CEPro
Video Encoding: How To Do It Right – Squidoo
Video Encoding From A To Z – SSilver
Video Codecs Comparison – Phil Date
H.264 Versus MPEG-4 – Vinicius Tupinanda
Video Encoders Compared – ReelSEO
Best Video Codecs For RAW Video Data – Andrea Danti
Video Container Formats and Codecs – ReelSEO
How To Optimize Your Video Uploads – BoomTaaKTallaght Youth Band
Video Conversion and Encoding Tools and Services: A Mini-Guide – Kiyoshi Takahase Segundo
Free Video Rippers, Encoders and Converters – pmtavares
HTML5 Video Encoding Tools – WiseCodes

If you want to start selling a physical or digital product on the Internet, there are now a growing number of online services that make it very easy for you to create an online store in minutes. You, set the price, and these services take care of all the transaction and payment matters. In this MasterNewMedia guide, you will find the very best web services out there to build, create or set-up your own online store in the easiest and most economical way possible.

Photo credit: pavlen

Today, even small content producers and blog publishers can sell their own stuff online easily, cheaply and without having to go through any slow bureaucratic verification and accreditation process.

These services in fact, sensibly reduce or completely resolve one of the long standing obstacles to allow web publishers to easily sell online: having the ability to easily accept credit card payments online.

The business model on which these new simple ecommerce services operate is based on charging sellers a low-cost small monthly subscription fee and in levying a transaction fee on each individual sale your online shop makes. Many of these services actually do not even charge a monthly fee, but operate only by charging you a small commission on your actual sales.

The advantages and benefits of having such new sales-support tools and services readily available is that online publishers and entrepreneurs who were hesitant and discouraged by the complexity of testing the sale of certain products or services online, can now challenge their interests in a much easier fashion and with little or no budget at all.

In addition, these new online selling services are a new tangible opportunity for creating new, simple revenue channels, helping publishers large and small move gradually away from advertising-only business models to mixed approaches in which new types of high-value, highly unique content and information products are sold for a price.

The additional advantages of creating your own online selling outlet, where both physical and digital products can be sold, include:

• Web-based: You create, host and run your store entirely on the web, installing nothing on your computer or web server. You can fully manage your online store while on-the-move and from everywhere.
• Payment: People can pay you via credit card, PayPal or other payment gateway systems and transactions are automatically handled in your currency of choice.
• Protection: You are protected against frauds and malicious transactions.
• Ease of use: You are provided with access to a web dashboard from where you can browse and update your product inventory, manage transactions, track orders and everything else you need to take care of.
• Automatic inventory: Your product inventory is dynamically updated as soon as someone makes a purchase. You don’t have to worry about sold out items or limited product quantities.
• Uniqueness: You can customize the appearance of your online store by choosing the layout of your storefront and by complementing it with relevant content components or widgets that may help your customers find what they are looking for more easily, while making it easy for them to share with their friends and colleagues their preferences and product suggestions.

To help you identify rapidly your ideal service to create an online storefront in minutes, the MasterNewMedia research team has searched, identified and collected all of the best simple store-building tools available and to make your evaluation as effective as possible, it has prepared a mindmap showcasing all of the services in this space, as well as our usual set of comparative tables illustrating the strength and weakness of each one of these services.

Here are the specific criteria MasterNewMedia has identified to test and compare these simple e-commerce services:

• Starting price
• Max no. of products for sale
• Social media integration
• Custom domain
• Payment gateways available
• Coupon / discount codes
• Transaction fees
• Pro price and features

Dive here below into all of the information you may need to identify to start selling any type of product or service online, in a matter of minutes.

How to Create an Online Store In Minutes – Comparison Tables

Best Tools to Create an Online Store In Minutes

1. Shopify

   

   Shopify is a web-based service that allows you to create an online store in minutes. With prices starting from $24/mo, Shopify lets you sell up to 100 products, customize your online store design, use a custom domain name, integrate your store with social media and more. Payment gateways supported are credit cards, PayPal and Google Checkout. For every sale, Shopify charges you a transaction fee of 2%. It is not possible to use coupon / discount codes. The next pricing level available ($99/mo) lowers the transaction fee down to 1%, allows you to sell up to 10,000 products, have real-time stats and also to sell discount codes to encourage purchases.
   
   http://www.shopify.com/

2. Etsy

   

   Etsy is an online marketplace for handmade products where you can sell your original stuff with a dedicated and customizable storefront. Etsy has no monthly subscription fee, but you are charged 20/c for four months when you put a product on sale. There is no limitation to the number of products that you can sell on Etsy and your online store can be integrated with social media services, but not have a custom domain. For every sale Etsy retains a transaction fee of 3.5% of the total sale price. Payment gateway systems accepted are credit cards and PayPal. Discounts are possible using the combined shipping function that allows you to sell multiple items by reducing the price of every additional item purchased.
   
