Health4you

About

The website I will be designing is in relation to one's health. More precisely, information or new research regarding one's overall state of complete health. This site's main topics will be-

General
Nutrition
Fitness
Mind & Soul
Men's Health
Women's Health

Each category will have different areas of browsing and interacting. This will be largely blog based with different blogs from anyone who wishes to participate. The blogs will be categorised into top rated blogs, recent blogs and featured blogs. Revenue will be generated through advertising from site sponsors. These sponsors will have target specific advertising for the topics the users are browsing. The content displayed will be in a very simple manner and will be very compatible with mobile and tablet devices.

Target audience

The anticipated audience of this website is for anyone who has an active interest in their health, state of mind or just general well-being. This is a very broad area and could potentially target just about anyone. Being more specific about the target audience and their characteristics, the website will attempt to appeal to people who are between the ages of 21 and 40, well educated or intelligent, concerned about their body image or state of mind and have a genuine interest in their health and well-being. The target audience will also be of more interest, and therefore targeted, if they are from the lower-middle class or above, as they will be more likely to be able to contribute to the revenue producing model of the site.

Anyone who is involved in different areas of social media will also be of interest. This means that people who spend a lot of time on Facebook, Twitter or Google+ are of interest, as their engagement will often involve free advertising for the website through the sharing or liking for its social media page. The area this side of the website will try to appeal to is teenagers, both female and male, of all economic backgrounds. This will be done through constant and consistent updates through social media pages and links to social media websites on every page. 

Blueprints

Form of navigation

The site is mainly structured as a global navigation structure due to its consistent listing and ability to access any category from any page. Like most global navigation structured websites, this is done through a navigation bar on every page which allows easy and simple access to these categories. For the target audience this site is aimed at, it is essential to have such quick access to any page, as this type of audience can be bored or frustrated easily by slow or difficult navigation structures.

Due to the nature of this website and the target audience, a contextual navigation system is applied on top of the current one. This is through page suggestions and links to 'similar' blogs which draws the audience in further. Like most sites, this site does cross between many other navigation systems, although to a much smaller degree. This includes local navigation through individual categories selected and search navigation through the blog search selection

Type of browsing

Browsing through this site is done primarily through a poly-hierarchical method. Because most blogs are accessed by the category they belong to and can belong to more than one category, different blogs can be accessed multiple times through different category topics and headings selected.

To support the contextual navigation form of this website, the browsing can also be done through associative relationships between what the user is currently or has previously viewed. This method is great for linking and suggesting pages or blogs to people who know roughly what kind of information they are after but not specifically.

Wire frames

Home

This is the wire-frame for the home page. It focuses on simplicity and doesn't overload the user by crowding the page. There are two ways one can search from this page, the consistent search bar in the top right corner which can always be accessed from anywhere in the website and the option further down the page which has more search options for more specific results. 

Navigation Page

Here is a results page for a searched term. This page will come up when searched from any method and will continue to display the search options previously selected. Multiple blogs that meet the search criteria will be displayed here with a small summary of what is in the entire article. This page also is an example of the global and local aviation system used. One can see this from the consistent main headings and the 'search' heading which notify's the user where they currently are on the site. 

Content Page

When a user visits this page, this is what they will eventually be after. Here is how the blogs will be displayed that the user has selected. It incorporates the same navigation system components as the previous page. It also incorporates advertisements on the side, which would be audience specific advertisements to appeal the user reading the blog. This page also adds the contextual navigation part of the site by displaying and suggesting sites the current user might like. This also helps the user learn what they might be interested in and how their keywords have effected the search through the listing of the metadata of the blog being displayed on the side. 

A small example of what could be a large table of vocabularies organised into a metadata matrix.

Metadata Matrix

Vocabulary	Description	Examples	Maintenance
Audience	The viewers and users of the site.	Teenagers, Any health fanatics.	Easy
Category	Areas the users can select for browsing.	General, Nutrition, Fitness.	Moderate
Tags	A collection of descriptions of a blog or image.	Nutrition, teenager, men, mental, gym.	Difficult
Featured	Blogs that are given an important status.	Featured, not featured.	Easy
Keywords	Words that help locate more specific blogs.	Greens, weights, creatine.	Difficult.

Controlled Vocabulary 

Just a list of terms which have the same meaning when replaced with alternative terms. This is just a small list and the real list would continue to grow the further the website went into development. 

Accepted Term	Variant Term
Blog	Blogs, Web Log, article
Nutrition	Food, diet, health, menu
Men	Male, boy, guy, man
Women	Female, lady, ladies, woman, girl
Fitness	Health, weights, training, gym, train, exercise

Alphabetical Order

After some thought and some revision, the following is the result of my ordering of these words in alphabetical order.

