Dan’s Blog (2.0)

This year I’m more excited than ever about Mobile World Congress (née 3GSM). But the excitement at this year’s event won’t be at the event. It will be at two amazing side-events: the Mobile Monday Global Peer Awards happening on Monday the 11th and the Mobile Jam Session on the 12th.

At last year’s Global Peer Awards, we had 23 mobile start-ups from 23 Mobile Monday cities around the World presenting on stage. We had companies like Skyhook Wireless (which has recently achieved some fame as the technology behind the location awareness function in iPhone), RealEyes3D (which went on to be selected as a Red Herring top 100 companies in Europe as well as other accolades), and MobileComplete (which was also selected by Red Herring and took the world by storm with their DeviceAnywhere product). A full list of 2007 participants is available here. This year, it’s your chance to see more early-stage companies and innovative mobile services - before they become famous and stop returning your calls.

The Mobile Jam Session will be a unique industry event, bringing together a spectrum mobile developers for a kind of un-conference that will combine a “code camp” style with a creatively driven workshop structure. After hearing who has so far signed up, I’m more fired up than ever about this event.

W3C will also be out in force at the conference itself, promoting the release of MobileOK as a “Candidate Recommendation” and the release of an open source code library that allows content developers to more easily test their content for mobile friendliness. If you’re at the conference, go visit them in Hall 7, stand 7D56 and get the real deal on MobileOK and the future of the Mobile Web. We’ll also hopefully see W3C folks at the Mobile Jam Session.

See you in Barcelona!

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 11:20 under Mobile Web, mobile 2.0
Tags: 3gsm, globalpeerawards, mobile2.0, mobilejamsession, mobilemonday, mobileOK, MobileWeb, mwc2008

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After a great meeting of the Mobile Web Best Practices working group last week, the group decided to issue a “Last Call” working draft of the mobileOK Basic specification. This spec is basically a series of tests you can perform on content to evaluate how well it implements the best practices themselves. Because many of the best practices are not machine testable, these test necessarily only represent a subset of the best practices, but they’re a good place to start (hence “basic”). The specification (actually “mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0″) is intended to raise the quality bar on mobile Web content. I invite you to review it and send comments in to the public W3C mailing list (public-bpwg-comments@w3.org).

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 23:34 under Mobile Web, W3C
Tags: mobileOK, MobileWeb, MWI, W3C

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I’ve just added a label (as it happens, an ICRA label) to my site. Why? Because content labeling (or “labeling” depending on what longitude you reside in) is going to be an important building block of the future of the Web. If you pick up a box of breakfast cereal at the supermarket, you can look at a label and quickly determine if its ingredients are going to be suitable for you. For example, many products these days contain a warning label if they contain nuts for those of us that suffer from nut allergies. Even if you don’t have food allergies, but just prefer to eat organically produced food, you can look at the label. A content label for a Web site is analogous to such a food label, but is primarily intended to be processed by machines. The most deployed site labeling technology is ICRA (Internet Content Labeling Association) which was developed for child protection. Hence, ICRA is most appropriate for labeling “adult content.” The result has been that the adult content industry (keen to show they are supporting child protection and thereby avoid regulation) have embraced labels. And that’s the current state of labeling on the Web: lots of porn sites have labels. Most other sites do not.

But adult content is not the only possible application for content labels. For example, a content label can tell you whether a Web site is accessible (has it followed the W3C’s WAI guidelines?). A content label can tell you if the content is appropriate for educational needs. A label can also tell you if content is mobile friendly, and that’s the theory underlying the work that the Mobile Web Best Practices working group is undertaking with mobileOK. Content labels can also be an important enabler in the field of content search and discovery, particularly on the mobile Web. This is what Google mobile sitemaps (for example) are all about — explicitly telling the search engine (the content discovery agent) about the content so the user doen’t have to wade through pages of search results to find what they’re looking for.

So it’s clear that a number of industry requirements are converging on the idea that some kind of metadata will be fed upstream from content providers to browsers and content discovery agents. But can these content labels be built on top of open, inter-operable standards? And will they be trustable? These are some of the questions that the Web Content Labels incubator group (WCL-XG) has sought to answer. This group is likely going to transform into a fully fledged W3C working group some time in the new year in order to develop its initial recommendations into a new W3C standard. This standard could enable a whole ecosystem of labeled content, labeling authorities and label verification services. You can already see glint of how this could work by downloading the Search Thresher Firefox plugin.

Bottom line: content labels built on top of open standards mean more machine-readable data on the Web, which translates to better user experience and ease of use. Verification of these labels mean a more trustable Web. Labels are definitely coming into the mainstream. I fully expect content labels to be a ubiquitous within the next two years — users won’t necessarily even know they exist, but they will be silently improving the trustability and usability the Web. If you want to be ahead of the curve, hop to ICRA.org’s label generator and generate yourself an ICRA label.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 16:46 under Blogs, Mobile Web, Web
Tags: ContentLabel, ICRA, mobileOK, MobileWeb, searchthresher, W3C

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