   http://www.etsy.com/

3. Big Cartel

   

   Big Cartel allows artists and creative people to create a personal online store in minutes to sell their products and make money. The first pricing level is totally free and allows you to sell up to five products and have basic stats and store customization features. No custom domain, social media integration, nor coupon codes are available. Big Cartel retains no transaction fee for your sales. Payment gateways supported are credit cards and PayPal. If you want to have advanced features, you have to switch to a professional pricing plan (starting from $9.99/mo) that lets you sell up to 25 products, fully customize your online store, have a custom domain name for your shop, enjoy improved analytics and also have the ability to sell discount codes.
   
   http://bigcartel.com/

4. Vendder

   

   Vendder is a free online service that allows you to create an ecommerce store in minutes. You can sell up to 30 products, customize the layout of your online store, integrate the store inside your own blog, sell in multiple languages and more. Vendder retains a transaction fee of 3.5% of the total sale price for every item you sell. No custom domain, social media integration, nor coupon / discount codes are supported. The only payment method supported is PayPal.
   
   http://vendder.com/

5. Shoply

   

   Shoply allows yo to open a free online store without installing anything on your computer. You can sell up to 15 products, promote your stuff on social media, customize the layout of your online store, and much more. No coupon /discount codes are supported, nor you can create an online store with a custom domain name. The transaction fee applied by Shoply is set at 6% of the total sale price. If you want pro features like advanced analytics, a lower transaction fee of 5%, a custom domain name, or the ability to sell up to 50 products, you must opt for a professional plan starting at $19.99/mo. Payment gateways accepted are credit cards and PayPal.
   
   http://shoply.com

6. TynyPay.me

   

   TynyPay.me allows you to start selling your own products online for free in a matter of minutes. Right on the homepage you can fully customize your product offering and start selling right away without the need to customize or set an online store first. There is no limitation to the number of products you can sell, you can promote your products on social media and also geolocalize yourself to foster local sales. No custom domain, nor coupon / discount codes are available. For each sale you make, TynyPay.me retains a transaction fee of 5% of the total sale price. Payment gateway systems accepted are PayPal and credits cards.
   
   http://www.tinypay.me/

7. Vendr

   

   Vendr is an online service that allows you to create a free web-based store in minutes. By subscribing the first (free) pricing plan available, you can sell up to five products, customize the layout of your online store, sell in 15 languages, integrate your store inside your own blog, and more. Vendder retains no transaction fee on your sales. No custom domain, social media integration, nor coupon / discount codes are supported. Payment gateway system available are PayPal, credit cards and Google Checkout. If you want to sell up to 25 products, track your inventory and be able to sell coupon codes, you must go for a professional plan starting at $9.95/mo.
   
   http://www.vendr.com/

8. Upload N’ Sel

   

   Upload N’ Sell lets you sell your own digital products online in a matter of minutes and without spending a dime. Right from the homepage, you can fully customize your product offering and start selling right away up to five products without worrying about store customization or settings. Also, Upload N’ Sell retains no transaction fee on your sales. No social media integration, custom domain, nor coupon / discount codes are supported. The only payment method supported is PayPal.
   
   http://www.uploadnsell.com/

9. Yokaboo

   

   Yokaboo is a web-based service that allows you to create a free online store in minutes. Yokaboo lets you sell up to six products, customize your online store design, track the statistics of your online store and more. Payment gateways available are credit cards and PayPal. Also, Yokaboo retains no transaction fee when you sell an item. It is not possible to use coupon / discount codes, have a custom domain name for you online shop, nor integrate your site with social media. If you want all these features you need to purchase a professional pricing plan starting at $14.99/mo, which also gives you Google Analytics integration and the ability to sell up to 50 products.
   
   http://www.yokaboo.com/

10. Sell Simply

    

    Sell Simply is a free auctioning service that leverages Twitter to sell your products on the Internet. You simply tweet your price offering and product details mentioning @sellSimply. You can also include a picture and hashtags in your tweets. When someone makes an offer, you will be notified via direct message so that you can evaluate and choose the winning offer. Payments are taken care using PayPal and no transaction fee is applied. You can sell as much products as you like and no custom domain, coupon / discount codes are available.
    
    http://sellsimp.ly/

11. Muncom

    

