vod:pod is the newest video sharing and aggregator site on the block, and it has a few twists. Three of them:

First, the primary focus is a video collection (a pod) rather than a single one. Collecting can be done by individuals or together. So, for example, here are 4 people collecting indie music. You can scrub over the videos for a rank and rating preview before watching, and the sparkline at the top right gives you an idea of the popularity of the pod.

Second, VodPod lets you upload videos but doesn’t ask for an exclusive relationship. It reaches out into the Web–you can include videos from YouTube, Google Video, and so on in your pod, and keep all of them collected alongside your own ones. These highlighted pods all mix-and-match from different service.

Last is something Mark Hall just told me about: Each video has a low-threshold response widget next to it, so you can say quickly that you loved, just watched, or laughed at what you saw. If you add your Twitter details in your vod:pod profile, that response will also be announced to your Twitter buddies. Simple, social and (importantly) deliberate every time.

There’s a lot more to come - really big features - but I’ll leave it there.

vod:pod is the first service I’ve watched all the way from early concept through to launch. S&W did some very early product ideation and experience work - on how people find videos to watch online, as Mark discusses - and I’ve been following progress since. While the shape of the solution has changed considerably, the core values have been maintained: Organising, socialising, and being part of the Web.

I find that promising, and so vod:pod’s what we use to host videos for this blog.

Adaptive Path kindly invited me to their offices this morning, where I muddled through my Making Senses talk, on using the human senses as inspiration for next-generation Web browser functionality.

Revisiting the slides, and the conversation afterward, has shown me how to state the argument more directly:

1. As far as interaction on the computer desktop and the Web goes, navigational and spatial metaphors dominate. On a micro level we talk about direct manipulation of files via icons: Dragging, moving, opening and so on. On a macro level, we have addresses, visiting, and sitemaps.
2. When a person has navigated to something, they can know what it is because of the navigation itself. For instance, you know you’re in London because you followed all the signposts to London.
3. In a world of cheap sensors, many, many display surfaces, and high connectivity, we are presented with information without that navigational context. Furthermore, in areas which have traditionally used the navigational metaphor (mainly the Web), navigation might not be the most appropriate approach to reading the news, buying books, or hanging out in chatrooms. Yet still we approach Web design armed with this metaphor.
4. It’s as important that a thing can be instantly appreciated for what it is, as that it can be navigated to. ‘Instantly appreciate’ means comprehend pre-consciously, just as we instantly appreciate a chair as a chair when looking at it, without having to deliberately deduce the meaning of the pattern of light on our retina.
5. As a guide to what qualities we should be able to instantly appreciate, we can use human and animal senses to show what features we need to recognise of things in the environment. Sensing these features is sufficient to let us intelligently interact, without navigating.
6. To summarise these features, we need to be able to detect: Structure, focus and periphery, rhythms of activity, summaries, how this particular thing is situated in the larger environment (and more). The Web browser, as our sensory organs online, should do this job, instead of leaving it to the websites themselves.

Applying the sensory model to Web design triggers a few ideas:

• The high-level structure of all sites should be represented by the browser in a consistent way, not by each site differently.
• Regular patterns in browsing (such as the sites visited daily or weekly) should be supported by the browser.
• Using the extracted keywords of a web page as its ’scent,’ hyperlinks should indicate how their odour strengthens or detracts from the smell of the current browsing trail.

There are more ideas, but that’s what the presentation discusses and illustrates.

Incidentally, the image at the top of this post is from J. J. Gibson’s The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, which talks about how we see continuously and actively as we move through space. I’d like to consider browsing the Web in the same light.

XTech, the European web technologies conference, has picked The Ubiquitous Web as its 2007 theme:

As the web reaches further into our lives, we will consider the increasing ubiquity of connectivity, what it means for real world objects to be part of the web, and the increasing blurring of the lines between virtual worlds and our own.

The call for participation is now open; topics we find especially interesting are mobile devices, RFID, user interface, web apps, and of course where this is all going.

Alongside Adam Greenfield of Everyware and Gavin Starks of Global Cool, S&W will be keynoting. See you there!

Web apps are currently undergoing a renaissance–or perhaps they’re fulfilling the promise made when the genre was created in 1999. The technology, skills and community that go to make these web apps is beginning to turn in many different directions. We’ll soon see a number of different web app species. One I find most exciting is Deploy to Desktop. What if the same skills needed to build complex web apps could be turned to making desktop applications, starting from a simple web app in a HTML renderer window, and iterating to use native widgets, drag and drop, and full OS integration? (More about this in my App After App talk.)

