Web 2.0

Network Analysis of interconnected roles of social media and traditional media in shaping Social Movements: Results and Organisational Implications - Part 1

2011-12-08T03:07:14Z

In this blog series we will discuss the role of social media and traditional media in shaping Social Movements. Social Movements of the kind witnessed in the recent past such as anti-government protests in the Middle East and North Africa, occupy Wall street protests in the US and Anna Hazare movement in India have all been built upon groundswell support. One common characteristic of these social movements is that they have all leveraged the power of Internet and social media to galvanise their actions for maximum effect. The activists leveraged social media destinations such as Twitter, Youtube, Facebook and various blogging platforms for publicizing protests and mobilizing fellow supporters and dissidents. Protesters used these platforms for coordinating across distributed protest groups, scheduling and organizing protests as well as informing the world about these protests. While social movements were gathering momentum across geographies, the role of traditional media such as television and print was not just restricted to reporting the social movements via their conventional channels. Traditional media extensively leveraged the very same social media destinations used by protesters and dissidents, not just to report news, but also to exert their influence on these social movements. This has interesting implications for social movements, online interest group formation, role of social media as well as role of traditional media. Understanding the active role played by traditional media in influencing social movements by leveraging social media would help to establish the extent of influence of various entities on the success or failure of groundswell social movements and marketing campaigns. This blog series is a preview of our forthcoming research paper which attempts to analyze the role of traditional media in leveraging social media particularly during the Anna Hazare movement in India. We analyse the archived Tweet feeds, Google Trends data as well as media coverage of protest movements and explore the reasons as to how and why traditional media amplified the sentiments of protesters by leveraging social media and their role in influencing the pace of social movements. We applied Social Network Analysis techniques to better understand the role of various entities involved in the movement. The results provide interesting insights into the interplay between social movements, social media and traditional media. In this first blog, we list the data sources, methodology and metrics used for the analysis. This will be followed by the next blog where we examine the role of key entities/nodes in the network. This final blog will wrap the discussion with key insights and implications of the analysis for social movements and the parallels we can draw for marketing campaigns and organisational implications.

The Anna Hazare movement was Tweeted with two prominent hashtags #annahazare and #janlokpal. The data used for our Social Network Analysis included Tweets with the hashtag #annahazare. We analysed about 25,000 tweets between Aug 24 2011 and Oct 08 2011. The final data used for analysis had 7365 nodes and 14,666 edges. The network analysis and visualization program Gephi, the open-source graph visualization and manipulation software was used to derive the below network graph. Each node in the graph represents a Twitter id and the edges or the connections represent the interaction pattern across these nodes. In the next blog we will discuss more network statistic and the roles played by various entities in the protest movement.

A Moment of Pride for a Team Member and the Team (of course)

2011-04-30T19:37:10Z

Proud to share that one of our team member, Krishna Chaitanya, was recently selected as a Most Valuable Professional (Internet Explorer) for the year 2011 by Microsoft. He was selected for his "technical expertise and contributions to the developer community". This status was awarded to him for his contributions such as presentations and blog articles, and participation in the product group discussions related to web browsers, (JavaScript/jQuery/DOM, AJAX, web standards etc.)

The pride is, essentially, in the fact that he is the only Indian in a list of 14 MVPs from across the world for the year 2011. Krishna recently received a plaque and some memorabilia from Microsoft to announce his inclusion.

]]> Krishna has been, and continues to be, an extremely active geek working with the latest web technologies particularly from the Microsoft stable. While the current acclaim is the biggest so far, he has been receiving several such commendations for his work in ASP.NET, jQuery, web integration, performance tuning and best practices in front end engineering etc. He has received Microsoft MVP award in 2010 in ASP.NET category and he is a regular speaker at Microsoft Community Tech Days, Virtual Tech Days, technical Bar Camps etc. He also actively takes part in coding competitions, hackathons, developer events both online and offline. Krishna, an unassuming person, is single mindedly focused on technology discussions to an extent to be considered a "nerd". Guess, this dedication has helped him experiment with technologies and help make them better by identifying areas of improvements and suggesting innovations that could address these shortfalls.

