I recently ran across a wonderful video on YouTube in which Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the Wold Wide Web, speaks about the idea of the Semantic Web. It’s a simple, yet elegant concept that has yet to come to fruition as Berners-Lee had originally dreamed.

The Semantic Web is all about expressing the meaning of our content through standardized markup, which is the mantra of any standardista. It’s more than communicating information hierarchy with heading tags. Semantics help us communicate the logic, context, and relationships of our data to computers so they can automate tasks or find important patterns that humans may have missed. On the Semantic Web a simple program could help employers locate the right talent for a project by search keywords in resumes of people near the company. It would also make it possible to automate the coordination of a complex event like a family reunion. If data such as personal schedules, contact information, and venue locations are presented in a standardized way, a program could read the data to identify the best date and location for the event then handle all of the invitations and RSPVs.

Beyond simplifying basic tasks, The Semantic Web could one day save millions of lives. Imagine a search spider that crawls the Web discovering medical ailments that are marked up in a standardized format. Common symptoms in a particular location could be identified and reported to medical experts who could immediately determine if the pattern is actually a dangerous pandemic. It would make it possible to irradiate deadly diseases before they spreads. The same technology could be turned on poverty, violence, genocide, and most any other major issue that plagues humanity.

It’s tragic that Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of a Semantic Web is still so far off. The vast majority of content that is published online lacks structure or meaning, which makes it very difficult to find and even more difficult to elicit its meaning. Achieving the goal requires massive buy in from individuals, organizations, governments, and corporations. That’s the bad news. The good news is that it’s actually quite easy to publish your content semantically, and the idea is gaining some momentum. To learn more about the big ideas of the Semantic Web and what you can do to make your content semantically meaningful to computers check out this brilliant video: Intro to the Semantic Web.

To enter simply head on over to Facebook and join the Building Findable Websites group. Once you’ve joined post your favorite ideas, tips, and/or tricks to making websites findable in the discussion thread entitled “The one thing you can do to help the findability of your site is … ”.

If you’re not the Facebook type then post your findability ideas as a comment on this blog post and you’ll be added to the drawing. A winner will be selected at random on April 7th, 2008 so get your entry in beforehand. I’ll announce the winner right here and will ship the book directly to the lucky devil’s doorstep.

Good luck and may the force be with you!

Now that the manuscript has been transformed into a glossy cover-wrapped volume, I thought I’d share with you my experience. I’ve often wondered what it’s like to devote yourself to a single topic for such an extended period of time, and how the publishing process works. It’s something that is often romanticized as an extended, solitary expedition into deep, meaningful thoughts. Although there’s a bit of romance in the writing process, there’s also a lot of research, attention to form and continuity, second guessing of yourself, and old fashioned hard work along the way.

As a teacher for nearly a decade, I’ve become accustomed to reading my student’s faces to determine whether or not I’m making any sense. Writing doesn’t afford this luxury. For months on end I wrote and wrote sometimes wondering if my extensive passages would provide enough information to the reader to help them grasp my point, or maybe I was getting too detailed which could be patronizing and slow. Of course, my editors Jeff Riley, and Jonathan Snook helped me answer these internal questions along the way, but the feedback loop is a lot different than explaining something in person and changing tack immediately when you see your message isn’t hitting its mark. Somewhere along the way I got over the second guessing and plowed ahead. After chapter 3 I felt like I had found my stride, and the overall structure of the book started to become more apparent.

The Process of Publishing and the People Involved

There were a lot of people involved in the publishing process – a whole team, in fact. As the acquisitions editor, Michael Nolan received my written proposal for the book and a sample chapter then presented it to a board of publishing gurus at Peachpit who evaluated its relevance to the target audience, looked at other books that already explored similar topics, and made a final decision on whether or not to publish it. This was a pretty slow process. I submitted the proposal in April then bit my nails until late July when the official green light was handed down. The writing process didn’t start until August of 2007 -six months after my initial conversation with Michael. After the proposal was accepted Michael acted as the project manager for the book, coordinating the entire team.

Jeff Riley was my development editor. His job was to provide feedback on the form and structure of my writing. He evaluated all formatting for consistency, passed each chapter on to Jonathan Snook the technical editor who evaluated all code and techy concepts, then passed the combined edits and feedback to me. I then made the requested changes or decided to stick to my guns at times and leave things as they were. My changes went back to Jeff for another pass and prep for the production team who handled the formatting and layout.

While I was writing, the design team was working on the page layout and various elements that would be included in each chapter. They used a sample chapter to design the treatments for tables, figures, captions, tips, and various sidebar elements. This was shared with me for feedback, and revised one more time before placing the manuscript into the page templates.Kate Reber – the production editor – coordinated all of the pre-press production of the book. Once she had all of the content into the design we went through each chapter three times to tweak the layout and catch any oversights. A proof reader also went through the entire book a few times again checking for errata and inconsistencies. I’m not sure how many times we all read the book, but I think I read through each page about 8 to 10 times. I think I could now recite it from cove to cover.

