The push has been primarily focussed in the more socially inclined European countries and continues today to be touted as the marker of a serious website for the general public.

Note: I don’t claim to be any kind of expert here, just an interested observer.

Today while checking out the International Association of Athletics Federations website, I noticed a little link to an “Accessible Version”. For a start I think it is hilarious that the main website is not considered accessible and they need a separate version to do that. Having a look at all the bad layouts in Firefox, I figured that was a good move on their part.

Clicking on the Accessible Version link is what really made me laugh though. Check it out below. I won’t even bother pointing out the all the poor layout and how this is completely lacking in accessibility, but a few things that you might not see on the surface… The only thing changed is the CSS between the two versions, which means reliance on javascript and that layout of the html are still there (two of the most important elements to accessibility).

How about we stop the charade and stop claiming that we are supporting accessibility for web when we just have these half hearted efforts.

Accessibility should be able to be achieved with plain good website design. Let’s keep it simpler and forget about the accessibility if you don’t know what you are doing.

There have been a lot of discussions recently about ways to construct a distributed micro-blogging environment. Dave Winer triggered a conversation on distributed storage and distribution of Twitter but all the consensus amounted to was a lot of chatter about clever ways to backup your Twitter feeds to recover when Twitter goes down.

For me this doesn’t directly address the problem. It fixes Twitter uptime issues to some extent, but that is not a solution for the masses, it is a solution for the elite who can realise that this is an issue to think about in the first place. Most users will use something or not, they are not looking for ways to retrofit a service.

Elsewhere Mike Warot compares centralised internet services to silos and makes a convincing argument for using centralised services. The comparison to silos is made to discuss the need for specialists and specialised equipment to keep your grain/data safe. I agree. But another thing that makes our grain/data safe is having multiple silos. Mike’s argument only sells me on the aspect having properly supported infrastructure and technicians but I want to be able to choose the silo that doesn’t sit in the path of the tornado (continuing with his metaphor).

As mentioned in much of this discussion, the structure of micro-blogging (and we can use Twitter as the base model) can be its own data structure, not so dissimilar to RSS. There are a few different types of information that need to be requested, but surely they are all easily rendered with XML…. but something a little bit more clever to handle the unique nature of the exchange.

As it turns out, as I have been writing this post, Michael Arrington released a very nice piece outlining how Twitter could be opened up technically based on what a bunch of smart people who know about this kind of thing have been talking about. It demonstrates a viable system utilising XMPP that can push messages to clients rather than having to continually check for updates. This need to continuously check for new data is what was widely regarded as the biggest obstacle for an open Twitter-like platform.

As soon as someone does the work to get an open platform running, does that mean the end for Twitter and its hefty status as the “next best thing”?

Very likely “yes”.

The brand of Twitter will still more than likely continue but you have to think that the number of roll-your-own micro-blogging platforms will boom and eventually most of the micro-blogging for the bulk of normal users (as opposed to the geek centric Twitter users of today) will collect around the use of open micro-blogging from the big guys … Google, MSN, Mixi (for the Japanese users), Yahoo (if the shareholders don’t tear it to shreds).

Japan has really only just got started with Twittering if what we hear from Twitter Japan is true, which implies that micro-blogging is well suited to a Japanese market. The heavy use of mobile phones for accessing the internet (100million mobile users vs 85million PC users) and the heavy affinity for blogging (Japanese is the most popular blogging language in the world) would all point to a boom about to hit Japanese shores once the mainstream gets a hold of it.

Counter to support of an open platform is the reluctance to get too heavily involved with open source projects (mostly due to language difficulties)… which brings us back to Twitter Japan. The people behind Twitter Japan are Digital Garage, who have been very successful in bringing foreign web assets into the Japanese market. One of the projects that they very successfully brought in was Movable Type,… yes, an open source project. While the rest of the world moves heavily towards Word Press, Japan uses Movable Type more often than not.

Chances are the Digital Garage would be the best ones to bring such an open micro-blogging platform into a Japanese market that has some reluctance to adopt foreign projects without their hand held, but they of course have other motives with the Twitter relationship well established.

The question I have been thinking about is, “When (yes, that’s a when, not if) an open micro-blogging platform is established, will Twitter follow?”. I think the boom Japanese use of Twitter implies that Japan will have a lot to say about that.

