tmiles.co.uk

We’re considering renting out our home so I have been doing quite a bit of research about what kind of return we could get and what legal hoops we’ll need to jump through etc…

It was during a google search (other search engine are available!) that I landed on the following page on Lovemoney.com: How to rent out your home.

I was struck by the seventh paragraph, which reads:

“After all, over the long-term, property has proved a good investment. Sitting tight and seeing out this current dip in the market by letting your home could prove very Foolish indeed.”

I have emphasised the word foolish above, as it caused me some confusion. I read this to mean that letting out your home was a bad idea. After all the dictionary definition for foolish is:

1. resulting from or showing a lack of sense; ill-considered; unwise: a foolish action, a foolish speech.
2. lacking forethought or caution.
3. trifling, insignificant, or paltry.

However, this sentence didn’t seem to make sense when read within the meaning of the whole article.

After double checking and re-reading the content it appears that lovemoney.com is actually produced by fool.co.uk, which is a well known web site offering financial/money advice.  It appears that within this context the term ‘Foolish’ actually means a good thing. Fool.co.uk have ‘branded’ the word foolish to mean the opposite of what it actually means!

There are two lessons to be learned from this: Don’t use branding when plain English will do and know where all your content is going to be published. Context in this situation is very important, as much as I wouldn’t have suggested they use this term on fool.co.uk it would probably make more sense than it does on lovemoney.com.

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[Rant alert.]

My focus is mostly Intranets, however I sit next to our Web Team so often hear their grumblings of discontent, therefore I fairly confident what I am about to write translate to the world wide web as well.

We rely on subject experts to create and write content, often these subjects experts are policy officials with little understanding of what makes valuable web content. Most of the time, publishing content on the Intranet (or web) is a box ticking exercise and something done at the last minute. Very rarely do they think about the web when they are formulating and beginning to write their new policy. Often when you tell them about how people want web content and read the web you are treated to a sigh and a roll of the eyes and told to just ‘publish the content’.

Content owners often give the excuse that they’re too busy and hard pressed to worry about accessibility, well structured content and the user goals of people looking at their content. They’re apathetic to the concerns of us webmasters!

The result: a sprawling website of inconsistent, unstructured content which is too long to read and a nightmare to search and navigate. And who gets the blame for said poor website? That’s right, us webmasters.

[End of rant.]

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Gerry McGovern in his book ‘Killer web content’ says:

“Here lies a major irony of the age of mass communication: the more communication people are exposed to, the more they are shutting off and depending on their gut instinct.”

Web users are impatient and ignore banner ads and pointless marketing content. It’s one of the reasons twitter is so popular, Tweets are short and sweet and if you don’t like them you can just ignore them.

How many times have I heard the following excuse for creating a library of a website full of old and no-longer relevant:

“but someone may want to look at it one day! It’s better it’s on our website just in case.”

Wrong!

Every page, every document, every old press release that is put on a website makes finding the 5% of useful content held more difficult.It muddies the search results, it gets in the way of a good Information Architecture.

This is especially true for an Intranet, which is so commonly used as a dumping ground for boring content.  Remember an Intranet has a captured audience, there’s usually no alternative for the user (other than to not use it) if the content can’t be found. You put poor content into the Intranet search engine you’re going to get poor content out.

Recently I attended an UK eInformation Group seminar on ‘making search work’. The speaker said that, in his experience:

“90% of search problems are about the people”

i.e. Not the technology. Either the content is badly structured and managed or the search technology isn’t correctly configured.

Everytime we put content on a website we must ask ourselves, who is this for, who is going to use it?

Gery McGovern has the following rule of thumb for a page of content:

100 words: You’ve lost 25% of your readers
300 words: Youve lost 40%
500 words: You’ve lost 60%
1,000 words: You’ve lost 80%.

Maybe it’s time we applied something similar to the number of pages?

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I have moved my website to a new (and hopefully more reliable) host….Wordpress have a great product here, which made migrating content simples (like a meerkat!)

I have also taken the opportunity to re-do the theme.  I love my coffee and most people will be reading while drinking the stuff, so there is some logic!

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I have blogged previously about my dislike for the term Web 2.0 so you’ll have to forgive my hypocrisy for using a similar term for this post.

If I dislike these terms why am I using them? Well, if you get past all the hype you are left with terminology which is useful in driving debate and quantifying where the web is and where the web is going in the future. Most of the people who I am writing this post for will know instantly what I mean when I say web 2.0 and can probably see where I’m going when I use the term web 3.0.

Web 2.0 is all about social networking, user generated content, collaboration and mashups, or alternatively to quote Tim Bernes-Lee (Inventor of the web) a “piece of jargon”. Web 2.0 is a transfer of power to the end user – you have more control over what content you see, how you see it, who you share it with and how you can manipulate it.

So where does web 3.0 take us? Well there seems to be a couple of strands of thought for this, they are: the immersive web and the semantic web.

The immersive web will allow you to enter a multi dimensional environment, virtual words. The semantic web will join up the infinite pieces of information available and draw connections between them. Natural language search is one possible application, and is already being developed at powerset.com.

The next challenge then is to think of more useful applications, beyond that of the marketers and advertisers.

However, I’m still struggling to see the complete usefulness of Web 2.0, how many people actually know how to customise Firefox or what RSS stands for, let alone how to use it? The future of anything is in its longevity, remember friends reunited? Apparently 80% of people on Twitter are sheep, merely following not posting, how long before the 20% become tired? Of course, I hasten to add that I’m still a user of both Facebook and twitter and of course blog reasonably regularly.

Web 3.0! Maybe we’ve still got a bit of way to go on Web 2.0 and were trying to run before we can walk.

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