A Little Overzealous – Too Many Chapters

I had a lot to say on the subject of findability, so much so that I wrote 5 chapters too many to fit in the book. I started to get nervous about the length in October, and by December we realized that there was roughly 106 pages too many. I felt like I was lopping limbs off of my first born as we excised chapters to make the target length, but luckily all of this content is published on the book’s companion website http://buildingfindablewebsites.com as free PDF downloads. Although these chapters aren’t in print, they’re not lost.

It’s extremely satisfying to wrap up such a long, intense process and hold the final product in your hands. I hope this book achieves my original goal – to create a better awareness of findability and its close relationship to web standards best practices. You can join the findability discussion in the Facebok group.

If you are going to be at SXSW this year or any of the other conferences where I’ll be speaking, please do introduce yourself. I’d love to hear your perspective on the book.

What is findability? How does it relate to SEO, and what is the web standards connection?

You can read my response on the An Event Apart blog.

An Event Apart New Orleans will be held at the posh Hilton Riverside April 24 – 25. The list of speakers and topics covered is fantastic:

• Andy Clarke, author of Transcending CSS, presenting “Underpants Over My Trousers”
• Aaron Gustafson, co-author of AdvancED DOM Scripting, presenting “Progressive Enhancement with JavaScript”
• Robert Hoekman Jr., author of Designing the Obvious, conducting “On-the-Spot Usability Reviews”
• Cameron Moll, author of Mobile Web Design, presenting “Good vs. Great Design”
• Brian Oberkirch, Publisher of Like It Matters, presenting “Kick it Like Pelé”
• Jason Santa Maria, designer at Happy Cog, presenting “Good Design Ain’t Easy”
• Dave Shea, co-author of Zen of CSS Design, presenting “Living, Breathing Design”
• Stephanie Sullivan, co-author of Mastering CSS with Dreamweaver CS3, presenting “Design Challenges, Standards Solutions”
• Jeff Veen, design manager at Google, presenting “Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps”
• Aarron Walter, author of Building Findable Web Sites, presenting “Findability Bliss Through Web Standards SEO”

Plus our hosts Jeffrey Zeldman and Eric Meyer will be speaking too.

• Eric Meyer, author of CSS: The Definitive Guide, presenting both “The Lessons of CSS Frameworks” and “Debug / Reboot”
• Jeffrey Zeldman, author of Designing With Web Standards, presenting both “Understanding Web Design” and “Web Standards: The Return of the King”

Registration for the conference is now open. I do hope you can join us for what’s sure to be a battery charging, mind opening, biegnets chomping good time in the Big Easy.

I’ve submitted a proposal myself, and I’m going to shamelessly lobby for your vote! Here’s the synopsis of what my talk will cover:

Title: Building Findable Web Sites: Web Standards SEO and Beyond

Why Vote For My Panel?

• Web standards and search engine optimization go together. I’ll outline how using web standards will help make your site easier to find via search engines
• Do search engines really give a damn if you follow web standards? My panel will give you the answers
• I’ll discuss how Accessibility and SEO goals often overlap
• I’ll provide info on how technologies such as Ajax and Flash can cause problems for search engines and what you can do to address the problems
• My talk will provide plenty of practical info that you can use on any site
• The information is based upon my forthcoming book for New Riders entitled Building Findable Web Sites: Web Standards SEO and Beyond to be released early in 2008

You’ll need to register an account with the panel picker (don’t have to sign up for the conference) in order to vote. If there’s something specific you’d like to learn about in this panel, shoot me an email and let me know.

I appreciate your vote! http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/436

• A more Accessible site is a more findable site. Search engines can better index a web site that is built to follow WCAG and/or Section 508 guidelines. Google is the biggest blind user on the Web!
• Accessibility includes more customers, which leads to more profits. Accessibility is not just about disabilities. It’s about alternate devices for viewing a site too.
• Target.com was sued by blind users who could not use their in-Accessible site. Do you want your business to be the subject of the next class action law suit and all of the bad PR that comes with it?
• Using semantically meaningful markup improves Search Engine Optimization, which drives more traffic to the site, and generates more revenue
• Using Microformats (again, semantically meaningful markup) also improves Search Engine Optimization because search engine spiders can better understand the content on the page
• By keeping your formatting (CSS) separated from structure (XHTML), you will use less code, which make your site download faster for your users. Your external CSS files will also cache in the browser’s temporary memory so the code that handles formatting doesn’t have to download each time a page is viewed.
• Maintenance times can be dramatically decreased by building sites without verbose nested tables, which can be a nightmare to try to modify. Changes can be made site-wide in a design by modifying one external style sheet, saving time and money.
• Following Web Standards improves proper cross-browser display, and helps ensure that a site is forward compatible with future browsers
• Server bandwidth fees are decreased when less code is required to download for the page to display (cached style sheets, less redundant markup)
• If you are doing any contract work with US government agencies, your site will need to be Section 508

“You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.”