Krishna is an avid blogger (http://www.novogeek.com/) and his personal page is replete with various small and large projects that he works on. He is active on other social media as well such as twitter and facebook.

We are proud of you Krishna. People like you raise the overall intellectual quotient of our team and energize everyone in striving for excellence. These are qualities we look for in people interested in working with our team.

The focus is shifting, Mobile Web on Radar

2011-03-24T09:24:39Z

Do you need a wrist watch to check time?

Do you click snaps using a high-tech digital Camera?

Do you need a computer to check emails?

Your answer to all these questions is "hmm, not really", right?

Because for doing all these simple but essential tasks you most probably use a single slick device, your cell phone! Don't you?

When the computer revolution began, Computers had been a monopoly of technocrats and businesses. And With advent of IBM personal computer (popularly known as PC), computing technology suddenly entered your drawing room. It essentially spurred a huge demand for word-processing applications, limited mathematical computational abilities and desktop games. As industry was catching up with the newer needs there came internet and World Wide Web. Personal computers those stood alone until then started talking to each other and PC transformed into an excellent communication device. Browsers, email applications gained popularity and in the twinkling of an eye web and internet emerged as one of the most powerful flattener of the world.

Digitization possibilities of practically anything compounded by resilient wireless infrastructure and swift rise in computing capabilities of cell phones and electronic devices made it possible to access digital information anywhere, anytime and forever. Devices grew smarter and took up functions of each other's. Today radio can be heard using internet, fax can be sent and received using computer, mobiles can be used to browse web. This creative and simultaneously disruptive phenomenon is known as digital convergence. It has essentially commoditized the web and digital information thereof.

Smart mobile devices hold a central position in this interesting revolution. As far as a non-techy individual is consider, her needs and usage of telecommunication and digital technology is limited to

· Searching information, googling

· Clicking snaps

· Sending and receiving e-mails

· Social networking (Facebook, twitter etc.)

· Making and receiving voice calls

· Texting

· Playing games

· Listening to a radio

· Listening to music

If you look at any average range mobile phone that is available in market today has all required features and at much cheaper price than price of a desktop or a laptop. Furthermore it has certain additional advantages to offer.

· Unlike a computer, a mobile is always with you as an integrated part of you and your lifestyle

· Unlike a desktop or a laptop, cell phone is always on

· Mobile interface is quite intuitive to learn and levels of literacy do not impact much as far as simple tasks are concerned

· Mobile devices are inherently multimodal

· Thousands of mobile apps are available to enrich the capabilities of your phone

And all this compels us to shift our focus to mobile web and accessibility of websites using mobile devices.

In my next post I will talk about certain constraints posed by mobile devices while interacting with web.

Shrirang P. Sahasrabudhe

Accessibility Expert

FutureWebResearchLab- Infosys Labs

Call for papers for the AMCIS 2011 MiniTrack: 'Pervasive Computing'

2011-01-10T04:00:24Z

Call for papers for the AMCIS 2011 MiniTrack titled 'Pervasive Computing'. Potential authors could be academicians and practitioners. Details given below:

Americas Conference on Information Systems
AMCIS 2011
Detroit, Michigan
August 4-8, 2011

Call for Papers for the Mini Track

Pervasive Computing

Keywords: Sensor Networks, Mobility, Social Networks, Cloud Computing, Software as a service, Intelligent Agents, Analytics

Motivation

The term Pervasive Computing was first popularized by Mark Weiser in his seminal 1991 paper The Computer for the 21st Century that described his vision of ubiquitous computing. Mark Weiser's version of Pervasive Computing related to the creation of environments involving computing and communication capability, which seamlessly integrated with the end users. Pervasive Computing has the end user at the focus, with various technologies, devices and networks facilitating seamless computing, communication, collaboration as well as commerce related functionalities to the end users. This is made possible by embedding sensors, controllers, devices and data into the physical spaces of human beings thereby facilitating seamless interactions. Pervasive Computing is revolutionizing the way humans interact with other humans, devices, applications, networks, sensors, infrastructure, machines, services etc. Pervasive Computing have characteristics such as pervasive computing devices including mobile phones, appliances, sensors etc., pervasive networks including wired and wireless networks, pervasive ecosystem entities participating from formal as well as informal social networks whereby entities engage across multiple locations, platforms etc., pervasive data resulting from exponential growth of data (both structured as well as unstructured) created by social networks, ecosystem entities, sensors etc., pervasive computing and storage power available on the go via cloud computing technologies.

