Now to the gist of it - despite rumors to the contrary, at its core Quora is a Q&A. The biggest innovation from my perspective is the added social element which effectively created a new breed of those sites - where social interaction and question discovery and answering are intertwined. Questions and answers are spread through social profiles. Your dashboard is filled with questions that people you might be familiar have interacted with (answered, followed and so forth).

The result is a somewhat chaotic and interesting experience, which explains much of the buzz around Quora. On the core experience however - the Q&A - it falls somewhat flat for me, and here's why:

• There are serious moderation issues at Quora - open-ended questions that rarely get answered, irrelevant answers that get popular because the writer has a strong social graph, lack of focus due to the broad nature of the service.
• The UI is terrible. Dreadful. Not from an aesthetic point of view, mind you, but from usability and user-experience perspective. I can't tell who wrote a question (I guess it's by design - but why?). It seems I'm browsing activity instead of questions, which might work for Facebook but it makes the site hit-and-miss on each visit, as well as a time sink (not unlike Facebook). The actual action title in the activity items is in small font size and greyed out, making it hard to tell what am I seeing - many times I clicked on a question I already seen and read because someone decided to follow it or vote for it after 4 months. I mean, check out their Email notification settings (since improved a bit) -

'Nuff said. I played with it a bit and hadn't been there recently.

On the other side of the table we have Stackoverflow and the Stackexchange sites. For pure Q&A they are far superior, even though they lack the social interaction in Quora (which may or may not be a bad thing). I've been a long time contributor to Stackoverflow (though I didn't have time to spend there recently), and some of the reasons it works so well include:

• An amazing UI and user experience. While visually very simple and spartan, the UI is highly polished - finding and filtering relevant questions and answers is extremely easy using tags and a very effective search - which also helps reduce duplicate questions as it makes suggestions during question creation. It's easy to tell who asked the question and who wrote the answer (with the exception of the community wiki - which is also a nice touch), and what is their "ranking" - ie, reputation. Another nice touch is the real-time preview of your answer.
• The gaming mechanics all work together very effectively to engage people and make them try to write the best answers possible. Without involving populist tactics - ie, your twitter followers or facebook friends that are probably not experts on the subject in question - the voting system works very well to generally promote the best answers to the top. Badges and other gaming elements keep "players" involved and trying to improve their writing and their answers each time.
• A highly evolved moderation system - which started at a good level and iteratively improved to great through user feedback and smart decision making from the SO team. Coupled with a very refined rule system, it's rare to see irrelevant or badly formatted questions stick around for more than a couple of minutes. To avoid over zealous moderation, you need multiple moderator votes to close a question and usually due diligence is done in the comments giving time for the writer to rectify rule violations.
• The splitting of the topics into different verticals (such as programming, cooking, gaming etc.) increased the quality of both questions and answers, as users are there looking for a specific topic and many of them are experts on the subject. I would say this is the number one differentiator between the stackexchange sites and other Q&A sites - which tend to be overly broad in scope and lower on quality of content.

While Quora is the new hot, sexy startup on the block, in my opinion it is stackoverflow and its derivatives that are the real winners so far - I find it a bit confusing when people talk about quora as a place for expert answers, when it trades structure for social and virality. Quora still has something on its hands, but it remains to be seen if they can mold into a service that provides value over time and does not succumb to its own popularity.

The post links to a PDF document written by three Google researchers, and covers a subject I've been experimenting with a lot lately - the semantic extraction of data.

The document is a nice read though probably too technical for most, and it brings up the difficulty of implementation as one of the barriers for taking the next step towards structured data on the web. The argument is that most small content publishers do not posses the knowledge and expertise required to publish their content in a semantically meaningful way.

It seems to me that there's an easy solution for that - and that is to embed semantic awareness in the publishing tools themselves. Most people publish content through one of several high-profile content management systems (WordPress, Moveable type, Blogger, etc), meaning it is possible to reach a very large segment of content publishers from relatively few integration points.

Expecting people to learn about and implement web semantics is unreasonable, as the document suggests. Delegating that responsibility to the authoring tools by enhancing the backend logic and the interface, is very much doable. Need to add a calender event? allow the interface to add it in the proper microformat. Want to affect the styling of your content? allow the interface to give several semantically significant options (headers, paragraphs etc.). Most of those options are available today, yet they are not obvious enough that they are used in a consistent manner.