    Muncom is a web-based service that allows you to create a free online store inside your Facebook Fan Pages. You simply install Muncom on Facebook and then you can immediately start customizing your online storefront and selling your products. You can also chat with customers and embed Google Maps inside your store to geolocalize your position and specify from where you will be shipping your products. Payments are taken care using PayPal and credit cards and no transaction fee is applied. You can sell as much products as you like and no custom domain, coupon / discount codes are available. Registration is required before shopping on Muncom online stores.
    
    http://www.muncom.com/

12. Spiffy Stores

    

    Spiffy Stores is an ecommerce service that allows you to create an online store in minutes. With prices starting from $23/mo, Spiffy Stores lets you sell up to 100 products, customize your online store design, receive email notifications about your transactions, have detailed analytics integrated with Google Analytics and more. Payment gateways supported are credit cards and PayPal. For every sale, Spiffy Stores charges you a transaction fee of 3%. No coupon / discount codes, social media integration, nor custom domain are available. The next pricing level available for $54/mo lowers the transaction fee to 2%, allows you to sell up to 2,500 products and to sell discount codes.
    
    http://www.spiffystores.com.au/

Originally prepared by Robin Good and Daniele Bazzano for MasterNewMedia, and first published on Aug 9th, 2010 as “How To Create An Online Store In Minutes And Start Selling Your Products On The Internet“.

What has P2P to do with politics? Isn’t peer-to-peer related to file sharing and pirated media? As a matter of fact, peer-to-peer is not just a popular set of tools and technologies to easily share and distribute digital content, but it is also a new fascinating study field that analyzes how we could approach our future by working and operating in a collaborative and sharing fashion rather than in a competitive and exploitative one.

Photo credit: Robin Good

This peer-to-peer vision is all centered around the cooperative creation of a truly sustainable future, not based on speculative and unregulated exploitation of natural resources, but on a social dynamic of voluntary spontaneous participation. The overarching goal is the creation of common goods, products and services for local, self-sustainable communities.

As such, the P2P political movement is shaped by open source, local self-reliance and a shared sense of the urgency of exploring and defining sustainable futures and it is made up of tens of thousands of independent, decentralized actors connected by expertise and skill affinity as well as by local projects and endeavours.

On the other hand, the current political economy is based on the fundamental misconception that natural resources are unlimited.

Not only. The same system is also responsible for creating artificial scarcity for potentially abundant cultural resources by leveraging copyright and similar laws to discourage re-use and replication of intellectual works.

This combination of pseudo-abundance and artificial scarcity does two things:

a) it destroys the biosphere and

b) it hampers the nourishing and growth of social innovation and of an open culture.

In a P2P-based society the situation is practically reversed: the limits of natural resources are recognized, and the focus is shifted to the potentially infinite abundance of immaterial resources as the core operating fulcrum.

The peer-to-peer political approach favors vocational work, co-operation and collaborative approaches where individuals operate together to create and distribute value to their peers.

According to Michel Bauwens, the peer-to-peer movement evangelist and publisher of the P2PFoundation web hub, we are approaching times in which our present working and economic paradigms may have to give in to completely new ways of organizing, producing wealth and of relating to each other on this planet.

If you want to understand what peer-to-peer politics are all about, and why a peer-to-peer political system could be a good candidate to potentially replace our present political and economic system in the future, this in-depth video interview I have recently shot with Michel Bauwens, gives you immediate insight into why the present global system of neoliberal capitalism is close to collapsing and why a P2P-based society may be an attractive alternative socio-economic model to consider for the future.

The Importance of a System Based on Creating Value

Duration: 2′ 27”

Full English Text Transcription

Michel Bauwens: I wanted to discuss some of the political aspects of peer-to-peer and the Commons.

The first point I want to make is the following and it is a kind of meditation of how do societies change.

The classic left position was that the workers take power, then they change everything and create a new society – this is not exactly the approach of the P2P Foundation.

What I propose is based on the reading of history – which is basically the following:

When the system enters in a crisis, for example the end of the Roman empire, it:

• cannot grow any longer,
• cannot get slaves so easily and it
• turns into some kind of a crisis.

Then the élite within a society will look for solutions and will try to find other ways to create and sustain value.

Within a slave-centered Roman economy, we have some slave owners that create serfs, which were called “coloni“. They re-align themselves to to this new mode of creating value.

Of course, at the bottom you have also a change, because slaves become serfs. They can live on the land, have family, etc…

Societies only change when the old system breaks down and then the new system takes over. Of course that is a complicated historical process, but this is the kind of dynamic I want to explain.

Similarly, today you have:

• A re-alignment of a section of the capital – which I call a netarctical capital, which enables and empowers social cooperation,
• the people who work are becoming peer producers and participants in this new system.

