Screenshot from Semantico's Dictionarium app

Semantico’s Dictionarium app is available for download from the app store now (short link at http://bit.ly/dictionarium)

We’re really pleased with how quickly we managed to get this live in the app store. The app was approved on first submission – a testament to our internal QA.

Creating a dictionary has given us the perfect opportunity to refine a number of important concepts we use when developing mobile apps.

Throughout the design process we’ve taken care to optimise the display for both the iPhone and the new iPad devices. Delivering an app for both devices is not only essential for publishers, who don’t want to develop the same content twice, but also for end users who don’t want the complication of downloading different apps in order to access the same content.

We’ve built the app to take us through some of the core concepts that publishers will need when taking their content to mobile devices, whatever the subject matter. The essential functionality of Dictionarium is that of a search engine with an integrated e-content reader. Text with hyperlinks allows the user to navigate through the the content and jump from one concept to another.

Semantico’s bespoke publishing platforms deal with large amounts of complex information: putting together the dictionary has allowed us to create and deliver an app with a large data set behind it of 107,757 headwords and 123,742 definitions.

Data compression and application speed optimisations are essential to create a great end user experience and an app that publishers can be proud of. By compressing the database we’ve halved the size of the app from 105MB to 51MB.

The Dictionary is designed so that the main way users find the information they need is through search. Search functionality is important for all online publications. Users expect to be able to find the information they want through keyword searching at the very least, and there’s been no problem with implementing this in the iPhone / iPad environment.

After a successful project it’s pleasing to have had 2,000 downloads in the first week of the app going live. Take a look at the work we’ve done – and make it 3,000! http://bit.ly/dictionarium

This will be good news for those librarians who are concerned that the figures publishers provide after the first year of compliance might be inaccurate. An annual audit should ensure that no software errors suddenly appear.

However this will be bad news for those wanting to see costs kept down in a sector which is already hugely challenged by budget cuts. Publishers must bear the extra costs of the annual audit, and it’s hard to imagine that these will not be passed on to libraries in some way.

The audit must be carried out by a professional organisation recognised by the COUNTER project. This includes ABC Electronic in the UK, who offer a fixed price for this service. I contacted ABC Electronic to find out their prices but I did not recieve a reply.

It’s hard to imagine a worse time for this change. Although the financial impact will be fairly small, costs and budgets are being squeezed from all sides at the moment. Lets hope there are no more changes like this in the pipeline.

Update: After I published this ABC Electronic saw this blog post and called me to apologise for not replying to my email enquiry, and I subsequently received pricing details for the COUNTER compliance auditing service they provide.

All of a sudden, a development that for too long appeared to be stalled by the chicken-and-egg problem of how website owners could be induced to tag their metadata looks to be in imminent danger of going seriously mainstream.

Marketers, it seems likely, rather than academics, will lead the charge to the VW campers from here on in. And in all probability, publishers and information providers who aren’t already waxing their boards in preparation for this particular wave of technologic change could risk being left behind as it steadily takes on tsunami proportions and thunders beachwards.

Google, Facebook, Twitter embrace semantic technologies

A recent article in New Scientist (subscription required) described how the giants of search and social media are making moves to actualize the semantic web.

1. Google’s recent acquisition of Metaweb’s Freebase, an open-source repository of structured data – or ‘entity graph’ as the company styles it – containing more than 12 million entities, will potentially enable much smarter searching. Entries in Freebase are tagged in such a way that machines can ‘understand’ what they are about and make meaningful connections between them. At the simplest level, computer searches would, for instance, be able to distinguish between David Mitchell the British Novelist and David Mitchell the British Actor, Comedian and Writer (not to mention David Mitchell the Tory politician, David Mitchell the retired American ice dancer, etc. etc.).
2. Twitter has recently released information about its new ‘annotations’ feature, which allows users to annotate a tweet with structured metadata. A tweet about a new book release, for example, might let you link straight to a ‘look inside’ book widget or the Amazon page for the paperback. Launch of a test version is apparently imminent.
3. Facebook is making changes to its Open Graph protocol that have a semantic element. Website owners can add a “like” button to their site, along with semantic tags that tell Facebook’s servers what the page is about. According to Facebook: ‘based on the structured data you provide via the Open Graph protocol, your pages show up richly across Facebook: in user profiles, within search results and in News Feed’. So when a Facebook user clicks the ‘like’ button on a publisher’s site – relating to a particular title, or author, perhaps – a link is established between that site and their Facebook profile.