HTML 5 is around the corner, with more semantically relevant tags (such as header, footer, navigation, sections). Integrating support for it in those content management systems is a good first step towards more semantically accessible content.

Going even further with this, content management systems could provide more structured data on demand - or wait, they are already doing this! XML feeds, anyone? seems to me that if you poke a little beneath the surface you find that there is actually a lot of structure in modern online content. What's lacking is uniformity, but even so the number of dominant standards is not great.

Who will be "the next Google" who can examine this structure and extract meta-meaning that can provide value? you can be certain some bright minds are already on the case.

He has recently decided to have a go at a t-shirt design himself, and came up with this brilliant concept which I think is pretty awesome. If you like t-shirts and have a threadless account, please take the time to have a look and vote for it (I'd really like to see it printed ).

Some very well known and successful online entities can be considered as such - Wikipedia in which users contribute knowledge, Digg in which users help others find interesting articles by voting and facebook which is the current golden standard for social networking (in which user generated content - UGC - is a given).

However, those sites are not thought of as having strong business models. Wikipedia, of course, is free. Digg and facebook rely on advertising, which is the fallback business model on the web - conversion is relatively low and you can only count on decent revenue when you reach the size of the aforementioned sites.

As can be guessed from the title of this article, I would like to discuss a couple of sites / services that use UGC as the basis for a viable business model:

Case 1: Threadless

Threadless is an online t-shirt retailer with a twist - the concepts for the t-shirts are submitted by users, voted on by the community and finally hand picked by the staff. A winning design will be printed and sold through the site, and its creator wins a nice sum of 2,500$. That's the basic premise - there are several variations such as contests and reprints, but at its base - its a marketplace for ideas.

Threadless is already an established online brand, existing since 2000. It proves that you can crowd source creativity for fresh product ideas in a way that is both beneficial for the product distributor and the creative contributor. Threadless builds on this premise and succeeds because of their excellent blend of branding, community integration and good service. I have personally purchased at threadless multiple times and I've had nothing but satisfaction and enjoyment from the service.

Threadless currently has revenue in excess of 30$ million, and income of 10$ million annually. Not bad for a startup funded with a 1000$ seed (earned in an online t-shirt content, no less).

Case 2: crowdSPRING

I had just recently discovered crowdSPRING, an online service that mates graphical design talent with design related projects. The concept is to try to improve traditional design projects proceedings for both sides:

- Project requesting parties (called buyers) are guaranteed to get at least 25 different concepts for their needs (be it a logo, website design, print and others), with a money-back guarantee.

- Graphical designers (called creatives) are given a global stage to show their work and generate income. Also, since buyers pay in advance, the winning piece is guaranteed to receive payment - there is no scenario in which a buyer can say he doesn't like anything and walk away.

- crowdSPRING itself takes a small commission on top of the project award money. This is the main business model for the site.

What drives the service is the interaction between buyers and creatives. Creating a project and watching the concepts improve as both sides learn more about the requirements through iteration and communication is a very interesting experience.

We've recently created a logo design project on crowdSPRING, and the reaction has been phenomenal. Though we have a couple of designers on board at Octabox, we felt we needed a fresh approach as we have been too deeply involved for a long time now. There are still 9 days (out of 14) till the project ends, and we already have an incredible amount of entries (over 300).

The process itself was worth the price of admission - through the interaction with the many contributors, we achieved some insights on what we want in a logo and a design direction for our new website.

crowdSPRING is not yet an established entity like Threadless, but it is well on its way to becoming one. Another example of how to crowd source creativity in a win-win situation for all involved.

Web 2.0 as a viable business model

Those two sites are just a small sample of many successful sites / services built on UGC as the driving force. I believe this market is still mainly untapped - there are plenty of possibilities to be explored. Despite that the basic premise is always the same:

- Create a community around a product / service concept
- Allow / encourage the talent within the community to offer their skills to the rest of the community
- Facilitate the interaction between the talent and the community, while trying to interfere as little as possible

What other successful web2.0 business models have you seen?

I will now try to predict the future: Using several statistical sources, I have plotted the usage patterns of the three major browsers (IE6, IE7 and Firefox) and extrapolated the timespan in which IE6 will become redundant.

I used three sources for my data:

• w3Counter, a hosted web-analytics service (no relation to the w3c)
• w3 Schools, a veteran repository of web development tutorials
• The Counter, a website analytics tool

As could be expected, the statistics provided by each site differ quite substantially, however since I am looking only for the trends of browser usage in theory it shouldn't have a big impact on the results.