This is the importance of people actually having a new system creating value, which out-cooperates and out-competes the classic model of IP proprietary capitalism. This is the seed of a new society, a new way of creating and distributing value.

I see a clear political link between the new way of creating value and the seed form for a new society.

This is one point.

The Grand Coalition of Commons

Duration: 3′ 14″

Michel Bauwens: The second point is: How do you create a social movement around this change?

I use the concept of the “grand coalition of the Commons“. It is based on my analysis of what is wrong with today’s society and basically is the following.

Our society is based on pseudo-abundance, false abundance, the think nature is infinite and we have a system which eats up the Earth’s resources and the biosphere and basically it is endangering life on Earth.

We need an economic system which recognizes this natural scarcity, this limitation of the planet.

The other problem is what I call artificial scarcity or pseudo-scarcity.

The idea is that we have a system of intellectual property rights, copyright, patents, trademarks, different things which basically say: “You cannot copyright unless you pay us or you ask for permission.”

Innovations are often:

• Locked down,
• privatized and
• kept in check.

This is a real problem, especially in an era of climate change where we actually need very fast innovation.

You cannot mobilize open communities, open designs and open codes for your software if you do not have a form of sharing where people can say: “Yes, if I contribute, somebody else will not take it away and privatize it.“.

If these analysis are correct, we have two forces that can already form part of what I call “the coalition of Commons“:

1. One is all those forces on the planet which want to change the economy into a sustainable economy:
   • Sustainability movements,
   • environmental movements,
   • green businesses, etc..
2. Then we have all the forces that want a free culture:
   • Open science,
   • open access publishing,
   • free software movements and all of that.

   We have a free culture movement and a sustainable economy movement.

3. Let’s imagine that we find a solution to this crisis of society, but that does not involve social justice. My idea is that that will not work, because then you have to manage social conflict and social tensions.

   We need a solution that actually combines those three – it is like a tripod.

   We also need social justice moments involved in this change.

What I call the grand coalition of Commons is the building of a new social movement that:

• Is centered around the Commons and civil society,
• develops Commons-oriented policy frameworks to protect the Earth, to free culture, to achieve social justice and a more fair distribution of the planet resources to humanity.

That was the second point.

How Is Political Struggle Related to Peer Production

Duration: 3′ 25″

Michel Bauwens: The third point I want to make is the following: How is political struggle related to peer production, open infrastructures and the Commons?

I think the point is the following and again it is like a tripod.

1. The first thing is we need constructive social movements which build the alternative.

   If you go in the streets, you disagree with what is happening and you do not have an alternative program, it is not going to work. You cannot just say no.

   You need to build and prove that what you want is actually a viable method. This is why I am in favor of building open infrastructures in every area of social life. But this is a slow process and sometimes you do not have the time.

   We will have take into account the current conjuncture, which is basically: There was a big financial meltdown, all the money went to the bailout of the banks and now there is no more money for welfare, pensions and education.

2. Let’s say the European welfare system is under sustained attack. Whether we want it or not, it is going to create social tension.

   We are going to have movements on the right and on the left, radical movements are going to spring up and they are going to fight it out, eventually in the streets.

   This is why you cannot ignore politics and social struggles, but what you have to find is a connection between:

   • the constructive social movements who are building new things – let’s say this is the slower road – and
   • social movements, which can in a very short time sometimes become dominant.

     They can lose or they can win, but you can have massive mobilizations that can occur, especially in times of economic crisis like the one we are be going through in the next 8-15 years.

   It is very important to find these connections.

3. The third connection is around policy making and the state.

   I want to stress that is not just enough to build new things and it is not enough to have a social movement. You need to have policy. Why?

   Let’s take the file sharing.

   Young people want to share – this is a transgressive activity, a sub-cultural activity.

   You just say: “No, I do not care about society, I want to do what I want to do.” You get attacked.

   The RIAA, MPAA – the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America – are going to enact loss and they are going to put you in jail. This creates the feeling around for a political reaction.

   We see that from this transgressive social movement what you have is a Pirate Party and the Free Culture movement, which are protecting these new cultural rights.

   You have a:

   • Transgressive phase,
   • constructive phase – Creative Commons,
   • political phase.

   Then you have to engage with the existing institutions of society, eventually create new institutions, but you have to engage with politics and policy making, in order to protect these new ways of creating value and these new ways of creating happiness in your life.

It is not going to happen just automatically, by just doing your things.

You have to take into account the whole totality of society and you have to be active in different fields.

This is the third point I wanted to make about peer-to-peer and politics.

