Go Flash or Skip

At first glance the Bellecour website appears to be one that's promoting "green environment" or even one that sells eco-friendly ideas, plans, buildings rather than that of an art school. The commercial flash websites that I have come across are usually the one that has loud/soft music and this site surprised me with the absence of audio. The whole website is done in flash.
The website has made use of 3D elements; it has used nice spring colors that are effective and functional.

For the sake of convenience and lack of French language knowledge I have named the three pages in this website as GREEN, BLUE and ORANGE.

The three different Schools Of Art are distinguished by three colors green, orange and blue.
In the GREEN page the color is a compositional and unifying element, variety is created in placing the color elements with futuristic looking, and dome shaped buildings and metallic shiny car.

The proximity of the human elements near the passing cars, the landscape in the background with the buildings, the park-like setting and the dome shaped building, the big bowls of plant, the green rainbow are nice work of imagination and eye-catching compulsive work of art.

There is limited interactivity with the website at the click of a mouse the car moves there is a call-out window indicating a conversation between the man and the lady in this page The VOTRE IDEE sign board linear look creates hierarchy and is facing the dome shapes.

The BLUE color scheme with a green meadow forms the backdrop, the placement of the green meadow with the tiny looking human elements again in a park like setting creates visual hierarchy. The pink and white flowers, plants in the foreground, the low-flying blimps suspended in the air create variety. The green meadow is juxtaposed with blue billboard looking screen/big screen and the man position at the top creates visual interest and scale. The white fence creates line and visual interest.

The robot/alien looking character seen in the background creates movement, visual tension the same way the passing cars did in the GREEN page. The 3-D Robot arouses curiosity in me and I click on the next page.

ORANGE page or the Esta 3D Bellecour webpage shows the 3-D robot in the foreground beside the orange blob of paint. The movement of the robot/alien is realistic a vector illustration springs first same as the GREEN page with the architecture line drawings this becomes a full-blown 3-D element as it approaches the foreground. The 3-d robot/alien and the other younger robot are placed with the short grass growth that creates visual hierarchy, variety and visual interest – this page is dominated by the presence of the two robots and their wild actions.

There is a repetition of the elements such as the sign board this time in orange color, the trees, the grass and this repetition creates visual interest
The casual-looking human elements engaged in animated conversation appearing detached from the robotic elements and the parked car, the cityscape in the background creates an illusion of community and appears to be a student oriented environment. The learning environment is depicted as fun, open, casual and collaborative which is what it is supposed to be.

All the WebPages allow reader input on a cell phone's interface and they clearly target the students (audience) who are invited to open exploration of art, architecture and multimedia.

The logos in three different colors to distinguish the three pages in different colors with the B symbolizing the first letter of the name of the college Bellecour, the functional tabs that are consistent in color and brand imaging builds trust with the audience.

True to what Jakob Nielsen has said Flash 99% bad the website has small font, limited interactivity and flash typical poor intuitive qualities. Despite these drawbacks website however is able to convey its message clearly, consistently and effectively to the NetGen learning styles of its intended audience. I may not be a NetGen learner but that does not stop me from visiting interactive, Flash-spurned online games sites such as Orisinal. This website has beautiful feminine colors, interactive games with cool names , cute characters... Enjoy !

Social Bookmarking and Tagging

I just finished reading a video news article in ZDnet.com on Joshua Schachter, the developer/creator behind del.icio.us, one of the first, social bookmarking tools, created del.icio.us because he needed a more sophisticated bookmarking tool to handle his large and growing collection of links. He needed a better tool that offered greater functionality and scalability and allowed him to retrieve both his favorite and most frequently used links, as well as information less frequently used, but important to him when he needed it. He defines this as an efficient tool that helps to "keep found information on the internet found".

Folksonomy or social bookmarking is the Folksonomy, a term coined by information architect Thomas Vanderwal, combines the people or "folks-y" approach to building taxonomy and defines folksonomy as "a type of distributed classification system". It is usually created by a group of individuals, typically the resource users. Users add tags to online items, such as images, videos, bookmarks, and text. These tags are then shared and sometimes refined. Folksonomy is

"a naturally created classification system which arises as a result of user-based tagging. A user tags an object such as a bookmark in order to remember it later; that information is then added to the global tag cloud and helps to create a folksonomy".

Wikipedia defines Tagging as

• A tag acts like a subject or category.
  
• A keyword is used to organize Web pages and objects on the Internet.
  
• Each user "tags" a Web page or image using his or her own unique tag. An image or Web page may have multiple tags that identify it.
  
• Web pages and images with identical tags are then linked together and users may use the tag to search for similar Web pages and images.
  

According to Thomas Vanderwal, folksonomy involves three data points that is:

• Web page and/or media
  
• The individual tag
  
• The distinct person tagging
  

He also categorizes folksonomy into two categories:

Broad: "Delicious is a broad folksonomy, where a lot of people are describing one object," Vanderwal said. "You might have 200 people giving a set of tags to one object, which really gives a lot of depth.... No matter what you call something, you probably will be able to get back to that object."

In a broad folksonomy, Vanderwal continued, there is the benefit of the network effect and the power curve because so many people are involved. An example is the website of contemporary design magazine Moco Loco , to which 166 Delicious users had applied the tag "design."

