In•for•ma•tion n. 1.) Knowledge obtained by research, observation, study or instruction in a form allowing for its recommunication to others enabling a state of knowing.

Ar•chi•tect n. 1.) An individual skilled in the art of building who creates the instruction for the construction of organized space. 2.) the thoughtful specifications and superintendence of the building of useful structures.

In•for•ma•tion Ar•chi•tect n. 1.) The individual who organizes the patterns inherent in data, making the complex clear. 2.) A person who creates the structure or map of information which allows others to find their personal paths to knowledge. 3.) The emerging 21st century professional occupation addressing the needs of the age focused upon clarity, human understanding, and the science of the organization of information.

From Information Architects by Richard Saul Wurman. Lest we forget, as the Web 2.0 deluge pours on.

By definition it may seem that the answer to this question is yes. It’s simple. A user starts a web browser, enters your company’s domain name, and your website appears. You have hopefully spent some time thinking about those users, but making sure your site is connected to the web means more than viewing your site in a web browser.

Search Engines
The most obvious example is search engines. Companies write software called “Spiders” that visit your site and ask for every page. You have probably invested some money into “Search Engine Optimization (SEO)”. One goal of SEO is to make it easy for the spider to find, prioritize and index the important content on your site. This is accomplished by improving the HTML code behind your web pages.

HTML is one language of the web, but a more powerful language is XML. For instance, to optimize your site for the Google spider you can add an XML sitemap file to the root of your website. This tells the spider where to find content, what content is important, and when content has changed.

XML can take different forms and that’s where it gets interesting.

Feed Readers
Many people read their favorite sites without ever opening a web browser. Instead they use a Feed Reader.

Many websites offer their content in XML formats called “Real Simple Syndication (RSS)” or “Atom Syndication Format (ATOM)”. A feed reader, which may look like an email application, checks your site for updates and sends the information back to the user. Internet Explorer 7 has a feed reader built-in and you will notice in the screenshot below that the content of the Elexicon blog looks very different in the IE feed reader.

Mashups
As soon as you provide an XML feed, other websites can combine your content with other sources to create a new experience. The richness of your data enables unforseen value as others start to piece it together with additional web resources. Here are some examples:

Widgets: A web feed allows users to put your information on their site. This is great for SEO and for your user. If your company has a dealer network, each dealer site could host your news widget and drive traffic to your site while adding value to theirs. In the screenshot below, you can see a simple widget displaying the Elexicon blog feed on my Google home page.

Geocoding: If your data has a geographic connection you can include the latitude and longitude. Many digital cameras will geocode and timestamp every photo when it is taken. If you upload your photos to the Flickr website, then sites like flickrvision can combine the Flickr feed with a map and you get a fascinating worldwide photo tour in real-time.

Aggregation: Others may chose to load your data and analyze it for patterns and trends. For instance, Twitscoop reads all the words from the microblogging site, Twitter, and creates a real-time tag cloud revealing the most popular topics of conversation on the web at any given moment.

Here is a Mapdango map of Grand Rapids, Michigan, which pulls together weather, events, photos, history and more.

Sites like technorati are trolling for content and if your information is tagged properly, it will likely be included.

Visualization: Besides aggregation, advanced visualization is another trend. Software is used to analyze data and create new ways of seeing things. SpatialKey is a new company doing some nice work in this area.

Application Programming Interface (API)
Another level of web integration is providing an API. An API allows others to develop even more robust web applications with your data. It will be easier to do business with you and it will offer valuable exposure for your company. A great example of this is the UPS API which provides information about a package in an XML format. Web users have used the API to create multiple ways to track packages, by map, IM via Twitter, and more.

What you can do
It is not enough to think only of people visiting your site with a web browser. You need to think about what rich information you can provide to the web. Organizing your data will benefit your company and you may be surprised what it inspires in the web community. There’s a lot going on; just look at the full spectrum of sites in this analysis dubbed The Conversation Prism.

As we go about our daily activities we generate a large amount data. We go places. We have conversations. We spend money and buy particular products. We work on various tasks. Often we would like to remember that information, and in some cases, such as criminal investigations ideal to have “total recall” with video if possible.

Before computers, recording this information was a manual process with pen and paper. Most modern gadgets have simply replaced the pen and paper with stylus and touch screen. However, there are some devices and software that simply record your activity without any assistance. The information is available and the right solution can just gather the data as it happens. Then it provides useful and structured searching and reporting of the information.

Here are some of my favorites:

• Trackstick: This inexpensive device records where you go and provides a means to record way points for future notice. The information can later be displayed on Google maps. You can record jogging routes, sales trips, fishing expeditions (with hotspots) and more. I think this space is going continue to grow. I suppose cellphones will take over here since I think they already offer real time GPS.
• Nike pedometer: Any pedometer is a great example of gathering implicit information. The Nike implementation is clearly robust since it works with the iPod to track steps and more. I am not sure if it records velocity or impact, but it should.
• TimeSnapper: This great product takes a picture of your desktop at regular user-defined intervals. It also records the active application at the time the image is taken. The user can then replay the day. This implicit diary refreshes the memory of what happened. It also aligns activity to time for reporting. If an important text-based document is lost, you can often jump back to the day you worked on it and use the OCR capabilities to recover the information.
• SenseCam: This is a “life recorder” that Microsoft Research is developing.
• IBM and Maersk Logistics: These companies have developed real-time cargo container tracking. Each container device can talk to other containers to leap frog information back to a central computer as a mesh network. The container is aware of the lighting changes which implies intrusion. It detects geo-location, moisture levels and more.

I would like a system that keeps track of what I buy down to the product. Costco knows exactly how much I spent with them last year. Now I just need it in an itemized report so I can track expenditures more accurately.

