Web Development SE Optimization and Internet Strategy

A quick note about the soon to be release Firefox 3 version of the Open-source browser. I currently run the latest version of Firefox 3 and everything is smooth after a buggy last release on OSX.

Hope we can raise the bar to a 20% worldwide browser share for Firefox soon!

A quick post about some of the new features coming out the #2 Digg Town hall and my personal thought :

• Announcement of a more integrated Facebook feature, integrated friends.
• They are currently working on a new comment system. What? another redesign, I found the current one really usable.
• Digg may implement a new system to manage micro communities inside the digg website, to more reflect the digg diversity. Thats the feature I’m personally looking too, I’m eager to see any Mixx community functionality.
• They say that they are not working on word or url specific that user may filter, but they are working on a NSFW filter.
• The upcoming section will have major improvements to boost the usability in the next few months, right now there’s too much submissions to go through. It will display more targeted submissions based on your and your friends activity. Again this kind of feature can boost micro community.
• They are testing a new version for the anti dupe detector. Will detect dupes before you even fill the form for the title and description. Great feature. So they will crawl your url .. can be extend to some anti spam features too maybe with DOM inspection…
  
• They are working for podcast and videos sections integration. Great! podcast are just dying right now, sadly.

That’s it : )

edit : the new comment system is up since few days and its blazing fast, great improvements in speed. All the highlights on the Digg Blog.

This Tuesday, I went to Quebec City, for the Intracom 08 Conferences to be a part of the Tuesday 29th panel. How to improve web development with Benoit Piette, Jean-Francois Renaud, Nathalie Berger and Guillaume Séguin.

Here is a little recap of my day

First of all, I didn’t went to the Benoit Piette’s presentation, I already saw it the day before, in the bus on our way to Quebec City. You can find the slides about the Web 2.0 Browsers battle on his website. So I went to the Aaron Marcus presentation.

Aaron Marcus on Cross-Cultural User-Experience Design for the Web

Culture make a difference in how people interact, make purchase, communicate, etc.

How you research, design and analyze must be done with cultural input from the end users you’re targeting. Aaron show us some example on how it can end up if you’re not paying attention to cultural specifications, funny to see some old Netscape 4 screenshots here.

An gold rule that is often forbidden in website development; culture should impact the design, the User experience of a website.

Which cultural specificities to look for :

• power distance, the power distribution between low and high social classes
• collectivism vs individualism societies
• masculine vs feminine cultures
• uncertainty avoidance, where the unknown from dangers vs the know is more acceptable
• long term vs short-term orientation

E-transformation

Next one was Lionel Pardin’s presentation. I Was at there with Jean Francois Renaud from Adviso, here a link to his comments on Branchez-vous and my comment too.

Web semantic

This presentation was in my point of view the most interesting one, maybe a too much technical approach for the crowd, but I really enjoy this one. So basically Yan Bodain talked about the four stages of the web and the coming web 3.0, a more semantic web, where machines will be able to do Ontology. The OWL language using the RDF syntax is one of the fundamental technology underneath the Semantic web, which is not a new web but a new way of doing it. This is very interesting and I’ll keep looking at those things, it may unleash a very new way how human can search informations and interact with machines.

Improve web development projects

So this was finally my turn after a little lunch where I met Julien Sarradet, an old colleague at VDL2. I was on a hour and half panel with five others specialist talking about how to improve the quality of your web projects.

My part of the panel, the Seo point of view of the quality in web development:

SEO for better web projects (pdf, not locked) in French

So Intracom 2008 in old Quebec City wasn’t the perfect conference you can expect, maybe too few people (around 100, not that bad tho), but was really nice for a first time doing a presentation especially being on a panel with helpful colleagues.