But 44 users had also assigned the URL the tag "architecture," 28 "art," 15 "furniture" and so on. That means that because so many people applied so many different tags to Moco Loco's site, it could be located in a number of different ways.

Narrow: Flickr's system is a narrow folksonomy, because rather than many people tagging the same communal items, as with Delicious, small numbers of users tag individual items. Thus many users tag items, but of those, only a small number will tag a particular item.

"You don't have quite that capability of the power curve," said Vanderwal, "but you do have that ability of adding metadata to an object."

Folksonomy and user intelligence:

Like Wikipedia social bookmarking as Tim O'Reilly puts it, harnesses collective intelligence of its users to find information on the internet and encourages user participation. The success of Google, Amazon in user engagement and has proved that,

• It is a truism that the greatest internet success stories don't advertise their products. Their adoption is driven by "viral marketing"--that is, recommendations propagating directly from one user to another. You can almost make the case that if a site or product relies on advertising to get the word out, it isn't Web 2.0.
  
• Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia based on the unlikely notion that an entry can be added by any web user, and edited by any other, is a radical experiment in trust, applying Eric Raymond's dictum (originally coined in the context of open source software that "with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow," to content creation.
  

All the above definitions of folksonomy aligns with what Joshua Schachter says that the most interesting thing about social bookmarking is "sharing" the information found with other users, in his words this means, "we're going to go from a world where] machines are telling you what's important and searching information [to a world where] we're actually going to be able search the knowledge of other people and get access to other people's opinions and thoughts and so on in much more direct manner". When I visited the del-icio-us site I was given a code (like that of Youtube when a video URL has to be embedded)to be pasted in the html to create a network badge thereby involving the user in the creation and application of software emphasizing "user-created content" – a Web 2.0 characteristic.

Social ties and folksonomy:

In her blog Rashmi Sinha discusses about social ties formed during tagging with the help of an illustration (mentioned below):

• Ad-hoc groups
  
• Lots of weak social ties
  
• Conceptually mediated ties
  

Folksonomy's future:

As folksonomies are very new, it is difficult to predict what directions people will take them in. From the graphs and analyses available, it appears that use of folksonomies is still on the upswing, and discussion in the "blogosphere" continues. There are many predictions of tags being incorporated into everything from search engines to home computers, to warnings of tags creating clutter, unusability, and advertising.

Some believe that folksonomies will become unmanageable, that the cost of classification is being transferred from the information creator to the information user.

Standard or popular terms for tags are also encouraged by the number of views that they are likely to attract if, for instance, they show up in Flickr's popular tags cloud. Clay Shirky suggests group classification as the "next frontier." Under this scheme, people would be able to select whose tags they want to view.

Hierarchies, search engines, and file folders are not likely to go away, but there is room to supplement and personalize their features with folksonomies and tags.

According to Mary Beth Lakin of American council of education, "there are disadvantages to social bookmarking. Although the organization of social bookmarking is flat with no folder fuss, the tools are still evolving and not all are user-friendly. Also, people create the tags. As a result, they create a level of meaning and context not found in current search engines (Wikipedia on Social Bookmarking). However, no consistent standards and management exist for tags, which can create confusion and result in wasted time.

The current focus of social bookmarking services is on individual users, but some trends point toward more collaboration and group use.

Organizations across sectors, from manufacturing and software companies to health care and social services, could make use of social bookmarking systems to more effectively serve their clients. Social bookmarking could also help professionals who need to easily store, access, and share information.

In another area, the marriage of social bookmarking to the digitization of books (Google's current book-scanning project has provoked a mix of opinions) offers the potential to expand reading as a community activity. As noted in a recent New York Times article: "Bookmarks can be shared with fellow readers. . . . You might get an alert that your friend Carl has annotated a favorite book of yours. A moment later, his links are yours. In a curious way, the universal library becomes one very, very, very large single text: the world's only book" ("Scan This Book," May 14, 2006).

In colleges and universities, students and professors could use social bookmarking systems to share course-based knowledge from one year to the next, leaving a "legacy for the next generation" of students and faculty (Tony Hirst, "Towards a Managed Social Bookmarking Environment in Higher Education," November 4, 2005). To better serve adult learner groups, support staff in academic advising, career services, and counseling could create bookmark communities.

Finally, social bookmarking might offer relief not only for researchers, students, and teachers, but also for the general public. With the abundance of online information, lifelong learners across sectors often feel overwhelmed and left behind. Through this electronic word of mouth, learners can mark it, manage it, and share it".

As I read more about folksonomy and spurred on by Vanderwal's tip "The more people getting involved with tagging, the greater the value", I created my del-icio-us account and tagged these websites that has interesting information on folksonomy, web usability, information architecture, technical writing and visual design:

UIE Brain Sparks

Good website on visual design and interface usability- be sure to check out their podcasts and brainsparks blogs maintained by Jared Spool

Technical Writing Tips, Tricks and Tutorials | Free Word Templates

This website has a lot of practical tech writing tips and provides lot of goodies like document templates

http://www.adammathes.com/academic/computer-mediated-communication/folksonomies.html

Article on Folksonomy