Original list	Aphlabetical order
El Paso, Texas Saint Nicholas, Belgium The Lord of the Rings Newark, New Jersey XVIIme siècle .38 Special St. Louis, Missouri New York, New York 1001 Arabian Nights The 1-2-3 of Magic Albany, New York #!%&: Creating Comic Books The Hague, Netherlands $35 a Day Through Europe H20: The Beauty of Water Plzen, Czech Republic	.38 Special #!%&: Creating Comic Books $35 a Day Through Europe The 1-2-3 of Magic 1001 Arabian Nights Albany, New York El Paso, Texas H20: The Beauty of Water The Hague, Netherlands The Lord of the Rings New York, New York Newark, New Jersey Plzen, Czech Republic Saint Nicholas, Belgium St. Louis, Missouri XVIIme siècle

Did you put The Hague under T or H?

I put anything starting with 'The' under its following word. This is because people are more likely to ignore the 'The'. 

Did you put El Paso under E or P?

I placed this Under P.

Which came first in your list, Newark or New York?

I placed New York before Newark because I placed symbols, numbers and special characters before letters and a space is a special character in my eyes. 

Does St. Louis come before or after Saint Nicholas?

St. Louis was placed after Saint Nicholas, as 't' comes after 'a' in the alphabet.

How did you handle numbers, punctuation, and special characters?

I placed all of these before the letters of the alphabet. This was a personal preference and this is where I would look for them if I was going through a list. The order these were put was guided by no specific rule, just what I felt was the right order. 

Assuming the italicised terms are book titles, what might be a more useful way to organise this list?

Well, since the book titles tend to start with more than just letters, it would be more logical and much more useful to organise these by their author. This is something many people would look for if the title wasn't found straight away.

If the cities represent places you've visited and the book titles are ones you've read, how could chronology be used to order the list in a more meaningful way?

This list would be organized in a much more meaningful way for me, the one who has read or visited these places. This is because I would know exactly where to look on the list without any confusion. Others may find the list to appear as being random though, which isn't very meaningful for them. 

At first when I looked over this list, I was expecting an easy ordering of the list. After a day or two, when I found time to actually go through the list and make decisions about what goes where and having to justify each choice, I started to question everything. I had to make decisions and apply rules that I just trusted were 'correct'. After completing this ordering, I googled websites that would organize these for me and I found that even these different websites didn't organize them all the same way. Some of these sites include-

http://alphabetizer.flap.tv/
http://www.textfixer.com/tools/alphabetize-text-words.php
http://www.alphabetize.org/

Take care,


Riley Van Zeeland.

All about labelling

Today I have focused my insight on labeling on a torrent sharing website called TorLock.

It is relatively new and I believe it was created due to the large number of current torrent sharing websites lacking the core principles that this site introduces. As part of the requirements, I have provided here a navigation system table, providing navigational labels and what labels they lead to.

Label	Destination’s heading label	Destination’s <TITLE> label
Main top-of-page
Torlock	Torlock	TorLock - The No Fakes Torrent Site
Movies	Movies	TorLock - Verified Movies
Television	Television	TorLock - Verified Television
Games	Games	TorLock - Verified Games
Music	Music	TorLock - Verified Music
Software	Software	TorLock - Verified Software
Anime	Anime	TorLock - Verified Anime
Ebooks	Ebooks	TorLock - Verified Ebooks
Body
Over 500 000 verified	Press Room	TorLock - 200K Verified
Join our forum	Torlock Central	Torlock Central
Login	Login	TorLock - Login Page
Upload	Upload a Torrent	TorLock - Upload a Torrent
“links”	“link”	“link” - Torrents - TorLock
Other top-of-page
Chat	Chat	TorLock - Torrent Chat
Forum	Torlock Central	Torlock Central
News	News	TorLock - Torrent News
FAQ	TorLock - FAQ	TorLock - FAQ
RSS	RSS Feeds	TorLock - RSS Feeds
Contact	Contact Us	TorLock - Contact Us

I chose this website because I thought it was a good example of labeling. From looking at this table I can see that it does label navigational links very well. Almost all of the pages navigated to from the home page, accurately label their headings and HTML Titles in relation to the content and consistent with the previous links. If I had to suggest improvements, I would say that the forum page wasn't as consistent as the rest of the site and it wasn't labelled as consistent either. Perhaps a 'Home' link could also be added to give everyone a link back to the home page in case someone doesn't realize that the 'Torlock' link is a home page link.

