It’s pretty obvious that a new social web has evolved and is continuing to evolve. Apparently tagging has moved beyond blogging. I haven’t been involved with blogs: I’ve been doing forums and Joomla. Tags are something that has come out of WordPress, etc.

The little bit of experience I had with WordPress showed me they had a very effective method for sharing information between bloggers. It’s been in the back of my mind that I needed to figure out what that was they were doing, because I could see it was good.

So that’s what Social Web is about, apparently. Using tags in more places than just blogs, to connect people, groups and events. Right?

Well, that’s very cool. Thank you for the info!

Now my 8 and 9 year old daughters skype me at work, sending me emails and update our family intranet.

When designers tried to create beautiful HTML sites, the solution for complex layout was to use (mis-use) tables. Software developed to facilitate this resulted in (sometimes) attractive sites that clients loved when presented by the designer, not on the web but on a local machine. The sites would have looked lovely, if they had worked. For many users actually trying to view the sites, the material arrived at a painfully slow pace. I think that clients often didn’t know how frequently browsers, seeking fast satisfaction, just moved on. Do we need to mention Flash and all of those time-traps on the entry page – loved only by the client and loyal friends?

Lots changed with the widespread use of Cascading Style Sheets. Casual users, who can manage some HTML, still find CSS + HTML + site management to be confounding… but the precision control of the site and many other features of CSS has resulted in some lovely sites that also load quickly. (CMS themes usually use CSS.)

The Internet search technology has had a great impact on site design (or should have). In the early days, to be effective with the crawlers it was enough to be sure that pages were well annotated in the header with keywords and content description. That all changed when Google and others ranked pages with the volume and quality of incoming links. The current game of seeking to have a community of linked sites, I think, is part of the attraction of certain aspects of social media. Most people still don’t know that the power of blogging (especially for business) has to do with the nature of blogs, not just as sites for personal expression, but as whole communities of connected bloggers. This was a feature of blogs even back when it was the realm mainly of geeks. My experiments show that Google gives an amazingly high rank to a new blog article… which then fades in time (so, keep posting!).

Intranets have been around since the days of Bulletin Boards. One piece of software that has been outstanding is Firstclass. Members at a FC site have known most of this ‘social media’ experience since the mid-90s: easy-to-setup countless threaded forums, easy online chat among members, FC is also a full POP server so every member has full email to the rest of the Internet (plus added email features within the site), every member can have their own web site… but if managing HTML is complicated, every member has a folder where any files dropped in it appear on that member’s web location as an clickable and downloadable list (much easier than FTP for big files, and fast!). The FC technology was developed in Canada, it has been a true pioneer in social media, but the software has been sold several times, and, I believe, due to terrible marketing, never saw its potential for growth.

Just because this is a bit of an historical perspective, at the time the web appeared, many watchers were expecting the experience of navigating Internet sites in a 3-D space would be achieved by Gopher. In those days we all found goodies on the Internet with FTP and Gopher. I still remember the night that I downloaded Mosaic, the first web browser. Until then I’d seen the web as an interesting use of hypertext… but that night changed everything.