Pervasive computing is one of the major pillars on which tomorrow's enterprise are being built. By turning nearly everything into a computing device, pervasive computing is making it imperative for companies to reach their end-users through a multitude of devices -- both wired and wireless. Users in turn are accessing content and applications through multiple channels as well as social networks, resulting in an exponential growth of data that need to be constantly monitored and analyzed. Social networking platforms are engaging end-customers in an informal manner and the accumulated content and ideas become an aggregation of the collective intelligence of end-users. Intelligent enterprises are drawing inferences as well as key decision points by analyzing data about their customers, competitors, vendors, markets, products as well as services. Enterprises are able to garner localized, specific intelligence using sensor networks, thereby enabling them to develop innovative products and services, which are better aligned to market needs.

Possible topics include:

• Pervasive computing devices requiring the need to reach end customers across multitude of devices

• Social Computing and social networks which are engaging end customers across multiple locations, platforms etc.

• Exponential growth of data (both structured as well as unstructured), created by end customers, sensors etc. requiring the need to analyse and visualize the data

• Leveraging easy availability of computing power on the go in the form of cloud computing

• Decision making by understanding and analyzing the collective intelligence created across various customer touch points as well as social networks.

• Effectively connect and engage end customers via formal as well as informal social computing and social networks

• Better understanding of customer behavior using techniques such as text analytics, natural language processing as well as social network analysis.

• Enhanced information flow from distributed locations using sensor networks.

• Improved visibility across the supply chain and real-time data availability.

• Connect and engage end customers accessing products and services via multitude of devices such as mobile, TV, sensors, appliances as well as via multitude of delivery channels such as wired/wireless internet, bluetooth etc.

• Better monitoring of production processes to optimize operations, reduce costs, enhance production as well as prevent and/or detect health and safety issues.

Mini track chair

Dr. Jai Ganesh
Principal Research Scientist
Infosys Technologies Limited
Bangalore, 560 100
India

Call for papers for the AMCIS 2011 MiniTrack: 'Web 2.0 and collaborative value creation'

2011-01-10T03:38:47Z

Call for papers for the AMCIS 2011 MiniTrack titled 'Web 2.0 and collaborative value creation'. Potential authors could be academicians and practitioners. Details given below:

Americas Conference on Information Systems
AMCIS 2011
Detroit, Michigan
August 4-8, 2011

Call for Papers for the Mini Track

Web 2.0 and collaborative value creation

Keywords: Web 2.0, Rich user experiences, Peer-to-peer networks, Network effects, Collective Intelligence, Modularity

Motivation

Web 2.0 refers to the adoption of open technologies and architectural frameworks to facilitate participative computing. Web 2.0 is about harnessing the potential of the Internet in a more collaborative and peer-to-peer manner with emphasis on social interaction. It has less to do with technology and more to do with a metamorphosis aimed at facilitating collaborative participation and leveraging the collective intelligence of peers.

Customer and partner facing processes using Web 2.0 have the potential to not only radically transform peer-to-peer collaboration, but also inter-entity collaborations and commerce by enabling various types and combinations of business-to-consumer (B2C), business-to-business (B2B), Consumer-to-consumer (C2C), business-to-government etc. collaboration and commerce. Indeed, Web 2.0 has the potential to enable collaborative value creation across business partners. These could, for example, include scenarios such as Rich Internet Applications (RIA) based delivery tracking system leveraging Web 2.0 standards for desktop-like rich functionality on client side within a web page. There are opportunities such as providing rich information on all the convergent services subscribed to by a consumer (including third party services) leveraging Web 2.0 standards which could be achieved through the use of Mashups based on content from multiple sources (exposed using APIS, Web Feeds, Web Services etc.) to create new services. These could even be multi-channel mashups or RSS feeds. In particular, the interplay between the emerging Web 2.0 paradigm and the already popular paradigm of SOA seems to be of special interest owing to the complementarities of the two schools of thought. While Web 2.0 can offer an intelligent, rich, customizable, and interactive service consumer base for a service provider, SOA can offer the standardized conduit for the enterprise information and data to be consumed by Web 2.0 applications.