Video clips originally recorded by Robin Good for MasterNewMedia. First published on August 3rd, 2010 as “Peer-To-Peer Politics And Its Vision For The Future – A Video Interview With Michel Bauwens“.

About the author

Michel Bauwens (1958) is a Belgian integral philosopher and peer-to-peer theorist. He has worked as an internet consultant, information analyst for the United States Information Agency, information manager for British Petroleum (where he created one of the first virtual information centers), and is former editor-in-chief of the first European digital convergence magazine, the Dutch language Wave.

To know more about Michel Bauwens you can visit these sections of the P2P Foundation wiki:

• Energy and Sustainability -http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Ecology
• Open Manufacturing – http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Manufacturing
• Open Money – http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Money
• Open Design – http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Design
• Open Design projects – http://p2pfoundation.net/Product_Hacking

“How do I mobilize my website?“ is probably a question you have already started asking. But after the initial curiosity, you have not found yet the time to think seriously about when and how you are going to convert your web site or blog into a mobile version that can be properly viewed on any iPhone, iPad or on any other modern smartphone. In this MasterNewMedia guide we have identified and reviewed all of the best tools and services out there, that can help you build or convert your blog into a full mobile site.

Photo credit: Robin Good

The forecasted rise in mobile data traffic and the rising usage of smartphones are statistical confirmations that the time in which web publishers like you need to embrace the opportunity to deliver content to a wider audience and across multiple devices is here.

BlackBerries, iPhones, iPads, Android phones and other standard mobile phones may be already a significant part of the traffic you receive on your site, and the tools that can make your web site fully accessible on mobile devices are many, easy and inexpensive. So why not creating a better experience for your readers connecting to you via their mobile devices?

Well, a web site displayed on a standard computer screen is not the same as a web site displayed on an iPhone or BlackBerry. There are design and layout issues, legibility and navigation problems, the need for things to load rapidly and efficiently. In particular:

• Screen size: Screens are smaller and content on your pages need to be arranged differently than your standard website. Mostly, you need to organize information in a vertical fashion, but avoiding as much as possible the need to scroll down.
• Images: All pictures on your pages should be correctly resized and made smaller and lighter to ensure fast page loading.
• Connection speed: Your mobile site should be optimized to have fast-loading pages and to deal with connection drops or other issues related to connection speed. This is particularly important for a mobile site that sells products as no user wants to be worried of connection drops in the middle of a transaction.
• Widgets and plugins: All extra component like widgets, plugins and add-ons may slow down your mobile site and, most importantly, may not work at all on mobile phones. For example, Apple devices do not support Flash, so if you are creating a mobile website for them, avoid all Flash-based elements and, where possible, go for HTML5 instead.
• Sensors: Last-gen phones have physical sensors like accelerometers, gyroscopes, light sensors and other bells and whistles built-in. On one hand, you should know very well if these sensors may cause extra issues for mobile navigators and, on the other hand, you should understand how to leverage these sensors to offer a superior navigation experience.

To help you identify the best tools to convert your existing site into a fully mobile one, the MasterNewMedia research team has searched, identified and collected the best tools out there to convert sites into mobile versions and to make your evaluation as effective as possible, we have prepared a tools’ mindmap and a set of comparative tables illustrating side-by-side the strength and weakness of each one of these mobile website builder tools.

Here the criteria that our team has used for this comparison:

• Custom domain: Create a specific URL that identifies your mobile blog site.
• Ready-made templates: Style your mobile-optimized website with readily-available templates.
• Mobile analytics: Supervise traffic, revenues, entrance keyword and other data of your mobile blog site.
• Ad integration: Integrate third-party ads in your mobile blog layout.
• Automatic redirection: Redirect your readers to a mobile-optimized page of your site when they are visiting your blog site with a mobile phone.
• Price: Cost of the mobile website builder tool.
• Pro features: Advanced features present in pro / paid accounts.

In addition to mobile website creator tools, in this guide you will find also those online services that allow you to visualize your blog as a mobile site for testing purposes or that allow you to redirect your standard web visitors to a an automatically-generated mobile version of your website or blog.

If instead you are more into coding than in utilizing web-based solutions, you can leverage the power of CSS3 media queries to create a mobile version of your website.

