Zag Design Group

TEDx Santa Cruz

2011-06-04T13:34:00.000-07:00

By Kimberly Parrish

Think Local First is proud to be a sponsor of TEDx Santa Cruz, a full day event featuring riveting talks and performances from a diverse range of inspired individuals largely from the Santa Cruz area and sprinkled with outstanding TED talks. It will be held at the new Cabrillo Music Recital Hall on Saturday, June 11, 2011 with an after event mixer with wine and food. Over 300 people will come together to hear fifteen extraordinary speakers share their passionate stories on one theme: Engage! Virtual Venues Network, a local media company will video and stream the event live and upload videos to TEDʼs TEDx YouTube channel.

TedX is a nonprofit devoted to bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. The TED organization via TEDx, provides local communities with opportunities to participate in an exciting, vibrant and engaging discussion of important ideas shared globally. Santa Cruz County faces challenges like many communities around the world. The TEDx Santa Cruz organizationʼs mission is to:

· encourage a contemporary idea driven community

· provide jolts of inspiration

· develop a structure for faster and better idea exchange

· illicit new solutions to shared challenges

· promote smarter discussion with sharpened action

· import ideas that work for Santa Cruz

· enable worldwide exposure

The event will be $75.00, but, because of limited seating (300 seats) to the live event, individuals wishing to attend will need to apply through an online form available at: http://tedxsantacruz.org. Selected attendees will be notified well in advance.

For more information:

www.ted.com

www.ted.com/tedx

www.tedxsantacruz.org

www.facebook.com/TedxSC

An internet experience for the senses

2010-11-17T15:40:00.000-08:00

Paradigm shift
We are on the brink of a paradigm shift due to expanded access to information on a scale that even alters interpretation of it. No, I am not talking about the release of some magical new product, instead I am referring to a true shift in culture.

With wide spread availability of the internet and search engines, information is not limited to existing categories. It is no longer being stored in any specific physical location, like on a shelf, within a section of a building, instead it is dispersed on the net. As information has expanded, instead of being harder to find search engines allow us to turn categories inside out and access whatever we seek from the particular to general, and all related data. We can access information based on our individual needs, interests and whims, and get results instantly. While this may seem like an insubstantial change, it is actually a radical shift that has far reaching impact. One of my favorite videos explains this best.

Are we limited by Google?
Even though this is a huge change in the way we store and classify information, it goes much further than that. Our use of the internet is evolving to shift even how we perceive our environment. We now have immediate access to information, enabling us to find out the opinions of experts, celebrities and even Joe Public regarding an event, the instant it happens. Our time between an event's happening, and its perception, interpretation and retelling has drastically shortened, making Google and the internet a forming factor for perception and collective experience in our culture today.

“Google is becoming an important factor in how you experience the world. Just like a person wearing glasses literally sees the world through predefined frames, humans are seeing the Internet through the limits of Google.” (quoted from seomoz.org blog Googles unspoken failures are limiting your potential)

However, Google and its record is a far cry from reality, for most anyway. Today I read a very interesting blog that presents the idea that Google has its limitations in that it lacks ability to tap into other aspects of human experience. We experience five senses, touch, taste, sight, smell and sound, and Google doesn't really tap into them.

I would like to expand on this idea by suggesting that Google, of course, is not sentient, it can not really experience anything it only dumbly repeats what we tell it. Not only does it not tap into our experience but it cannot really understand ours. It has no awareness and therefore does not understand the context of the information.

This results in Paris Hilton (the celebrity) and Paris Hilton (a place to stay in Paris France) meaning almost the same thing to Google.

Wouldn't it be great if Google could understand context?

Web 3.0 Context
Ready or not, that is exactly what is coming. While there are still no systems with awareness out there, that I know of anyway, the flip side of the coin is being developed with the result being a system that would have vast ramifications for how we perceive and interact with reality. This new development is a system that can access all the databases in the web, by understanding common tags. This will give context to media. Geographic locations, images, words, music will have context which will allow Google to do some amazing things that will tap into our senses.

Here is a sample of the evidence that I found on the web -

An application that allows you to snap a picture with your cell phone to find out your location and nearby restaurants, or other shops that you are looking for, is already available. Its monocle: an augmented reality feature of yelp's iphone application.