Second question, “Does it matter?” … will Twitter be over-run by everyone else or will they have time to have  the market controlled by the time an alternative is available.

I am looking forward to finding out the answers.

Dependent Records followed up with an arguably justified attack on the bloggers who republished the story (which originated from Torrent Freak) because of their lack of fact checking.

From Dependent Records news blog :

“The reaction of Torrentfreak.com founder and correspondant “Ernesto” was to note that since he has a full-time job, “doing extensive research is not always an option”. He had apparently read news of the label’s closing on the Dependent web site and taken the Pirate Bay story at face value; the facts that the person pretending to be Stefan Herwig misspelled the name of the label in the original announcement, and that the official label website made no mention of this unusual offer, failed to raise any red flags with either Torrentfreak.com nor any of the other Internet sites which reprinted the story verbatim.”

Dependent Records founder, Stefan Herwig, is justifiably angry about the mis-reporting (stated by Herwig to be upwards of 15 blogs, but chances are it is a lot more than that), but how much can we expect in terms of accuracy from blogs in the first place?

As blogs gain a larger and larger role in the reporting of events around us, it is more and more important to understand who is behind the blogs and that they are not necessarily professional journalists. Often a blogger is someone who has an area of interest that they keep up with to some level, feel they have a few things to say about it, and start writing. It is not a restricted medium (although access to some form of computer does seem to be pretty important) and so you will see various levels of professionalism. That is the nature of the medium.

Loading expectations on to the blog world for journalistic integrity is flawed logic in my view. The medium is not a medium of journalism, but of expression. What confuses this distinction in some peoples minds is the that some blogs such as New York Times, Tech Crunch and yes, maybe even The Next Web, are produced by organizations or groups of individuals who choose to present theselves as serious journalists. Sometimes the a large following for a blog can catapult them in to the same expectations as the journalism based sites as seems to be the case with Torrent Freak. Although Torrent Freak would have a hard time arguing against being held to the standards of a serious news source with this from their “About” page :

“… TorrentFreak aims to be a credible news source. …”

Still I have a hard time taking things I would read on Torrent Freak as fact. It is just the nature of blogs.

For instance, this blog is not a serious attempt at journalism, it is opinion, it is things I learned that I think are interesting enough to share. It certainly doesn’t undergo the same research depth I would use when I write for the Japan Times or The Next Web. And I think that is fine for this particular medium.

Blogs are forums for small bits of information from various sources being passed on. They are mediums of personal expression and of organisational expression. By nature they are tainted by the experience of the author, for good and for bad. Those sources can be reputable or not and from a variety of opinion points. It is the strength and weakness of the medium and we should make sure not to give them the same criticism or the same skepticism that we give traditional media forms. They deserve their own standards completely. … and that is another blog post.

This is a pretty open stab at Microsoft and their still market dominant (but waning) Internet Explorer which is famous for breaking web standards. Being responsible for putting together a lot of websites with my team, I have to say the lack of support for web standards in all flavours of IE is one of the biggest annoyances of our work.

On a related note, I recently spoke with Michael Smith from the HTML5 working group at the W3C (I also had him along to Tokyo2point0 recently, an event I co-organise to promote web development in Tokyo). He brought up a few interesting things about where the next web standards are heading from the W3C point of view. Over the past few years the trend with web developers has been to go towards the strict standards of XHTML where you have to be perfect for your code to validate. This movement is not quite working with about 95%, yes 95%!, of websites failing to validate. That includes HTML and XHTML sites, and the XHTML ones are just not a realistic goal for most developers.

The new movement at the W3C is to push developers towards to upcoming HTML5 standard which will be much more accepting and allow a lot more legacy code and make many of these old pages and old code structures work again. What they are also doing is clearly defining the way browsers should render the syntax, making life much easier for a browser that has any desire at all to meet standards.

The rollout of HTML5 is not going to be quick, but we can at least look forward to more easily obtainable standards in the future.

For now, the goal should be to understand that standard you are attempting to meet, use a validator to check your code, and stop using syntax that doesn’t work as specified on all browsers wherever possible.

We can all lament the mess that is IE and scheme for new ways to encourage users to get rid of it in favour of a browser that works properly such as Firefox or Opera. Perhaps this effort by the Mozilla Developer Center will help.