Competitor websites thepiratebay.sx and kickass.to both incorporate many of the same labels as Torlock. Torlock however appears to take the best of both worlds and displays different links for browsing categories but also contains easy to access links on popular searches. It's hard to put a finger on and exactly identify why I believe Torlock is the superior of the 3 in relation to its labels. I believe the graphical, colour scheme and location also plays a big role here.

Information Architecture

Today we are faced with the question, What Role does Information Architecture play in Website Development?

First up, what is Information Architecture? Before this subject, Information and Content Management, I had never heard of this concept but could have made a  reasonably accurate description of it. It's name suggests that it is the collection or representation of certain information. I know now that it is much more complex than this. In fact, the book 'Information Architecture' by Morville, on page 4, suggests that there are 4 definitions-

The structural design of shared information environments.

The combination of organization, labeling, search and navigation systems within web sites and intranets.

The art and science of shaping information products and experiences to support usability and findability.

An emerging discipline and community of practice focused on bringing principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape.

This is all relevant to planning, designing and building a website which is all part of the development process. At first one might think of this development process as only requiring a user-centered focus to develop a successful website but it is very clear that the Information Architecture is just as, if not more important. This is because, a user must not just find the website appealing and easy to use but they must understand what they are seeing, where they can get the information but most importantly, they must be able to actually get the information they are after.

There are many downfalls and expensive costs to a website that handles its Information Architecture badly, including-

• Cost of time for employees, customers and general browsers looking for specific information. 5 mins per person per query can add up to hours if not days of wasted time. 
• Cost of not finding information can be even greater. If the information is there but the customer, employee or uniformed worker can't find it, this information may be reported as non-existent and the data may be re-entered causing duplicate data and wasted time inputting it. 
• Cost of extra training, maintenance, longer searching time and loss of customers through frustration are just some more problems.

Another downfall is that it is hard to measure well structured Information Architecture, as the best examples are often the ones where the user doesn't even consider Information Architecture as even existing. This means that a successful development can be measured by a lack of complaints and increased members.

After all of this, I can honestly say that an Information Architect plays a very important role in any successful website development. Any time devoted to improving this structure and representation of information early on can greatly improve the worthiness of the same information and therefore the overall website later down the track.

Until next time.

Riley Van Zeeland.

Google+ Privacy Policy

I have had a Google+ account since the 'invitation only' days in mid-2011. I was interested in Google+ because of Google's history of innovative, simplistic and wide range of products currently available for free. Joining Google+ meant that there would now be a real profile that I could frequently visit and use that would be a base for the data stored in relation to my other Google experiences. This did not happen straight away but slowly but surely Google is combing all of its data to make a profile about me, that could know me better than I know myself.

After reading the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service, I was not surprised by anything I had read. Google+ can pretty much do what it likes with my data it collects according to its Terms of Service but its Policy and its motto 'Don't be evil', prevents it from using your information immorally.

From an old but interesting article-
http://trueslant.com/michaelshermer/2010/03/24/don%E2%80%99t-be-evil-why-google-made-the-right-decision-about-china/

When one uploads data or information onto Google, Google has the right to do the following-

...Give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works... communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our Services...

That is a lot of rights to a lot of information. The good thing is that Google has a policy in place to guide as and help us understand what this means 'our' information will be used for, instead of just assuming the worst.

Google+ and therefor Google collects information about us at every and any point we interact we any service even remotely related to Google. Now the positive note here is what google says it will do with the data it collects, remember Don't be evil! The Privacy Policy says-

We use the information we collect from all of our services to provide, maintain, protect and improve them, to develop new ones, and to protect Google and our users. We also use this information to offer you tailored content – like giving you more relevant search results and ads.

Sure, Google collects a lot of data and is able to use any of this data as it wishes but from what I have gathered, it is all for our benefit! Why not have personalized ads, friend requests based on interests and mutual friends, Videos based previously +'d videos or mail marked as spam based on our history.

Since Google holds all of this information, there does seem to be an issue about its security. What if there is a breach and someone steals our identity? That would suck! Unfortunately, from what I could find, Google claims to hold no liability or responsibility for losses or damages in relation to data given to it via its services where it was not reasonably foreseeable to prevent. Google does however work very hard to ensure our information is safe and secure. This is for the benefit of every party involved in social networking. They claim to-

• We encrypt many of our services using SSL.

• We offer you two step verification when you access your Google Account, and a Safe Browsing feature in Google Chrome.

• We review our information collection, storage and processing practices, including physical security measures, to guard against unauthorized access to systems.

• We restrict access to personal information to Google employees, contractors and agents who need to know that information in order to process it for us, and who are subject to strict contractual confidentiality obligations and may be disciplined or terminated if they fail to meet these obligations.

