G21 NEWS
News To Use
I Have Seen the Future:
Reporting from Web Design & Development '98
Part One of 3
by Rod Amis
G21 Editor & Publisher
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Every industry has its tradeshows. The difference with the industries emerging around this medium, the World Wide Web, and the Internet, is that many of the people who now ask participants to consider them "experts" only came to the medium four or five years ago. That includes This Writer.
Web Design & Development '98 a tradeshow and conference produced by Miller Freeman, Web Techniques and Web Review magazines, took place in San Francisco last week(21 June - 25 June, 1998.) After sitting out tradeshows for over a year, Your Unruly decided to cover this one for GENERATOR 21 and SUITE 101. My reports, an interview, and commentary on new software, will appear at both web publications over the course of this week, in three parts.
Even though we at the G21 regularly ran press releases from people in the industry during our first year of publication(1996) it was a practice I quickly found nonproductive. Nobody read the bloody things other than the public relations flacks, anyway. In this first part of the series, I would like to share an overview of the conference/tradeshow.
What was designated the conference keynote, was a panel presentation given on Monday evening after the Web Tools awards presented by Web Review magazine. Monday was a slow day at this show, most of the attendees had not arrived yet. When I dropped into the Cyber Lounge, where their were "live" internet hook-ups, after touring the exhibits floor, it was to find 9 out of 10 people in front of monitors using e-mail. The facility was touted as a place to "surf the web." But e-mail remains the "killer app'." Of the thousand or so people in attendance on Monday, less than two hundred stuck around for the "keynote." That was great judgment on the part of the 800.
In the small, incestuous community of "Multimedia Gulch" here in San Francisco, certain types of activity seem to delight the digerati, much to the confusion(and often consternation) of online designers, developers and content-producers. This keynote exemplified that digerati disconnect as much as the "Technorealism" movement does.
The panel was moderated by Eric Paulos, a graduate student at UC Berkeley Experimental Interaction Unit, whose self-described passion is working with personal computing devices as "garments." He, and his fellow panelists --- Natalie Jeremijenko, Performance Artist, Yale University, (http://www.tech90s.net), Eduardo Kac, Assistant Professor of Art and Technology, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, (http://ekac.org), and Mark Pauline, Founder/Director, Survival Research Laboratories,(http://www.srl.org) extrapolated this concept into the notion of "telepresence."
The combining thesis of all these presentations was that we would use our computer technology and the internet to communicate and connect in ways very different than we do today. Underlying this telepresence concept was using robotics to be "present" across time and distance. Using audio technology and digicams hooked into the Web, for example, participants at WDD '98 would be able to speak and see at remote locations throughout San Francisco by means of robots placed throughout the city, using the web interface to move and communicate using these machines. I think you get the idea.
Not exactly my idea of liberation, but the digerati probably find this kind of thing all-the-rage.
THE FUTURE: On the other hand, Tuesday morning's address by Sun Microsystems Distinquish Engineer and reknowned Web Guru Jakob Nielsen drew a respectable crowd and provided both exciting data and some challenging prosnostications. The topic of Nielsen's address, "Web 2003: A Five-Year Perspective on the Future of the Web," was certainly grandiose enough to pique anyone's interest. The content of the presentation lived up to expectations. You can get the entirety of Nielsen's address, unmediated by This Reporter, by following the link. For my take, stay here.
Nielsen had some rather startingly things to say, whether you are intimately involved with 'net on a daily basis, or not. Among the highlights:
- There are now approx. 2 million websites. By the year 2003 there shall probably be somewhere in the order of 100,000,000 websites. Then, as now, only the top 10% of these sites will get the majority of the regular traffic. This is because, Nielsen posited, just as all the books in a library or words in a language are not used, most websites won't be used by most people.
- The notion of "portal" sites is misguided and will ultimately fail. People do not come to the web to be directed, they come for the diversity it offers, and will continue to do so.
- The current elan of the speech-recognition interface is also misguided. The problem is that, just as with a UNIX command line, you have to know which command to give in order to achieve the desired result. Our current love of "Star Trek," Nielsen suggested, might just have a lot to do with this misguided focus. Ultimately, Nielsen says, it is the graphical user interface which shall triumph on the internet, because it is elegant rather than clumsy.
- This medium is essentially *participatory*. Thus the best web designs will ask, "How can my users/visitors manipulate the information delivery system I've provided?"
- Studies have shown that people read text 25% slower on these flickering monitors we have than they do from paper. Thus, the canny web writer produces 50% of the text he would in print.(I know, I know, this article fails that benchmark. I'll work on it.) Further, a University of Maryland study demonstrates that the smaller the monitor, the longer the decision-making interval. People provided with higher resolution, larger monitors showed a 57% increase in productivity.
- The largest issue for the web right now is speed of usage. Nielsen argues that the web is horrible(existing at 72 dpi, on average) compared to paper(which is 300 dpi or greater, on average.) This situation can't be overcome until high resolution monitors are the standard, and users have the equivalent of the personal T-1 connection. He predicts that by 2003 most high end users will have personal T-1s or their equivalent. Then the "Satisfaction" index for web usage will be justifiable.
I encourage you to follow the link in this article for the entire presentation and the studies, and charts, and Nielsen's rapier humor, which support it. But let me close with some of Nielsen's most breathtaking predictions.
Nielsen says he chose 2003 in order to present a five-year outlook, but that his data supports the notion that this is the point where the dominance of the web as a communication and enterprise medium will be fully felt. He believes the majority of users/visitors will still have analog connections at that time, and universal enjoyment of the web will be realized more like 2008. By that time, the trend toward convergence will be more complete, and newspapers will be obsolete, as will television and the telephone. (I thought about this one the next day when the newspapers announced that AT&T was buying TCI.) Instead of television, for example, some site Editor will provide a database of his favorite picks for a category of video presentations. In other words, we have not seen half of what this medium's impact will be, or even the models that will thrive here.
WEDNESDAY: Part Two of the Series - interview with a young webmaster whose site garners $6,000/month (avg) in revenues without an e-commerce interface.
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