For better or worse, with little intervention, computers will dig deeper and deeper into the information we create to provide us with a thorough look at what we do.

I just stumbled across aideRSS. It is a site which helps users find the best posts from a particular RSS feed by providing a “PostRank”.

Because blog posts are often their author’s random streams of consciousness, it is hard to wade through the many posts to find the few where an author was particularly clever. This is where aideRSS steps in. aideRSS helps you determine the signal to noise ratio of a particular feed.

They use an algorithm based on relevance, content, and people’s reaction to it. For instance, it shows how many times a particular post is referenced in digg, del.icio.us, or Bloglines (They should add Diigo to the list.

I think this will help me find the best posts from a particular feed and also, determine whether it is worth it to subscribe to the feed at all.

This is a great idea that I think will only get better. For instance, it would would be nice if user’s could rate posts. However those ratings should only be a portion of the formula, otherwise spammers and group-think could skew results. Also I think I would like to be able to subscribe to filtered feeds. The posts may need to be delayed a couple days, but that would not bother me, if I could get a better ratio of quality content.

Beyond that, they use sparklines in their UI, which you gotta love.

One advantage of the web is the ability to control the content being viewed.  This really comes into play when trying to compare products or services online.  Being able to compare features effectively helps the customer make the right choice.

You have probably seen those web pages that include a huge list of features with check marks in the columns that represent products to be compared.  Often a company will place its products next to competitor products and then stack the deck by inventing features it can claim that the competitors cannot–the advertising technique called differentiation.

A few sites allow you to filter a list of products by choosing particular attributes such as products within a particular price range, but most online efforts have not impressed me.

Well, I stumbled across a site called WikiMatrix, which helps users select wiki software.   The comparative tools are fantastic. The features that mean the most to me are the fact that you can choose which products are compared and you can choose which features are compared.  The later is key.  The user determines which features are important and can limit the comparative list to just those features.

I think there is still more that could be done.  One thing would be to let users define or apply their own features to products and then compare them.  For instance, the user might add an endorsements attribute or certain personally-defined pros and cons.

Either way, there is a lot of potential here especially for complex products like insurance plans, cell phone plans, automobiles, and computers, etc.  The web is the perfect medium to accomplish it.

It often saves time and money if you can learn from the efforts of others. That saved effort can also allow you to propel an idea beyond its initial capabilities.

In web development and programming in general, the concept of patterns has emerged. There are user-interface patterns, object-oriented-programming patterns, information architecture patterns and more.

For months I have been contemplating the need for a web site that outlines common database design patterns. After all, the relational database is at the heart of most web applications and many of the same strategies are required for web applications. Many websites deal with user authentication and validation, hierarchical catalogs of products or data, dynamic site navigation, shopping cart systems, integration with backend systems, scheduling, etc.

The Data and Object Factory is a great resource for the classic Gang-of-Four OOP design patterns.

Dey Alexander Consulting has a nice resource page for links on user experience design patterns, and it includes a link to welie.com–another site I have found useful on this subject.

If you want to track web design trends, check out Design Melt Down for many ideas, or go to the Website Layouts Cookbook for hundreds of wire frames to kick off your design process.

And now, without further adieu, go to Database Answers for a large repository of database patterns. I hope this site takes off and provides ways to enhance, rate or validate database design patterns.

I recently discovered an clever idea known as “Sparklines“. Sparklines are “data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics” and the concept was developed by Edward Tufte, a professor emeritus at Yale University who specializes in the presentation of informational graphics.

I am particularly fond of anything related to the role of symbols in communication and this immediately caught my eye. I have written the following paragraph to demonstrate one use of sparklines.

A web developer must consider the popularity of web browsers when designing a web site to ensure the widest audience will be able to access the site’s content effectively. Internet Explorer won the first browser war with Netscape and remained unchallenged and unchanged for several years. A relatively new web browser called Firefox has put Microsoft on guard. Over the last year Firefox has been able to exceed 25% market share. You can see in red each month that Firefox has had higher than 25% market share since January 2005.

After several years of dormancy in the browser space, Microsoft has literally apologized and released IE7 (Beta 2). It is interesting to watch the adoption rate of a new browser, therefore I have prepared some statistics on three well known browsers.

• Internet Explorer 7 adoption has been steady with a low of .2% in January and a high of 1.1% in May of this year.
• Firefox has had its ups and downs but has increased from 16.6% in January 2005 to 25.7% in May of this year.
• Netscape 7 never really got off the ground and is at its lowest mark to date. Its highest market share was 1.6% in November of 2003. Currently only .3% of web users are browsing with Netscape.

It will be interesting to see if IE7 can pull market share from the loyal following that Firefox has for good reasons already engendered.

As you can see, sparklines offer a quick intuitive look at information by embedding it compactly within the text itself.

These are simple examples that are utilizing the code written by Eric W. Bachtal. Eric’s code is a .NET implementation of the Python CGI program developed by Joe Gregorio. These guys have made it very easy to incorporate different sparkline graphs into your web site. Just assemble an image source tag with data points and instructions and the “web service” will create and return the graph.

Here is a simple example:

img title="IE7 adoption rate" xsrc="http://www.elexicon.com/sparkline.ashx?type=smooth&d=0,3,4,5,9
&height=15&min-color=red&max-color=blue&step=10&max-m=true&min-m=true&scale=true"  

There is a lot of potential here. Bissantz has some clever and attractive implementations of sparklines for Microsoft Office and the web.

Sparklines are a nice tool to consider for densely representing data. Using them inline with text or in mobile applications, where screen space is limited, can be an effective way to give the user a little more help decifering and remembering the content you are trying to communicate.