Jack Franconi has set up a community driven salesforce.com dictionary. Very cool.

Ajaxian had a post yesterday mourning the loss of view-source. It's about how many new Ajax applications are eschewing traditional HTML markup entirely, and generating their user interfaces with Javascript. Apart from the negative implications for SEO and accessibility, my main objection to this technique is that it devalues the metadata that users are contributing to many of these community driven sites.

If you haven't seen Professor Wesch's excellent video on the semantic web, now's a good time to do it:


By generating most of their UI using Javascript, these websites/apps lock out most of their user contributed data from search engine spiders. Spiders are the primary channel through which human/social intelligence seeps into the machine. Admittedly, there's a lot to be done before computers can understand us and do the things we want them to do. But we can help them along by not throwing frivolous roadblocks in their way.
 

Technorati Tags: ajax, wesch, semantic web, web 2.0, web 3.0

Yahoo Suggestions launched today with much blogospheric fanfare and an undeserved drubbing from the Digg crowd. I think it's great validation of what we've been doing on the IdeaExchange, and it's nice to see other companies embrace open product design. I think most of the Digg users criticizing other sites for ripping off Digg don't realize that neither Yahoo Suggestions, nor Salesforce IdeaExchange is an attempt to compete with Digg. For instance, there are no Apple rumors being spread on our home pages and our users are remarkably well behaved, even when they're showing their love for us on Digg.

Disappointingly, there was no mention of the IdeaExchange in the flurry of blog posts that flew in the aftermath of the launch. The IdeaExchange was the first use of web based voting infrastructure to manage product feedback. Since we launched the IdeaExchange in Oct '06, we've gotten a lot of attention and input from our customers, partners and even the mainstream media. It's been one of our most successful community initiatives, and every day it give product managers new insights into how people use and think about our products.

Anyways, I thought it'd be cool to make a list of all the websites that use a voting infrastructure to manage customer feedback.

Salesforce IdeaExchange (October '06)	Wordpress Ideas (January '07)
Yahoo! Suggestions (February '07)	Feedlounge (Feb 2006)