As mentioned earlier, it is in the best interests of every party to ensure all data is safe and secure. I also believe it is in the best interest of all parties that our data is combined and a valid profile about each of us is created. To move towards a Semantic Web, this is essential and also inevitable. I'm happy and more than willing to allow Google+ or Facebook or any well established Social Networking site to mine my behavior on their sites to create a profile to improve my experience, as long as everyone sticks by the one motto-
"Don't be evil"!!

I'll leave you with this video on the average consumer who is only scared of themselves.




Until next time.

Regards.

Web 3.0

The Web 3.0 is a very interesting yet somewhat scary concept. We all know that data is stored from, well, everything and anything but that's all it is, data. Data is nothing without a concept or understanding of it's relativity to the real world and everyday users. The Web 3.0 or Semantic Web is essentially The Internet that understands, a step towards an illusion of artificial intelligence.

Because the Web appears to be intelligent, it will know exactly what you want based on your entire history of interaction with Internet connected devices. What this means is users will spend less time finding out more about what they love. Widgets and news feeds will deliver personalized content straight to the user's device, whatever that might be (eg. watch, glasses, mobile or maybe straight to their brain). It will also allow users to communicate with technology through natural language. We can speak in our terms instead of the computer's! Another benefit to users is that we will receive specific niche advertising. I've already noticed this, when browsing while logged into Google, I'll often see ad's for products I've previously searched for and shown in interest in.

Everything will be connected to the internet and if all of the data coming from everything is stored and used, I can't imagine there being much privacy left in the developed world. Of course there will be privacy settings which can be changed to prevent the general public accessing your private data but the developers and software owners will no doubt have every right to use this data as they please because we'll accept their terms and conditions just to use it. This doesn't even take into consideration PRSIM!

As mentioned before, true Web 3.0 will be a real step towards an illusion of artificial intelligence. It will be very close to the equivalent to the Chinese Room experiment. So yes, I think the line will be blurred, but it won't disappear. When it comes down to the basics, programs, computers or The Semantic Web is broken down to bits but more importantly, code that forces them to be governed by a set of rules and the inability to think for themselves, even though it may seem as though they do. Not being an expert in neurology, I don't know exactly how and why we think, act and make decisions but I believe in the body, mind and soul and that we are more than just programmed pieces of flesh.

I'll leave you with a scene from 'Minority Report'. A future based movie with Tom Cruise about stop crime before it happens. This movie is big on knowing where everyone is all the time through retina scans. As you can see, this extremely intelligent spider like thing is identifying Tom Cruise by scanning his retina. Very interesting movie on how the government could behave if they know or believe they know everything... even the future.

Until next time.

Regards.

RSS Feed

To start off, I can say that I am very new to this feed reader stuff. In fact, I've always wanted to add some of my favorite feeds to a single feed that I can view in the one place but I never put aside the time to figure out how this reader thing worked. I guess I should have spent the 2 mins figuring out how to use it and add RSS feeds along time ago, as the name suggests, it is simple!

I didn't quite get a weeks worth in before writing this blog, in fact I only got 4 days worth of feeds. This was due to missing some key points when originally looking over the instructions. Anyway, I decided to use the feed reader on my Android phone, as all of my feeds are looked at when I have some spare time and rarely when I'm relaxing at the end of a day on my laptop or computer. Therefore, all observations were done via my HTC one X, which allows a decent amount of content to be displayed.

I subscribed to some general news sites, tech news sites, popular YouTube video feeds, BoyceAvenue (Artist on YouTube) and Torrentz.com.

I found that there were a few benefits to a feed reader (I used 'Feedly'). The first and most obvious being the main purpose of this technology, and that was to display all my RSS feeds in the one place which in turn saves me having 10 different tabs open on my browser and searching over and over again. Another is that I can mix different feeds into each other in the one place, such as different news websites. This made browsing that much easier and faster. Also, filtering different categories was very simple and effective when looking for a specific feed.

With all of the benefits, I guess there was a few drawbacks. Not very significant, but it was sometimes difficult to understand exactly where a feed was coming from, as they were often all in the one place. Filtering my feeds on the feed reader was also difficult to achieve. It was much more simple on my original websites.

All in all, I will definitely continue to use 'Feedly' and I believe that over time, through constant usage and familiarizing myself with the different settings, the experience will continue to improve and I will enjoy many hours 'reading'. Also, it could turn the other way and I could very well be at the maximum potential of 'Feedly' and it could be all downhill from here. I don't think this to be true, but you never know.

Until next time.

Riley.