Here all of the best tools and services to mobilize your website or blog:

Best Tools To Convert Your Blog Into a Mobile Site – Comparison Tables

Best Tools to Convert Your Blog Into a Mobile Site

1. Mobify

   

   Mobify is a web-based service that you can use to convert your blog into a mobile site. Starting with the free version of Mobify, you already have the ability to optimize and design your mobile site for thousands of mobile devices. You also have the ability to choose a custom domain for your mobile site and install a plugin on your blog that automatically redirects visitors to the mobile version when using their phones to reach your site. By switching to a pricing plan (starting from $249/mo) you also get advanced support, mobile analytics and custom branding. No ad integration, nor ready-made templates are available.
   http://mobify.me/

2. MoFuse

   

   MoFuse is a an online service that lets you mobilize your website. MoFuse allows you to convert your blog into a mobile site for more than 5000 supported mobile devices while taking care of displaying your content according to screen dimensions and connection speed. With the first step of its pricing offer ($7.95/mo), the service also provides mobile SEO and analytics, automatic redirection and standard support. If you go for a professional plan (starting at $39/mo) you also receive advanced features like custom mobile CSS, Google Analytics integration, mobile sitemaps and more. No custom domain, ready-made mobile templates, nor ad integration are available.
   http://mofuse.com/

3. MobiSiteGalore

   

   MobiSiteGalore is a web-based service that allows you to create a mobile-based version of your own blog. With pricing plans starting from $7.99/mo, MobiSiteGalore offers you a custom domain, basic mobile analytics, SEO and automatic redirection. Taking one step forward, for $11.99/mo you can also remove MobiSiteGalore logo from your mobile site, integrate ads on your pages, have advanced analytics features, include web widgets and more. No ready-made mobile templates are supported.
   http://www.mobisitegalore.com/index.html

4. DotMobi Instant Mobilizer

   

   DotMobi Instant Mobilizer is an online mobile website builder that allows you to optimize your blog content for mobile viewing. For prices around €1.51 – 1.81/mo, DotMobi Instant Mobilizer promises custom branding, improved search engine discoverability, custom domain name for your mobile site, automated Google Maps directions and more. No ready-made templates, ad mobile analytics, ad integration, nor automatic redirection are available from DotMobi Instant Mobilizer.
   http://instantmobilizer.com/

5. WireNode

   

   WireNode is a free mobile website creator that allows you to turn your blog into a mobile site. You can build mobile-optimized websites for most mobile phones on the market, analyze the statistics of your blog, have mobile SEO, integrate mobile widgets and support automatic redirection without spending a dime. If you want also to have a custom domain for your mobile site, remove third-party ads from your pages and get 20 SMS credits, you must switch to the first pricing plan, available for €15/mo. No ads integration, nor ready-made templates are supported.
   http://www.wirenode.com/

6. Onbile

   

   Onbile is a free online platform for creating and managing the mobile version of your blog. With a few clicks you can customize and build the pages and sections of your mobile site using one of the ready-made templates available. Then you only have to set an automatic redirection that brings visitors to your mobile site when landing your standard website using a phone. No custom domain, mobile analytics, ads integration, nor ready-made templates are supported.
   http://www.onbile.com/

7. Mippin Mobilizer

   

   Mippin Mobilizer is a free service that allows you to mobilize your blog or website. To start building your site, you must submit the URL of your blog or RSS feed, then you can use one of the ready-made templates available to style your mobile site. You can also fine-tune your mobile layout and choose to integrate a third-party ad service like AdMob to monetize your mobile pages. No custom domain, mobile analytics, nor automatic redirection are available.
   http://mippin.com/web/maker/mobilize.jsp

Best Tools to Visualize Your Mobile Site

1. FeedM8

   

   FeedM8 allows you to visualize your mobile site. Just enter the URL of your blog site and FeedM8 will automatically generate a URL that you can use to reach a mobile version of your site, free of charge. You can also receive your mobile URL via SMS by entering your phone number (only available for the US and Canada).
   http://www.feedm8.com/web/

2. Mowser

   

   Mowser is a free service by DotMobi that allows you to visualize how your blog is rendered onto a mobile phone. No custom URL is generated to reach your mobile site, since the service is only for testing purposes.
   http://mowser.com/

3. Google Mobilizer

   

   Google Mobilizer is a free service from Google that allows you to check how a standard mobile phone would display your website. You just have to enter the URL of your website and select if you want images to be hidden.
   http://www.google.com/gwt/n

4. WPtouch Pro

   

   WPtouch Pro is a popular plugin for the WordPress blogging platform that lets you create a mobile version of your WP blog and also automatically redirect visitors to the mobile version when needed. WPtouch is highly customizable and it is priced at $29.
   http://www.bravenewcode.com/products/wptouch-pro/

5. Blogger Touch

   

   Blogger Touch is a free widget that allows you to generate a mobile version of your Blogger blog and takes care also of redirecting mobile visitors to the mobile-optimized version of your site. Blogger Touch even allows you to redirect vistors to a mobile domain of your choice.
   http://bloggertouch.sopili.net/

Originally prepared by Robin Good and Daniele Bazzano for MasterNewMedia, and first published on Jul 26th, 2010 as “How To Mobilize My Website: Best Tools To Convert Your Blog Into A Mobile Site“.