Possible topics include:

Innovative collaborative business models based on Web 2.0
Flexible peer-to-peer interaction based on Web 2.0
Web 2.0 enabled value creation strategies
Enterprise 2.0
Learning 2.0
Web 2.0 based business value Webs
Interorganizational business processes using Web services
Mashups based interorganisational collaborative services
Web 2.0 based business architectures
Impact of Web 2.0 on organizational strategies
Web 2.0 based intuitive and rich user experiences facilitating enhanced social interactions and knowledge sharing
Peer-to peer network facilitating collaboration and sharing
Leveraging network effects right at the design stage
Folksonomy and its role in enterprise information management
Role of Web 2.0 enabling technologies such as AJAX, REST Web services, RSS, Flash etc.
Facility for extension mechanisms enabling network participants to contribute
Value appropriation of Web 2.0 through micro payments
Information Quality issues in Web 2.0

Mini track chairs

Dr. Jai Ganesh
Principal Research Scientist
Infosys Technologies Limited
Bangalore, 560 100
India

Rahul Singh, PhD
Associate Professor
Department of Information Systems and Operations Management
Bryan School of Business and Economics
The University of North Carolina, Greensboro

SONAR - Three worlds. One passport.

2010-12-24T02:59:18Z

It's a new era. Brought on by a technology that blurs the line between what's real and what's virtual. Introducing, SONAR (Social Networking and Augmented Reality based Retail) - a platform that combines three worlds: the physical, virtual and social. For success in the age of digital marketing, SONAR should be on your radar.

SONAR is a patent pending software platform, which is a combination of three worlds: physical world, virtual world and the social world. We built SONAR as an innovation demonstrator for retail enterprises who want to provide immersive customer experiences. As part of this, we conducted detailed exercises based on design thinking principles including storyboarding, user studies, design, prototype, beta testing and iteratively building the system. Augmented Reality (AR) intersperses vision with computer generated information, superimposed on the user's view. AR combines the physical world and an interactive, three-dimensional virtual world. Augmented reality adds graphics and sounds to the natural world as it exists. It is a technology which blurs the line between what's real and what's computer-generated by enhancing what we see, hear, and feel. Augmented Reality has the potential to enable natural interactions and immersive user experiences by blending physical and virtual worlds. This provides users with experiences not possible in just the real or virtual worlds.

SONAR is an effort to build future ICT systems which offer immersive user experiences for retail customers. Retailers are seeking answers to issues such as differentiating user experience on their points of interaction, increasing reach to the consumer, improving conversion rates on the website, sustaining consumer loyalty, etc. In several such areas, emerging interaction technologies such as AR can make a significant difference. New interaction technologies such as AR can help retailers find answers to some of these pressing needs. Given below is a screenshot of the system. Feel free to share your feedback and write to us if you need more information on SONAR.

JetBlue violates disability rules, gets punished

2010-12-15T09:55:45Z

JetBlue is in news again, and this time also not for good reasons. Few weeks back a lawsuit was filed against JetBlue airways for inadequate accessibility of check-in kiosks at the airport in addition to the inaccessibility of their website. This time the reason for the legal action is violation of rules protecting air travelers with disabilities and for failing to disclose when flights sold by the carrier were being operated under a code-sharing arrangement. The airline is being penalized $600,000 for the mistake.

The Department of Transportation ruled that $350,000 of the amount would have to be paid by the carrier, while $250,000 could be used to establish a task force to audit the carrier's handling of passengers with disabilities create a disability customer care center and enhance the carrier's website to improve its information for travelers with disabilities.

This post may appear to be off-topic, but it is not. Though it is not about accessibility it is about violation of rights of disables. My intention to write this post is only to reiterate the need for powerful disability laws and to encourage formation of inclusive society.

If we learn to empathize with our diverse audience, it is not really difficult to realize an inclusive planet.

Shrirang Prakash Sahasrabudhe

Accessibility Specialist- SETLabs

Shrirang_s@infosys.com

BS 8878 is up

2010-12-06T10:29:47Z

First British Standard to promote web accessibility and to facilitate digital Inclusion is a reality now. BSI (British Standards) has developed BS 8878 to facilitate inclusion of everyone in the web innovations.