We’re on the way there. Three data-points for that journey:

Apollo is Adobe’s cross-platform runtime, based on Apple’s WekKit, that lets you run HTML/CSS/AJAX apps on the desktop. It works offline, includes an API for communication between Apollo apps, and will let you write database hooks to a local or remote persistent store. The Apollo wrapper will be distributed free, like Acrobat Reader or the Flash Player (personally I think this is the wrong model–apps should be standalone, but we’ll see). Some Apollo screenshots.

Next is WebKit on Rails which is exactly what I wanted to see when I gave that talk. It makes it easy (well, easier) to take your Ruby on Rails web app, wrap it in WebKit, the Mac HTML renderer, and run it as a desktop app. See the list of existing projects for applications you can already download.

Last up is Pyro, which wraps 37signal’s Campfire browser-based live chat application and turns it into a Mac app. Features include a badged application icon (the number of unread messages are shown), drag and drop upload, scripting support and more. Someday all web apps will be available this way.

Back in June, at reboot8, I presented a series of web browser enhancement ideas based on an investigation of the human senses. (The slides and my notes are online: Making Senses.)

The concept of taste led me to imagine what it would be like to take a hyperlink on a webpage, and pop it in your mouth (taste starts on slide 7). Just like our tongue picks up a 4 or 5 flavours, but sometimes we really enjoy a salty or bitter taste and sometimes we don’t, what are the 4 or 5 tastes of a webpage that we like depending on our mood and nutritional requirements of the day?

In my sketch, tasting a link involves hovering over it and having a flavour summary pop up. This includes a thumbnail of the page at the end of the hyperlink, it’s extracted terms (corresponding to the smell), and a bar chart of the 4 page tastes (flavour is a combination of all of these). The 4 I chose, with only a little thought, were:

• Is it an outward-linking page, like a contents page, or an inwardly focused page like an essay?
• Is it frequently updated?
• Is the text more in the 3rd person, like a corporate or academic page, or more about the 1st person–subjective, like a blog or journal?
• Do many people link to this page, ie what is its pagerank?

They’re okay, as tastes, I think, but really could be better.

Fast forward a few months…

At eurofoo06, Ben Gimpert presented on the “Theomatics of Food” (he has a culinary background). He spoke about mouthfeel, that sensory experience of taste, materiality, stickiness… it’s a grand word.

Where I really pricked my ears up was when Ben joined taste to mouthfeel. What is the feel, he asked, of the main tastes? He speculated:

• “Sour” mouthfeel: pucker-y
• “Salty” mouthfeel: chewy
• “Bitter” mouthfeel: coating-y
• “Sweet” mouthfeel: crunchy

(I don’t recall whether he mentioned umami/pungent or spicy in this section too.)

Now this I like. Given those 4 tastes, and their corresponding feelings, are what we need to make a first-pass judgement on whether we need the buckets of chemicals available in any given food… could I use these real tastes to make the equivalent 4 for webpages?

What does my browser-mouth taste when I click a link? What are the basic flavours of HTML? What is the pagefeel?

So I think I’ll revise my original 4 web tastes. They’ll still take a lot of datamining to calculate, but that’s fine. Perhaps crunchy pages are like popcorn, ones people stay on for not much time, but when they click away it tends to be on another, almost identical page. Coating-y pages are ones that linger… could these be social sites, where you get embroiled in the community, sticky sites?

Chewy sites are long and worthwhile: academic papers, pages that are knowledge hubs, using keywords from a lot of separate parts of the web. And I’m not sure what pucker-y/sour is. Sour makes me think of lemons, which makes me think of citric acid at the centre of the metabolic cycle, which tastes nasty but is at the middle of all life. Perhaps the equivalent for the web is hyperlinks. Pages with a lot of hyperlinks on them are the concentrated stuff of life on the web, and so they taste very, very sour.

Okay, enough of that silliness.

I still think it’s worth taking huge quantities of every metric we can gather about the web and web browsing behaviour - page linger time, click-away time, search terms, text reading age, word tense, link network position, everything - and datamining it as much as we can. Maybe out of all of that we’ll find some stable metrics for describing pages, possibly even those pagefeels, and those will be great additions to search engines and web browsers.

Alternative taste suggestions welcome!