How can you help your readers find what they are looking for on your website? How can you facilitate their need to know what to click next or where to look when in search for something? Navigation instructions, or as someone calls them, interface design instructions for the user, are text-based and visual elements that can help your web visitors understand more easily what they need to click or where they can look to find what they are looking for. As such, these navigation signposts and visual directions can make a hell of a difference in converting temporary visitors into long term clients and fans. In this report you will learn what are the key basic elements you need to pay attention to, to design effective user-facing navigation instructions.

Photo credit: António Nunes

People have things they want to accomplish, whether it’s making a purchase, finding a recipe, or learning how to do something new.

Inherent in many web page designs, therefore, is information to help a user perform an action.

…In addition to these types of visual cues, we often write instructions to assist users in knowing what to do next.

These instructions guide the eyes and minds of the individual to look at the appropriate place and to take the appropriate action.

In this report, Connie Malamed identifies and explains which are the most critical aspects to pay attention to when working to add or refine user navigation messages and instructions to help your online readers find what they are looking for or take a specific action.

Specifically, some of the key aspects highlighted in this report, showcase the importance of several unique factors in designing effective user navigation instructions:

• Maximizing audience targeting
• Countering information abundance
• Writing style
• Improving accessibility
• Testing relevance

Leaving nothing to chance or luck, but planning carefully how to provide sensible navigation help to readers and customers looking to complete a specific task on your website, is a valuable investment that any professional web publisher providing content, products or services beyond the typical blog, should seriously consider paying close attention to.

Here, the full report in detail:

The Small Print: Writing User Interface Instructions

by Connie Malamed

User Interface Instructions: What and What For

A person’s behavior on the web is highly goal-driven.

People have things they want to accomplish, whether it’s making a purchase, finding a recipe, or learning how to do something new.

Inherent in many web page designs, therefore, is information to help a user perform an action.

For example, if you design a button that must be clicked to reach a desired goal (e.g., placing an item in a shopping cart), then shadowing the button so it appears to be raised will help your audience understand that the shape is a clickable object.

In addition to these types of visual cues, we often write instructions to assist users in knowing what to do next.

These instructions guide the eyes and minds of the individual to look at the appropriate place and to take the appropriate action.

The Importance of Mental Models

Designing and writing the instructions that are part of the user interface is both an art and science, involving copywriting and design skills as well as an understanding of how people use mental models.

A mental model is an internal representation of how things work. It’s a broad conception of causal actions and their effects.

People apply their mental models to new situations so they don’t need to relearn everything from scratch. This helps to make us cognitively efficient.

Through experience, users develop mental models of how different types of websites work.

They learn the types of actions to take on an ecommerce site versus the types of actions that will work with a stock photo site.

People apply their mental models to new situations so they don’t need to relearn everything from scratch. This means people will apply their stereotype or mental model of similar websites to how your website works.

Why Clear User Interface Instructions Are So Important

This is one of the main reasons user interface instructions are so important.

People have an unpleasant experience when their mental models are inaccurate or incorrect. It causes:

• frustration,
• user errors and
• a failure to accomplish a goal.

A frustrated user might look for another website that’s easier to use.

Writing easy-to-understand instructions and presenting them aesthetically can ward off these types of problems.

Good instructions will guide website visitors, even if their mental models are imprecise or erroneous.

So here are some guidelines for writing user interface instructions that I’ve gleaned from years of designing online learning as well as gems from usability research.

Know Your Audience First

When you know the characteristics of your audience, you can imagine them and direct your words to them.

Unless your visitors are a savvy, homogeneous group, it’s best to assume they’ll need some guidance to achieve their goals.

Think beyond the obvious audience characteristics to consider the subtleties of how readers might perceive and react to your words.

• Will they understand idioms?
• What about humor?

Notice the example above.

The humorous instructions on the CAPTCHA form could only work with a sophisticated and experienced audience.

Inexperienced computer users and those who are not fluent in English would have no idea that “Verify you’re human” means to type the alphanumeric characters in the box.

Counter Information Abundance

Finding balance is always an issue.

When writing user interface instructions, include enough detail so users know exactly what to do, but not so much detail that it becomes difficult to process the information.

People can only process small amounts of information at one time.

You can help the situation by writing instructions in plain and simple language, which should help visitors accomplish their tasks efficiently and quickly.

Try to use short sentences when possible.

For example, this sentence could easily be broken into two: “Click the Add to Cart button, then click Check Out at the top of the screen.”