Advertising goes semantic

Any change in the way Google works has major implications for marketers. If using an entity graph changes the way Google delivers its search results significantly, the dark art of Search Engine optimization will have to respond and weighty volumes of SEO best practice to be revised.

But even more wide-ranging changes will have to be made to practice around online marketing, with micro-writing and metadata tagging becoming ever more critical aspects of the marketer’s art, as websites lose their traffic to Google’s interface, which now not only provides a place for people to enter search terms, but also a place for them to read the answers, with no further click-through taking place.

New Scientist speculates, however, that it is in the Facebook and Twitter changes that the main attraction of these developments may lie for advertisers. With the major players in social media on board, apps are already beginning to be written that can exploit the potential of semantically tagged data.

And – oh dear – here comes another water-based metaphor: mainstream adoption is likely to open the floodgates for such third-party development. This is because it solves the chicken-and-egg incentive problem of how you get website owners to tag their content. There is a clear incentive for any content owner to tag their content appropriately, providing structured metadata, if it means targeted, relevant access to Facebook’s 500 million plus user base.

Why should you care about this?

The implications for publishers are obvious. The opportunity exists, through semantic technologies, to massively improve the discoverability of their content online. But they also present a threat. Those who move fastest stand to gain a march on their competitors, while those who lag could well miss out.

This throws down yet another gauntlet to a traditionally conservative industry that may well feel it already has quite a bit on its plate to deal with. Even more reason, then, for publishers to embrace the world of online in a concerted fashion, if they are to reap the benefits and stay ahead of the competition.

Surf’s up!

If you’re investigating the use of semantic technologies, talk to Semantico first. We offer a Semantic Web consultancy service focused on helping publishers improve the discoverability of their content using the evolving semantic web. Contact us today.

Search should be clairvoyant: like a magical librarian who somehow correctly guesses what it was you were looking for; offering it up within a fraction of a second, along with a wealth of additional filtering options and navigational possibilities.

Without wishing to destroy the magic, here are my seven steps to improving findability:

1. Define what relevancy means in this context

Relevancy is a difficult thing to pin down. A set of search results is more or less relevant on the basis of how well the information retrieved meets the need of the user. Arriving at a definition of relevancy therefore means doing some fairly detailed analysis of your users and content. Some BIG questions need answering.
Is recall or precision more important? How do you go about catering to the competing needs of different user groups?

Clearly, discussions need to be had and decisions made. During this process it will be worth considering a range of scenarios where you might like to boost certain results over others:

• Field weighting
  e.g. results within titles are more relevant
• Recency of data
  e.g. results from recent data are more relevant
• Search phrase density
  e.g. results which contain the most number of uses of the search phrase are the most relevant
• Search phrase term proximity
  e.g. results where multiple terms are nearer to each other are more relevant
• Records which have been bookmarked, cited or linked to
  e.g. results which have already proved themselves to be useful to other users are more relevant

2. Provide lots of options, not just lots of results

Findability is not just about returning relevant results. A good search implementation will also provide lots of additional further options to the user, which they can use to hone in on exactly what they were searching for. Examples of this include providing:

• Meaningful facets through which the results can be filtered
• ‘Did you mean…?’ option – for alternative spellings
• ‘Users who searched for x also searched y’ option – for related searches
• Clustering of search results, e.g. by topic
• Sort options
• Hit-highlighting – to highlight the phrase terms in context

3. Enriching the data

Data not only has to be marked up consistently and correctly, it can often benefit from some enhancement before it goes online. In practice, this can mean additional classification processing or entity extraction through text mining. The goal is to ensure the content itself is rich enough to support the sort of advanced searching and filtering that we want to build within the site.

4. Measure relevancy

It’s worth setting up some relevancy metrics to monitor how search is performing over time. A good method is Mean Reciprocal Rank. To implement this you track click-throughs to search results, giving each click-through to a first result a score of 1, each click-through to a second result a score of 1/2, each click-through to a third result a score of 1/3, and so on. Adding all these together will give you the ability to track an overall relevancy score, with a higher score meaning that top links are performing better.