What about being able to visually search? You can take a picture of something with a device connected to the net like your cell phone and find out information about it. Sounds like science fiction doesn't it? This application is in the early stages of development and is available to android users. It's called "google goggles". http://www.google.com/mobile/goggles/#text

Is your head spinning yet? Mine is. Clearly, there is something under this system allowing search engines to understand not a flat this = that sort of tag but a tag with context. It's called microformats or the semantic web. XML and RDFa data from semantic networks are used to clarify search queries and web text to improve search results. While this does not produce an 'aware' system it does allow the search engines to understand the context of the search. Paris Hilton is not the same as the Hilton in Paris.

Here is one of my favorite videos on the semantic web.

Science fiction dream or augmented reality
While the internet will never actually be able to have experiences, or so I hope, it will be able to relate as if it does. It will be able to understand what images are, and return appropriate information. It will be able to give meaningful search results drawing not only on what we typed in but also the context of our search. It is truly an exciting time to be alive as the human race evolves and progresses. Ready or not we seem to be venturing into a kind of integrated human and artificial experience. While it seems to be still a distant science fiction dream, augmented reality might be much closer than we dare to imagine.

This video demonstrates a device created using existing technology.

This new technology will surely change the availability of information. Information limited to text and words will be opened wide open to include images, music and like ideas in a way never before possible. This shift could lead us to a more highly evolved state where relevant information is available at all times, allowing us to act with greater knowledge and consciousness. It could also be a world of untapped advertising opportunity where everyone and everything is a billboard ready for promotion. As this technology comes at us it is important thing to understand that it is up to us how we use these amazing tools, and what developments come from them.

Website Accessibility and PDFs

2010-11-04T12:27:00.000-07:00

PDFs are a very convenient way to place information on the web. They can manage magazine style layouts, interactive forms and unique mathematical information. For these reasons and more there is a growing amount of PDFs on the web which has fueled increasing concerns about accessibility, particularly for the users of screen reading technology, which converts text into synthetic speech.

Before 2001 PDFs were considered to be not accessible. With the release of Acrobat 5 significant steps were taken to address accessibility. Now in 2010, I hoped that Acrobat would automatically produce Web Accessible pdfs.

For pdfs to be accessible they need to be properly set up to work with assistive technologies like screen readers and browsers. This includes properly tagging the text, giving all of the images alt tags and the document needs to have a language specification.

The image to the left illustrates the roles the content providers or developers play, as well as the authoring tools, evaluation tools, browsers and assistive technologies play in delivering accessible content. Image curtsey of W3.org http://www.w3.org/WAI/EO/Drafts/slides/components.html

Research Process
Wanting to keep our the pdfs on our site, while ensuring our content was accessible, I began investigating website accessibility and PDFs through researching accessibility guidelines and testing pdfs. Guide line document links are available at the end of this post.

Here is what I found:
Word, Open Office and Acrobat by default do not produce accessible pdfs. You have to go through many additional steps to generate an accessible document.

Steps to produce an accessible pdf -
1. Generate the pdf
2. Open Acrobat, I am using Acrobat 9
3. Run the Accessibility test at Advanced then accessibility then full check

4. The report usually comes back full of issues and steps to correct the issues.
Warning, Adobe has decided not to make the report saveable, exportable or copyable.

The issue -
Quite a few designers put information on the web in the form of pdfs because they aren't developers, programmers or coders. After reviewing one of the reports with the steps to correct the pdf, one of my colleagues exclaimed,
“Looks like it would be a very time-consuming process to fix every pdf and rather daunting, unless I could get some training or someone could walk through it with me. It seems closer to Web coding than what I'm used to. “

I'm not pointing my finger at designers. Instead I am lamenting the fact that Word, Open Office and Adobe produce inaccessible documents by default, and unless you run the test it is not apparent exactly to the degree that they are inaccessible.

Conclusion

While PDFs are still for the most inaccessible provide as much of the content as possible through properly tagged and coded HTML.
If PDFs must be used try to provide the content in another format elsewhere on the site.
Go through the extra steps to make the PDF accessible.

Glossary
Web content is the information in a web site, including text, images, forms, sounds, and such. Web content also includes web code, called markup

Assistive technologies (AT) are software and hardware that people with disabilities use to interact with the Web, such as screen readers, screen magnification software, alternative keyboards, and voice input software and switches for people who cannot use a keyboard or mouse

Authoring tools are software or services to create and modify web content, including:

Web page editors
Word processing software that saves files in web formats
Multimedia tools
Content management systems (CMSs)
Websites that let users add content, such as blogs, wikis, and photo-sharing sites

Evaluation tools help determine if a website meets accessibility guidelines, and include Web accessibility evaluation tools and markup (HTML) validators

Want to know more?