BS 8878, the Web Accessibility Code of Practice is based upon the earlier guidance published in 2006. The standard enables both public and private organizations to embrace accessibility of their websites and softwares.

The standard clearly demonstrates how organizational policies and production processes should be designed so that the digital divides can be effectively identified and bridged. The standard promotes active involvement of the target user groups to ensure successful implementation of standards.

Shrirang Prakash Sahasrabudhe

Accessibility Specialist- SETLabs

Shrirang_s@infosys.com

Australian DDA moves ahead

2010-12-03T08:55:28Z

It is good to know that, the Australian Government has taken a step forward in realizing better accessible and inclusive web within Australia. It has now endorsed the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 for all government websites. Earlier mandate was compliance with WCAG 1.0.

Early this year the Government Released National Transition Strategy (NTS) that clearly sets out a timetable and implementation plan for achieving compliance wit new guidelines. All government websites which fall within the scope defined by NTS must be upgraded to achieve WCAG 2.0 conformance.

The timelines for the same are:

Level A (Single A) by 31 December 2012
Level AA (Double A) by 31 December 2014

Websites must fulfill all five WCAG 2.0 conformance requirements In order to be compliant under new guidelines.

The strategy advocates careful and design level planning for accessibility implementation so that different needs of various user groups can be met. Use of standards-based web technologies and best practice content management processes has also been advised to mitigate any potential accessibility challenges. Principle of progressive enhancement has been promoted to ensure smooth transition from WCAG1.0 compliance to WCAG2.0 compliance.

All the best and hope to see more inclusive web in Australia.

Shrirang Prakash Sahasrabudhe

Accessibility Specialist- SETLabs

Shrirang_s@infosys.com

Canadian accessibility ruling: some insights

2010-11-30T16:44:50Z

Today Canadian Federal Court gave an important ruling on an accessibility complaint. A blind woman from Canada had filed a suit against government of Canada. she claimed that the government "violated her rights under section 15(1) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Part I of the Constitution Act, 1982.

the applicant provided five examples of accessibility barriers faced by her. the evidence of barriers was sufficient to prove that the applicant was discriminated against due to the need to access information and apply for employment via these websites. The Court is allowing the government 15 months to achieve compliance.

Here is the detailed ruling.

Here are some insights those I could assimilate from the lawsuit.

Do not build for today, build for tomorrow

In today's fast changing world obsolescence is guaranteed and accessibility standards are no exception. One salient element of the ruling is that the court found that the Canadian accessibility standards VIZ Common Look and Feel standard ( CLF ) is utilizing WCAG1.0 ( which is pretty outdated now) and government should update the CLF standard to utilize WCAG 2.0. web designers and developers must keep this in mind while building solutions. And should always aspire for addressing needs in future. I entirely agree that if the standard refers to WCAG1.0 , it is but obvious that we follow that, but wee must keep our knowledge up to date. So that we can go an extra mile to achieve real accessibility and not just the compliance to outdated standards.

One size does not fit all

whenever you test for accessibility, make it a point to include multiple assistive technologies. It is practically impossible to test the site with all possible assistive technologies, but assuming that all users having a particular disability utilize a single assistive technology product is incorrect. Use top two most predominant assistive products to ensure better results.

Design accessible, retrofitting is expensive

This is a well established fact that addressing accessibility during design is the most cost effective way to realize accessible website. Accessibility is not atoll a rocket science. Using progressive enhancement approach accessibility can be woven into the website without compromising timelines as well as aesthetics.

Shrirang Prakash Sahasrabudhe

Accessibility Specialist- SETLabs

Shrirang_s@infosys.com

Can a politician make it to be an effective UX professional?

2010-11-23T04:19:57Z

Can a politician make it to be an effective UX professional?

Sounds absurd, right? But it is not so. After reading the post you would concur with me.

This apparently absurd idea crossed my mind while listening to a conference presentation. The presenter talked about need of understanding user's culture for designing products and solutions for emerging markets. Let's quickly understand what "culture" is.

