June 28, 2007
Information At the Point of Inspiration...
If you've ever been to a Snapshots enabled page, you'll be familiar with the idea of being able to pop up a preview of a page (or RSS feed items from the page, or WIkipedia page summaries etc.) by hovering your cursor over a link in the page.
I have to admit I have disabled the service in my browser - I find it way too irritating...! I do think that following a link into a pop-up light-box has great potential for certain sorts of link, though: Interaction Design: Now Follow this Link.)
The Snap-shots tool (and others of its ilk) are love 'em or hate 'em services I think. I experimented with a tool in this vein some considerable time ago - popup links were intended to provided a shortcut way of linking to several items on a particular new story, but I never really pursued it:
(If I was tinkering with something similar now, I'd probably be pulling content in from a meme tracker...)
I also dabbled with an idea for being able to search over the links that were referenced in a page, or that linked to a page (demoed a couple of months later as searchfeedr), and could see all sorts of potential for services like Y!Q contextual search, which augmented Yahoo! searches made while viewing a particular page with additional contextual information.
Anyway, anyway,Yahoo! just introduced something new to their mail service - Yahoo! Shortcuts - which is maybe interesting from an online, text heavy course material design point of view (where tooltip glossary items are often about as interactive as things get).
What Yahoo! Shortcuts do is sniff out particular sorts of information in a mail message, and linkify them in an appropriate way. For example, addresses suddenly become links to pop-up maps, and pop-ups to news summaries for particular organisations are also possible.
(Hmm - ok - a check of my old blog has a prototype for that too: UK Postcode Linker Using Greasemonkey - a Greasemonkey script that augments UK postcodes appearing in a page with links to a map. There are lots of other related browser extension out there too.)
Google do something not totally dissimilar in Gmail - enabling document attachments to emails to be opened in Google docs (though not in a pop-up).
I guess what the Yahoo announcement did for me was to remind me about the possibilities for automatically augment pages with links to/pop-ups containing contextually relevant information.
Not overloading the page with links and pop-ups is something that needs to be borne in mind. But I could imagine a sidebar tool that allows you to enable the augmentation tools and then, when you hover (or hover and click over, or key press over) particular items in the page, the sidebar could be populated with relevant additional content.
From looking at my blog stats, I know readers rarely follow links; and course teams here don't get to see stats of how our students use our online materilas, so I have no way of knowing whether anyone clicks through outgoing links from Beyond Google, for example. Whether things like Snap do improve click-thru, I don't know. But being able to engage people with what are essentially hypertext "footnotes" and "endnotes" is something we need to work on, I think?
Okay - so this is all a bit vague, and I guess I need to do a demo to work out exactly what it is I mean... but no time to do that at the moment (morning coffee break is over...;-)
Posted by ajh59 at June 28, 2007 10:53 AM