Making the most of the Web as a communications medium can ensure Web sites take advantage of what the Web is today. Television, radio, telephones, and libraries are considered standard media and each one has its own characteristics and ways of making its mark regardless of the content sent via its medium.
Curt Cloninger, author of Fresh Styles for Web Designers: Eye Candy from the Underground, explains that everything is something and we need to figure out what the Web already is and how to best use it to accomplish our goals.
He has the right idea in that we need to give the Web a chance to grow and get its own identity. We need to understand what it has to offer. How often have we heard that we look like a parent? A sibling? How about we look like ourselves?
Furthermore, do we treat every child in the exact same way? Most of us adapt how we communicate with a child based on his needs, his strengths and weaknesses.
Cloninger identifies six characteristics that all apply to the Web, but each character is neither new nor unique to the Web. Most Web services take advantage of two or more characteristics; it’s rare to find a Web service that uses all six.
Understanding that the Web is an emerging communications medium with six characteristics that can combine and / or partner with other media will help businesses determine the schemes that would apply best to meet its Web service needs.
Many-to-Many Networking
Many-to-many networking enables a group of individuals to collaborate or communicate with each other. Before the Internet became popular, such networking occurred through telephone conference calls or three-way calling.
Examples now include email, bulletin board, chat rooms, instant messenger, open-source software development community, decryption via distributed computing, modular Web services, and multi-user interfaces where users can do multiple things at the same time.
Open source communities have online discussions, bulletin boards, and online collaboration. The Apache Software Foundation provides support for the Apache community for open source software development projects relating to the Apache server. They offer a variety of forums for participating and contributing to the foundation’s projects.
Decryption via distributed computing is best explained with Cloninger’s example of a group of cryptographers that encrypted a message in such a way that no single computer would ever be able to decrypt the message using mere brute force attacks. They offered a cash prize to anyone who could decrypt the message to determine how secure was the encryption.
A large number of people on the Internet formed a pool and took all the possible brute force approaches, breaking them up into small chunks.
Everyone signed up for a chunk while someone wrote a program to crunch the possibilities, and each participant downloaded and installed the program on his machine.
Whoever’s machine decrypted the message first reported the answer and received a special bonus from the group, and the rest evenly split the winnings. They succeeded in decryption the message as in “decrypting via distributed computing.”
Cloninger says that just by coupling a many-to-many network with automation, something previously considered scientifically impossible became possible.
Module Web service is another example of many-to-many networking. When a business doesn’t have the sources or skills to implement a feature in-house, it can add a modular service such as site search engines, mapping capabilities, or shopping cart capabilities.
In these examples, it’s not necessary to download software to make it work. Instead, it’s a matter of tweaking a few things and copying code into a Web page to network with the original source.
How does many-to-many working work with other characteristics? You may think email is only one characteristic, but actually, it also has time-shifting whereas online chats are live. Decryption and modular Web services also have automation involved.
Multimedia
For many, the first contact with multimedia was through CD-ROMs, which offered more than just text and still images. To prove the point of needing two or more characteristics on a Web service, Cloninger questions why offer movies on the Web when there are cable, satellite, and movie rental stores available? A service needs to go beyond the basic demand to reach visitors in a way that no other service can.
Born Magazine puts together something that can’t be duplicated in video or print requiring your participation to move forward. Unlike watching television, the visitor can control the pace and the action while hearing sounds and seeing animation. Only CD-ROMs and the Web can offer this kind of multimedia hybrid experience.
Database
Before computers, we had library card catalogs for databases. You could look for a book by title, subject, or author’s last name. Keywords or subjects were limited to pre-selected words and could not be mixed up to form new combinations. Computers arrive and ease the search process and broaden it by allowing more keywords and getting results within seconds.
Dictionary.com is a Web service that mixes database and automation. It has a database of dictionary words as well as a thesaurus. Enter a word to get its meaning, click on Thesaurus to get more words with similar meaning. Listings can include links to related Web sites for more information.
Another powerful database is Internet Movie Database with a large collection of movies and television programming, dates, actors, directors, characters, quotes, pictures, and much more. When watching a movie and unable to place a familiar face, look it up on Internet Movie Database and instant answers.
Combined with search engines, databases can help you find almost anything including forgotten words from a song, passages from the Bible, quotes from a speech or magazine to name very few of the numerous possibilities of what a database can do.
Automation
Automation is often partnered with databases, but it’s a separate entity because it is a program in itself and processes input like word processor software and ATMs. You’re looking for more than just text. Babelfish gives you the option of entering a Web page address or up to 150 words of text and it translates it for you.
To see another example, click on the sixth button from the right at Monocrafts to view the Fingertrack studies. Click start and move your mouse for approximately one minute. The software records and stores your movement, a time-shift factor. Enter your name so that your movements are labeled.
The next person comes and does the same thing. After both participants finish, the program takes both movements and has each one holding half of a whole “digital string” doing a dance with the middle of the string behaving based on the two inputs.
A similar idea to Monocrafts is Anemone, which is an online whiteboard that multiple people can draw on at the same time. Cloninger’s playground, Market-o-matic allows visitors to pick and choose the text and enter it to get a self-created artist’s statement for their latest art du jour.
Turux is a site full of abstract Flash and Shockwave animations of which are interactive. You can make an impact on the outcome of the automated drawings by moving and clicking the mouse.
Without any mouse action, the animation will continue on a set pattern until the mouse movements enter and tweak it. This Turux activity is an example of collaborating with automated software in real-time mode.
Live and / or Time-Shifted
When listening to the radio, it can be either live or time-shifted depending on the content. Most radio call-in shows are live, but the music they play is time-shifted since the singer is not currently singing the song. She recorded the song to allow radio stations to play it based on their schedules or requests.
When an auction is active on eBay, it’s considered live based on its current standings. After the auction ends, it becomes time-shifted as you review the results.
One of the more popular online events is Photoshop tennis where two players using a PhotoShop or other graphics program volley by making changes to the latest picture. The game is live on Fridays as viewers can watch the match while the commentator provides colorful feedback on each volley. The game is also time-shifted because viewers can watch the archived game after it has ended and vote.
Many of the television networks make it possible for viewers to watch the current news reports live through steaming media as well as archiving older reports for time-shifted viewing.
Location-Independent and / or Device-Dependent
Mobile computing is quickly gaining worldwide acceptance through PDAs, cellular phones, and other technologies enabling users to stay connected and access information whenever and wherever needed.
Originally, cell phones connected people who were not near a static telephone. The technology has taken another step and connects users to email, the Internet, and GPS technologies. These help people become more location-independent, gaining information regardless of location.
Web Services is a new area that is expected to take off because of its device-independence capabilities. Web Services will make it possible for the information to flow from one place to another regardless of device or application. We can access Web Services through SOAP, XML, and other similar open standard technologies.
All of these characteristics are mixed and matched to enhance the capabilities of the Web. Prior to the Web invasion, Radio programs took a step forward to connect with its listeners by adding call-in capabilities for song requests or contests.
The addition of Web services allows television programs to enhance the user experience by providing online polls, playing along with the game, or entering questions relating to a program’s topic.
Amazon has taken shopping to a new level by giving its customers the ability to review products so others can learn from their good or bad experiences. Amazon users computer technology to a good advantage by providing recommendations for its customers based on previous purchases and site visits.
Today’s Web proves itself as a medium performing a wide variety of functions. Tomorrow’s Web promises a myriad of new functions as we take this medium as much for granted as our daily newspaper.