Though every individual is unique, he or she always cherishes certain common values and beliefs. Culture brings these individuals together to form a group. Culture is a set of behavioral qualities and standard beliefs which distinguish one group from other. Culture operates at cognitive, perceptual and motivational levels. Culture provides us with a set of rules to predict and perceive our interactions with the unpredictable world. It plays vital role in shaping people's perceptions and expectations. Same things mean different to different individuals, like certain symbols which are considered holy in India may be considered offensive in other parts of the planet. Hence understanding the target audience and the cultural norms is essential key to designing interactions, interfaces and any user experience.

And the most competent group of individuals who very well understand and often leverage the cultural nuances is the politicians. Look at their campaigns, election manifestoes, and color and language preferences for the campaign material, colors and symbols used for flags and banners and their costumes too. Being politically neutral, I am not sighting any examples. But readers can easily correlate and sight examples in respective geographies.

It is clearly evident that politicians and political parties make these choices on the basis of the cultural and social status of their constituencies. They possess excellent and effective people skills. They use those skills to understand and analyze the target audience to determine people's nerve. They precisely understand what works and what does not work.

In usability parlance we call this empathizing with users, understanding user expectations and creating memorable experience by connecting with the audience. So I think that as far as cultural design decisions are concerned, politicians can be effective interaction designers. Only word of caution is: if you get them on board, do not let them play politics

Shrirang Prakash Sahasrabudhe

Accessibility Specialist- SETLabs

Shrirang_s@infosys.com

Programming the Social Web with Facebook's Open Graph API

2010-11-12T06:00:43Z

The Facebook F8 conference is an yearly event hosted by Facebook, to bring developers & entreprenuers together to build the social web. With the previous events announcing the Social graph & Facebook Connect, the 2010 F8 (21st April, 2010) had big news for the evolution of social web, briefly:

The Graph API
oAuth 2.0 based authorization
Social plugins
The Open Graph protocol.

]]> The Graph API, which is the core of Facebook Platform, gives developers the power to share and make the web more open & connected. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, coined the term "Social Graph" which is composed of objects(people, pages, events, communities, photos etc) and the connections(relationship, tagging, grouping etc) between them. Every object in the graph has a unique ID by which it can be referenced.
Technically speaking, Facebook offers REST based service which can be used to query about any object in the graph.

e.g., To get public info about Bill Gates on Facebook, click the following link: https://graph.facebook.com/billgates.

oAuth 2.0 is new authorization mechanism which is used by Facebook. It is an open protocol which allows secure API authorization without the need for entering credentials(passwords).It relies on the exchange of tokens instead of credentials and is more secure.

In layman's terms, when you add applications like FarmVille, you will get a confirmation box with "Allow/Deny" buttons. When you click the "Allow" button, the application will be added to your graph. Behind the screens, the app uses oAuth to authorize you via exchange of tokens.

Social Plugins are extensions of Facebook which can be embeded in your websites, creating social experiences. The famous "Like" button, login button, recommendations etc are some of the social plugins. They can be embeded into any existing site using FBML and Facebook JavaScript API. The official reference is clearly the best guide for learning about the social plugins.

The Open Graph Protocol helps in turning out your web pages into more meaningful objects in social graph
By adding a like button, you only add a link to your page in facebook's social graph, which does not have any other information. But by adding tags of Open Graph protocol on your web page's header, you are sharing more semantic data about your webpage, such as, title of the content, type of content, description, image etc. Since the protocol is open, these tags can be read by facebook (or any other network in future) to provide more meaningful information to users.

So, by using the Graph API, oAuth, social plugins and the Open Graph Protocol, you can fetch data about any object in the social graph, present it in a semantic way and provide social experiences to the 500 million(& growing) Facebook users on your site!

Having covered the basics, we shall dive deep about each of these in upcoming series of articles on facebook. Happy programming :)

Krishna Chaitanya T
Technology Analyst - Future Web Research Lab, SETLabs
KrishnaChaitanya_T[at]Infosys[dot]com
www.novogeek.com

JetBlue accessibility lawsuit

2010-10-20T04:15:16Z

In one of the earlier posts I had mentioned about accessibility complaint against Arizona state university. Unlike many past accessibility lawsuits, The trigger for the lawsuit was not inaccessibility of a website but was inadequate accessibility of Kindle reading device.