I plotted all three browsers usage percentage against their timeline, calculated the rate in which IE6 usage is decreasing and used some basic algebra to derive the timespan for IE6 theoretical oblivion.

The graphs:

That R-squared box you see in the graphs is the correlation coefficient for the linear approximation on the usage pattern of IE6. It stands for how well does the data represent a linear pattern, with values closer to 1 mean a better fit. Luckily, for all three graphs I got pretty good matches, with data from "The Counter" bottoms out at a 0.96 match.

As a side note, I found the data from "The Counter" to be the least consitent and reliable - all of its 2008 data is smoothed out over a period of 150 days, providing much less detail in the numbers, its precision level is low (no decimal point) and if you look at the IE7 data you will see a strange bump in the beginning of 2007 not seen in other sources. Pretty strange.

Continuing with the analysis - since I got pretty good fit for my linear approximations (pretty good for this blog post anyway. I won't be submitting any of this to Scientific American), I will use a linear equation to extraploate future usage values.

Formulating:

- Usage percentage is a function a of time (t)

- We approximate usage to a linear function

- We want to know the time at which IE6 usage will drop to 1%

- Some minor formula rearrangements give us what we need

The time we would want to count from would be the present day, so we will assign the last value for each graph as usage at t=0. The slope coeffcient 'a' is the slope extracted from the graphs. This gives us for each data-set the amount of months from now that IE6 usage will drop to 1 percent:

As I've mentioned previously, the data from "The Counter" looked suspicious so it's not surprising that the results it produced are skewed from the others.

How relevant are those numbers - The approximations I performed here are very basic and contain no error treatment. It also does not account for outside factors, such as the release of new browsers and operating systems. We have however an indicator for the life expectancy of IE6 - it has somewhere between 2 to 2.5 years of major shelf life.

Don't throw away your IE6 browser just yet

(The excel file I used is provided for your discretion here.)

This is quite the feat. Porting a visually-intensive language such as processing into the browser using open technologies (ie, not Flash) is like trying to fit square pegs into round holes. John is really pushing the limits of current browser technology with his processing.js library, and some of its features only work on latest beta builds of next generation browsers (Firefox 3, Webkit). This is by design, as this library is currently more a proof-of-concept than an actual tool for mainstream use (also due to the strain it puts on the system running it in the browser).

Hopefully browser makers will take heed - and attempt to make their products fully compatible with such ambitious projects. It will be a very special day indeed when we can comfortably run a complete port of processing in all the major browsers.

var Cache = {
	stack: {}, //Cache stack
	load: function(id){ //Load cache if found
		return (typeof(this.stack[id]) != 'undefined') ? this.stack[id] : false;
	},
	save: function(data,id){ //Cache data with unique id
		this.stack[id] = data;
	},
	remove: function(id){//Remove cache for identifier
		if(typeof(this.stack[id]) != 'undefined')
			delete this.stack[id];
	}
};

Short and sweet. Basic usage involves calling the load() method to check for cache hit and fetching the actual data if cache is empty. The remove() method is used to force fresh data to be retrieved.

Example:

/*
 * Say we want to load different pages for a paginated view via an AJAX request.
 * We'll wrap the process in a function that retrieves the requested page given the page number.
 */
function getPage(num){
	//We check the cache first.
	var content = Cache.load('page' + num);

	//If cache is empty, it will return false.
	if(content == false) {
		//Retrieve the cache via AJAX request using jQuery
		$.get({
			url: '/path/to/content',
			data: 'page_num=' + num,
			success: function(content) {
				//Save the cache, so next time no request is needed.
				Cache.save(content,'page' + num);

				//Load the content
				loadPage(content);
			}
		});

	//Cache hit, load the content immediately
	} else {
		loadPage(content);
	}

	//We seperate the actual page loading due to the asynchronious nature of AJAX
	function loadPage(content) {
		//Load the page into a DIV with an id of 'pagecontent', using jQuery
		$('div#pagecontent').html(content);
	}
};

In this example I used the cache to store a string (retrieved page HTML). However, you can easily use it to store objects and arrays (JSON anyone?) for more demanding usage.

Hope to keep you interested

P.S. I would like to thank Adam for the layout concept. Turned out pretty nice!