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) addresses web content, and is used by developers, authoring tools, and accessibility evaluation tools
Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) addresses the expression of website evaluation test results in a platform independent format
Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) addresses authoring tools
User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG) addresses web browsers and media players, including some aspects of assistive technologies
Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) addresses dynamic web content and web applications developed with Ajax, DHTML, and other web technologies
Essential Components of Web Accessibility

WAI home page
Essential Components of Web Accessibility provides more explanation of how the components need to work together for Web accessibility

The WAI home page lists Web accessibility highlights and links to myriad resources, including Introduction to Web Accessibility

SEO – What Matters? Survey of SEO Experts 2009

2010-10-27T12:32:00.000-07:00

The web world moves quickly and in the shifting landscape of evolving search engines, it is difficult to determine what really makes a difference in Search engine optimization (SEO). Search engine differences, industry variants and differing opinions of the experts obscure the important factors further. Often we are left wondering, what really matters in SEO.

Despite the variety of professional opinions and SEO tactics there are some ranking factors that most professionals agree affect site positioning on a Search engine results page (SERP). It is in leveraging these factors that you can gain an advantage over your competition.

Graphic, courtesy of Elliance.com that explores the lengthy list of both well proven and somewhat subjective factors that go into a ranking algorithm.

Clearly it's more complicated than just tuning up your meta data. So what really matters?
According to a recent survey by SEOmoz the Top 5 Ranking Factors are as follows:

Keyword focused anchor text from external links
External link popularity
Diversity of link sources
Keyword use in the title tag
trustworthiness of the domain based on link distance from trusted domains

The old magic bullet, keyword use in meta data keywords tag placed 24 in keyword specific ranking factors and was felt to have very minimal importance. Social media, including twitter links and facebook pages also scored low with very minimal importance.
In the survey the factors were given an importance rating and a degree to which the experts felt this factor was important for achieving high rankings. Below I've included the all the factors that received a rating of very high to high importance, so this is it, the 2009 SEO list of what matters.

On-Page (Keyword-Specific) Ranking Factors

Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag - 66% very high importance
Keyword Use as the First Word(s) of the Title Tag - 63% high importance
Keyword Use in the Root Domain Name (e.g. keyword.com) - 60% high importance

On-Page (Non-Keyword) Ranking Factors

Existence of Substantive, Unique Content on the Page - 65% very high importance

Page-Specific Link Popularity Ranking Factors

Keyword-Focused Anchor Text from External Links - 73% very high importance
External Link Popularity (quantity/quality of external links) - 71% very high importance
Diversity of Link Sources (links from many unique root domains) - 67% very high importance
Page-Specific TrustRank (whether the individual page has earned links from trusted sources) - 65% very high importance
Iterative Algorithm-Based, Global Link Popularity (PageRank) - 63% high importance
Topic-Specificity/Focus of External Link Sources (whether external links to this page come from topically relevant pages/sites) - 58% high importance
Keyword-Focused Anchor Text from Internal Links - 55% high importance

Site-Wide Link-Based Ranking Factors

Trustworthiness of the Domain Based on Link Distance from Trusted Domains (e.g. TrustRank, Domain mozTrust, etc.) - 66% very high importance
Global Link Popularity of the Domain Based on an Iterative Link Algorithm (e.g. PageRank on the domain graph, Domain mozRank, etc.) - 64% high importance
Link Diversity of the Domain (based on number/variety of unique root domains linking to pages on this domain) - 64% high importance
Links from Hubs/Authorities in a Given Topic-Specific Neighborhood (as per the “Hilltop” algorithm) - 64% high importance

Want to know more?
You can see all the details of the survey at http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#ranking-factors

Welcome to Zag Design Groups Blog!

2010-06-27T12:18:00.000-07:00

Zag Design Group is a full service design group focusing on web design and development with integrated marketing including printed brochures, eNewsletters and even video!

Don't have time to catch up on all the business and technology scoop? That's okay--we'll do it for you then blog about current design, web development, search engine optimization and internet practices to build your confidence and knowledge. The info will give you great ideas to strengthen your brand presence, increase profits, and reach your targets. We started this blog to share all this great information and a bit more about Zag.

We hope you enjoy it. Oh, feel free to comment and share our blog.
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