This time, recently filed lawsuit against JetBlue Airways focuses on accessibility of check-in kiosks at the airport in addition to the inadequate accessibility of their website.

California Council of the Blind and three California residents with visual impairments have together filed the suit in Federal Court for the Northern District of California.

the Unruh Act, the California Disabled Persons Act and the California Unfair Competition Law are the three California laws those form a basis for the suit.

Usually "structured negotiations" Are preferred for resolving accessibility Complaints. It is a collaborative effort towards reaching win-win consensus. Unfortunately JetBlue refused to opt for this litigation free way.

Shrirang Prakash Sahasrabudhe

Accessibility Specialist- SETLabs

Shrirang_s@infosys.com

Future of Web

2010-10-06T07:01:52Z

Looking say 12-13 years back, did anyone think of current form of web? I am talking about very early days of internet- when, to put up the web page on the internet people had to learn a markup language or contact a web site designer, when sending email was so fascinating. There was instant messenger, chat rooms where you could log in and talk to your friends who were available at that time.

Today with Web 2.0, especially with social networking sites like facebook, MySpace, twitter, flicker, blogs, Wikipedia, the face of web has changed completely. It has evaluated to its current form in around a decade's time. It has become more collaborative. Now uploading your data on web has become very easy with RSS. Sharing content, movies, pictures has become so easy that any common man who is not aware of underlying technology can share his views, broadcast the message to all his friends in one go, upload and share pictures/videos very easily. Internet is now accessible through cell phone too, which keeps people connected all the time.

In the very early days internet was just linking of machines (PCs). It has rapidly changed to linking of pages and making the same information accessible from mobile phones and other such devices. Same information is now available in different formats like text as well as audio and conversion happens on the go, as per the need.

What next? Future of web (for that matter web3.0) is very fascinating as well as scary. Technically it would mean linking of data in the page and not just the page. It focuses on building intelligence into the current form of web wherein by typing 'pune' the web would know that it's some location in India. It would have all other information available related to pune like its weather, landmarks etc. This is what is called as semantic web. Any word that appears web will know what it means. And it would be linking things related to that particular word together. Another aspect of future web is every day machines that we use like car, washing machine etc (anything you can think of, can be your pen) would be window the web. Everything would be chip based and would be connected to web. This is part of augmented reality.

All this is coming up really fast and 10 years from now we might have many of these things in place. You might have some small gadget in your pocket (I will call it your buddy) always, who is going to guide you for everything. Say you are hungry and want to have a MacD. You just express your thoughts and your buddy is going to give you information on the nearest MacD restaurant, traffic conditions, cost of the burger, weather conditions outside, approx time it will take for the delivery of burger at MacD and lot more. This is really fascinating but it has other side too. It would make everyone very much dependant. Also there would be some evil forces that could also use the same media adversely. Whatever it might be but at this time, this seems to be very attractive to explore and work upon.

Neha Ranjeet Ghorpade

Product Manager - Future Web Research Lab, SETLabs

neha_ghorpade@infosys.com

Understanding Blind Users' Web Accessibility and Usability Problems

2010-09-30T11:33:42Z

Our paper titled 'Understanding Blind Users' Web Accessibility and Usability Problem', has been published in the journal AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction. The paper is available at http://aisel.aisnet.org/thci/vol2/iss3/1. I am giving below the abstract of the paper. Have a look and please share your feedback.

Abstract

Our motivation for this research is the belief that blind users cannot participate effectively in routine Web-based activities due to the lack of Web accessibility and usability for non-visual interaction. We take a cognitive, user-centered, task-oriented approach to develop an understanding of accessibility and usability problems that blind users face in Web interactions. This understanding is critically needed to determine accessibility and usability requirements for non-visual Web interaction. We employ verbal protocol analysis for an in-depth examination of difficulties participants face in completing an online assessment through a course management system. We analyze the problems that hinder accessibility and usability and explain the nature of these problems in terms of design principles. Our study contributes an effective method for qualitative evaluation of Web accessibility and usability. Our findings will guide future research to develop more accessible and usable Web applications for blind users.