Desenvolvimento e design para a Web

Encouraged Commentary: Bringing Natural Conversational Dynamics to Commenting

Commenting on blogs is - by and large - broken. Designed with the hope of proffering interaction among bloggers and readers, commenting has generally devolved into a series of one-off responses with little actual conversation. Why? It's not designed to facilitate conversations. That's why you see any number of people - Intense Debate and Disqus, most notably - working to provide technology that enhances the conversational dynamic. Now, a new open source project from Jim Jeffers promises to enhance commenting in a way that is both natural and conversational. Meet Encouraged Commentary.

Sponsor

The new commenting features - built using jQuery - take their inspiration from Ubiquity, allowing users to highlight the sections of text that prompted them to comment and immediately respond. Using that context, Encouraged Commentary begins to string conversations and content together.

Encouraged Commentary currently offers three compelling features:

First, highlighting any section of a post avails a "respond" button that allows users to immediately comment. Clicking respond grabs the highlighted text and adds it - in blockquote - to the content of the comment, simply and easily referencing the exact passage that the user is discussing.

Second, working with comments, themselves, offers additional functionality. Highlighting and clicking respond within a comment automatically establishes the familiar "@user" addressing to make the intended recipient aware of the conversation directed at him/her. The highlighted text, again, is brought into the comment for reference.

Third, the connections among comments are tracked. Mousing over any commenter's name reveals a list of his or her other comments in the thread. Clicking on list items allows users to "jump between related comments and responses quickly" - something that threaded conversations have been working to capture. Reply and Quote buttons allow the user to jump into the conversation without highlighting.

Granted, the young project is not without its rough spots. Users are reporting issues with IE (shocking, I realize). And some of the implementation of the concepts could use refinement. No doubt that will come as more people engage in the project.

But those issues are easily overlooked. Because what is most compelling about this approach is the natural conversational dynamic that Jeffers has captured. You do what seems natural: highlight and respond. And you do so with context. That dynamic provides both Encouraged Commentary with content and the "hooks" to track the history of the conversation without adversely impacting the user. What's more, it provides a series of reference points that encourages new users to enter the discussion - and to do so just as easily as the conversation began.

If we see widespread adoption of this sort of thinking, it's quite possible that we may see the conversation returning to comments.

To see Encouraged Commentary in action or to try it yourself, visit Don't Trust This Guy, Jeffers' blog. To download the source code, visit the Encouraged Commentary project on GitHub.

Did Google Just Expose Semantic Data in Search Results?

In what appears to us to be a new addition to many Google search results pages, queries about birth dates, family connections and other information are now being responded to with explicitly semantic structured information. Who is Bill Clinton's wife? What's the capital city of Oregon? What is Britney Spears' mother's name? The answers to these and other factual questions are now displayed above natural search results in Google and the information is structured in the traditional subject-predicate-object format, or "triples," of semantic web parlance.

Sponsor

The answers aren't found structured that way on the web pages they come from - Google appears to be parsing the semantic structure from semi or unstructured data. That's something Microsoft paid over $100 million to try to do this summer when it acquired Powerset. Check out these screen shots below.

We're sure that Google's been doing this analysis for some time behind the scenes, but for the company to expose the data in this structured way and to include a link to view other sources appears new to everyone we've asked about it so far. We've got inquiries in with some people who specialize in search but our semantic web contacts say they've not seen it before. (Update: Some readers have said in comments that they've seen variations of this for some time, including a three year old Google program called "Direct Answers." None of the coverage we've seen of that program offers the kind of examples we're seeing here - but we're not sure what to think! We'll see how feedback goes.)

It appears that the feature isn't being bucket tested, either, it is globally available. Could 3rd parties make use of the data now that it's available in a structured format? Possibly. The search results pages aren't being marked up in HTML, which is a shame.

Is Google Creating Structured Data Where There Was None Before?

Bruno Haid of Austrian enterprise semantic startup System One pointed all this out to us and offers the following:

What's interesting is that while Justin Timberlake's mother is being parsed, amongst others, from http://www.celebritywonder.com/html/justintimberlake.html , there is no structured source visible that holds "Lynne" as string for Britney Spears mother. So either Google utilizes a trusted source that is not listed in "more sources" or they really extract that information from the unstructured text at http://ububu.com/BritneySpears.html . Which would make this whole thing quite huge.

Yahoo, Ask.com and Live.com are all unable to answer these questions so clearly.

Many of the data points are being pulled in from the structured part of Wikipedia entries, which is interesting. Other sources are wide ranging, from a license plate website to Jason Calacanis's Mahalo.

We're not sure what to make of this - have readers seen it before? We think it's new and we think it's pretty interesting.

Why is This Important?

As we've said about the semantic web before: Once our software is capable of deriving meaning from web pages it looks at for us, there's a whole lot of work that will already be done, allowing our human, creative minds to reach new heights. Structured data is a layer of standardized abstraction upon which new innovation can be created.

That's why we're interested to see what Google is doing.

The answers aren't always accurate - try searching the birth date of Jesus Christ, for example. Yahoo! has far more clearly articulated what they intend to do with semantic data. None the less, Google now appears to be doing something that no one else is doing. Maybe readers here search for "Britney Spears' mother" all the time, though, and have already seen this. It's new to us, though.

Report: Cloud-Based Email Cheapest Option for Most Companies

A new report from Forrester presents a cost analysis of cloud-based email systems in enterprises, such as Google Apps or Yahoo!'s Zimbra. In the report, Forrester argues that cloud-based email services are cheaper than running email on-premise for all companies with less than 15,000 employees. What's more, Google Apps is significantly cheaper than both on-premise solutions and other cloud-based email services - even for very large enterprises. This could spell trouble for Microsoft, as we explain below.

Sponsor

Despite the cost benefits, at this point most companies (56%) are looking to implement a 'hybrid' model of on-premise and external email services. Just 19% plan to migrate their entire email base to a hosted or managed email provider.

Forrester's cost analysis (outlined in full in its report) shows that for the "Information Worker" segment, a large portion of many modern enterprises, cloud-based email is often cheaper. Forrester concluded that "cloud-based email is always cheaper for companies with fewer than 15,000 users".

The following chart of various options is interesting, because Google Apps comes out significantly cheaper than Microsoft Exchange Online - and other cloud based email options. Also interesting is that Microsoft Exchange Online Standard is about 10% cheaper than many cloud-based providers - due to its economies of scale no doubt. One wonders whether Microsoft will be forced to drastically reduce its pricing for Exchange Online, in order to compete better with Google Apps; although that of course comes at the risk of under-cutting one of the company's cash cows, Microsoft Office.

Source:" Forrester; the above figures are based a scenario for 15,000 employees with email.

Even as the number of employees increases, Google Apps remains by far the cheapest option. Of course there are other factors to consider other than price, but even so these figures are striking and are likely to be very pursuasive for many enterprises over the coming years.

Lastly, there are some interesting comments in the report about about the low price point of Google Apps. Google told Forrester that it "uses automation and massive scale to achieve an order of magnitude lower cost of service than a typical enterprise." This led Forrester to believe that "Google can make money at this price, and that the service will handle some firms' or users' needs well, including its bigger customers like Genentech and Avago Technologies."

However Forrester noted that it is unsure how much focus Google will give to the service. Also Forrester suggested that Google Apps still needs "better mobile support, an offline email and calendar client, and a clearer view of the product road map."

Note: Forrester released a companion report, entitled Should Your Email Live In The Cloud? An Infrastructure And Operations Analysis, that digs deeper into the technical issues around cloud-based email.