This guideline goes along with the brevity advice above, but is often best to do at the end of the writing process.

At the end, you look at your writing from a different perspective. It’s easier to see which information is irrelevant, because it adds to the confusion quotient.

Deleting extraneous and superfluous details will tighten up the final copy.

In the example below, the communication could be more effective with fewer words.

There’s no need to sacrifice clarity for personality. With balance, you can have both.

Phrase Your Instructions Effectively

The task of writing accurately involves a subtle discrimination between words with similar meanings.

Usability research shows that people scan a web page rather than read it. Thus, your wording should communicate effectively while someone is on the fly and barely paying attention.

• Use words that promote clarity. “Select a date” is okay, but “Click on a date” is more accurate.
• Avoid double negatives, such as “I do not want to unsubscribe.” Also,
• Stay away from jargon that some people won’t understand, like industry acronyms and technical terms.

Speaking of precision in word choice, when you look at this menu below, do you understand the difference between explore and browse?

[Note: There is some disagreement over whether "select" or "click" is more appropriate for people using assistive technologies.]

Active Vs. Passive Voice

The active voice is crisp and clean and will move people to take action.

The passive voice makes readers yawn.

Compare this sentence in both voices:

• Active – “Click the Journal link to search for an article.“
• Passive – “The Journal link should be clicked when you are ready to search for an article.“

How To Provide Clear Website Navigation Instructions

Designing user interface instructions can be a challenge.

You must determine where they belong in the visual and information hierarchy. Although they need to be noticed by users, they shouldn’t overpower the page. And as a design element, they must fit in well with the surrounding environment.

Bottom line: plan for instruction text during the initial phases of design.

1) Vertical Spacing

If the instructions are longer than one line, it’s important that readers know which instructions belong together.

The leading (or vertical spacing) between related sentences should be large enough to enable legibility yet small enough to show the sentences are associated.

When there are several steps, keep each step separate by increasing the line spacing. Number the instructions if they are complex or will be perceived as such.

2) Typeface

Think hard about the type as a design element.

Use a typeface and style coherent with the rest of the site design.

Consider the size of the font. The user instructions must be legible by people of all ages.

Avoid bitmapped text whenever possible so users can enlarge the text if necessary.

3) Graphics

Yep. Sometimes it’s nearly impossible to say something in words.

A graphic provides support and makes text comprehensible, as in this explanation of where to find your account number on a magazine label.

4) Text Style

It’s okay to add a little personality to your user interface instructions and system messages. It might help your visitors have a pleasant or humorous experience.

Just ensure that your between-the-lines message can never be interpreted as a put-down.

For example, the instructions below help visitors feel better. After reading the message, you don’t feel like such a loser for failing to keep passwords in a place where they can be found.

5) Accessibility

It’s important that your small print instructions can be read by people who have difficulty with small print and/or use devices to read computer screens.

Some basic accessibility guidelines for writing user interface instructions are to:

• Avoid using graphical text so it can be enlarged (discussed in #2 above);
• provide text alternatives to graphical content so it can be translated into other forms such as Braille; and
• clearly separate the instructions from the background so they can be easily seen.

In addition, use hyperlinks contextually so that they make sense if the person can’t see the screen.

For example, a link that states, “Instructions for using this form” is better than a “Click here” link.

6) Testing

Test instructions with sample audience members, people outside of your office and with no prior knowledge of what it is you are doing.

1. Observe one or more people performing the task for which you’ve written instructions.
2. Note any difficulties they have and revise the instructions.
3. Repeat the process until people accomplish the task without problems.

Conclusion

You may be surprised at the time and effort it takes to write effective user interface instructions. Yet it might be one of the most valuable endeavors you pursue in designing a successful user interface.

Through the simplicity of comprehensible instructions, you can achieve so much – user assistance, appropriate tone and personality, and showing that you care.

Originally written by Connie Malamed for Understanding Graphics, and first published on February 1st, 2010 as The Small Print: Writing User Interface Instructions.

About Connie Malamed

Connie Malamed is the author of Visual Language For Designers: Creating Graphics That People Understand. She writes regularly at Understanding Graphics and is the principal of Connie Malamed Consulting. Connie consults, presents and writes at the intersection of cognitive psychology, visual communication and learning.

Photo credits:
The Importance of Mental Models In User Interface Design Instructions – Ktsdesign
User Interface Design Instructions: Know Your Audience First – SiliconValleyWatcher
User Interface Design Instructions: Active Vs. Passive Voice – Ronen
How To Design User Interface Instructions – Jesper Noer
Typeface – Wichita State University
Examples – Connie Malamed
Other Images – Clipart