It's been a while since I talked about "Grannies and Gurus", so before getting into the meat of what we're doing, it'll help to first define the audience we're aiming at. Non-technical users are those that regularly put URLs in the Google search bar instead of the location bar. They're people who've never used a text editor in their life, only Word and email. Non-technical people rarely use menu bars. They're people who have yet to create a new folder in their email program, or even their file system. Non-technical people are the vast majority of computer users. When I...

My wife plays Solitaire incessantly. She's got a PhD and a professor's schedule, but nearly every time I look over at her laptop, she's reflexively sorting cards into piles, playing Freecell or some variation. She tells me it relaxes her, which seems reasonable enough, even if my idea of relaxing involves a dark room and a soft pillow. She's not alone. Solitaire is easily the most popular computer program of all time. More popular than email or web browsing, Solitaire is often the first program people use. I used it to teach my mom how to use a mouse. It's...

My wife and I bought new cell phones last week, both with Bluetooth, both with SyncML. She's weaning herself off her Palm, trying to find a substitute desktop PIM for Palm Desktop. In the last few days, we've run the gamut: Apple iCal/Address Book, Notes (I worked at Lotus on R5), Mozilla Calendar/Address Book, ACT, Chandler, and even such older gems as Ecco, Goldmine, and Desktop Set. The only product we didn't look at was Outlook, as it's too prone to viruses. Why is this so hard! We're talking about freaking address and event information. Of all application areas, you'd...

Imagine it's four years from now. I'm sitting on the couch, watching Republican candidates vie for the chance to unseat President Kerry. Front and center on my large-screen media monitor is a roundtable discussion on SVN, the Semantic Visualization Network. Some clown is taking credit for the landmark legislation that saved Social Security, and I'm not so sure, so I pick up my media controller, which looks suspiciously like a game controller. It's got two joysticks, a direction pad, and bunch of buttons. I press the "Context" button and my viewscreen shrinks to a rectangle that's about half the size...

Yesterday, I wrote about the need for new user interface metaphors, so more people can better visualize interconnectedness. There are several examples of the semantic graph approach, particularly the ThinkMap prototypes (such as the Visual Thesaurus), the TouchGraph browsers, and the IdeaGraph effort. Even demos such as foafcorp are a step in the right direction, but they're just a step. The goal, I think, is to create a semantic browser similiar to these efforts, but one that non-technical people can use immediately without much orientation. I'm hoping there's a point where interconnected semantic graph navigation becomes extremely usable, where exploration...

One thing's clear to me about the Semantic Web: our current user interface metaphors aren't gonna cut it. Lists and trees have served us well, but in the massively interconnected world to come, they'll fall flat on their faces. But wait, don't we already have the World Wide Web? Isn't that the point of hyperlinks? Aren't we already massively interconnected? Well no, not really, at least not to most people. Yeah, we can do it, but most websites use hyperlinks as a kind of menu item, not an indication of inter-related resources. The "hyper" in hyperlink has become of secondary...

While in Sanibel, in between sessions, I was pacing with my portable phone, handling a client crisis back home. Much of the crisis had to do with mismatched expectations. They'd say, "Why doesn't it do {that}? I need it to do {that}" I'd say, "I mentioned {that} in the design talks. You said you didn't want {that}." They'd say, "But of course we need {that}. This isn't what I wanted at all." Same old story. Software is a difficult thing to make, particularly when you're making it with people who aren't used to thinking about their needs abstractly. Seems like...

The idea for my company's current project began in January 1999 while I was trying to teach my mom, Rosemary, how to email photos taken with her new Kodak digital camera. The software that came with it was called PictureEasy, and was pretty easy. Of the two dozen photo programs I've used since, it was probably the best for her, but it still had some snags that tripped her up from time to time. Over the next few years, whenever we went to visit her in Bonita Springs, Florida (half an hour from Sanibel), I'd download a bunch of new...

Years ago, at my father's old ad agency, I took over in the accounting department after they'd let a woman go who'd been doing the books. For a month I struggled with her filing system, rummaging in the cabinets for ten minutes each time I wanted something. Bills from the same health insurance company would sometimes appear in "Insurance", and sometimes under the company's name, and sometimes under "Benefits." I finally gave up and took a week to completely reorganize everything. The ability to organize is a teachable skill, though it's often seen as a personality trait we've either got...

Putting aside for a moment all this pie-in-the-sky, we-are-the-world stuff, let's switch to more immediate concerns. We were warned by our keynote at the conference against overhyping our efforts, and he's right. The more we reflect and rhapsodize about our vision, the more we'll tune out the press, and thereby the decision makers. Better to sneak up on them ... we should underpromise and overdeliver. But there's a bigger reason to shut up about it: I think in the short run the Semantic Web is more likely to fail than succeed. I went down to Sanibel to see if "it's...

A day before the conference started, I was sitting in the whirlpool at the Sundial reading Practical RDF by Shelley Powers with a highlighter. I was pretty focused on the book, so I didn't notice the four people that joined me in the whirlpool while I read. I looked up after a while and began being more friendly ... they were all Americans, and all on vacation. After we talked for a while, the man across from me asked, "What's the twenty second rundown on RDF." Apparently he had worked in IT before he retired, and geniunely wanted to know....