It is also a good idea to monitor searches that return zero results. A monthly list should be reviewed in case there are some sensible search queries in there which will have resulted in user frustration.

Regular reviews of search analytics are a vital part of ensuring that search is still performing well as the site and its content change over time.

5. Improving the user’s query

Normalising the user’s search phrase (and indeed the search index data) can help to improve findability. The following are all ways in which you do this:

• Converting all letters to lower or upper case
• Removing punctuation, accent marks or diacritics
• Expanding abbreviations
• Removing stopwords or “too common” words

Recall might also be improved upon in certain scenarios by converting the users query into a fuzzy query (to return results for close matches to the search terms in order of how well they match). It may also be worth expanding the user’s search to include synonyms using a thesaurus (to return results where matches have been found for the same or similar concept).

In these ways it is possible to enhance the input query before it has even been sent to the search engine.

6. Tuning the site for third party findability

Lots of users (yes, perhaps even MOST) start their search using a third party search engine. It is therefore essential that the site is Search Engine Optimised, meaning lots of quality in-bound links, the use of semantic markup, micro formats and much, much more.

It may also be worth creating an Open Search API – so that third party use of the site’s search facility is possible.

7. Finding also means re-finding

There is a very good chance that users will want to re-use the entries that satisfy their information need. Consequently, improving fundability should also mean making it as easy as possible for users to re-find what they found before. Helping users in this way can be done with features such as:

• Bookmarks
• Saved searches
• Direct exporting to citation software

So there you have it: seven steps to findability. It is a BIG topic and I’m certain to have missed out important considerations. Please do feel free to publicly rub my nose in some of them by responding below!

Some publishers choose to adapt an existing off-the-shelf journals platform to meet their needs for consolidation. However there can be technical problems inherent in this approach.

In a recent post to the CrossTech blog, publishing guru Geoffrey Bilder analysed the issues facing CrossRef members wishing to use the DOI system for non-journal content. Geoff’s analysis holds good for more than just the CrossRef DOI system, so I’ve taken it as a starting point below.

Reference publications and databases introduce fundamental challenges to any existing system designed around the journal article content model. These challenges fall into two areas:

• Structure. Reference works and databases can have complex nested substructures and there is a need for granular identification of these content substructures along with a mechanism for recording the relationship between them (e.g. “part-of” relationships between sub-section, section and chapter divisions, as well as “previous-next” navigational relationships between entries).
• Versioning. Unlike most journals, many reference books and databases change over time. To properly support archiving and perpetual access business models, there is a need to identify and maintain previous versions of reference content.

Both of these areas require support from the core architecture of any publishing system; without such support publishers have to resort to ugly work-arounds such as coercing all content into journal-article-shaped chunks. Such work-arounds fundamentally compromise the end-user experience and ultimately risk devaluing the publisher brand.

Furthermore the technology stack commonly used to build a typical journals system does not necessarily provide a good base to build support for the structural and versioning requirements outlined above. This is because the mixture of technologies used tends to match closely the typical structure of a journal article.

In an article the metadata and content are two separable parts which map nicely to a relational metadata store (typically SQL or RDF) plus a full text retrieval engine (Lucene/Solr, Autonomy, etc). Although the full text may contain semantic annotations such as chemical or gene markup, the homogenous nature of the content means that a single metadata schema can be devised which will fit the whole collection well.

However, when publishers want to add non journal content to the system this simple separation of content and metadata will no longer suffice. Reference and book content is much more demanding in terms of hierarchical structure and navigation. Many hierarchical structures in reference books cannot easily (if at all) be modelled using conventional relational metadata; these structures fit much more naturally and easily into native XML. Trying to create a single relational metadata schema capable of modelling all hierarchies across the full variety of reference and book content that publishers produce is an impossible task.

The structural problems of adding books and reference content to systems designed to separate full text and metadata can be broken down into two distinct areas:

1. Fragile schema problem. The problem of updating conventional database schemas as requirements (and the real world) change is often called the fragile schema problem. Because the design of the database must be fixed at the outset, any changes to the system, to accommodate extra metadata, new content types or changes to business process become costly and risk-laden. This is because assumptions about the structure or schema of a database tend to be hard-wired into the structure of all the software written to talk to the database.
2. Divorce of metadata from full text. Systems which use RDF or SQL databases for metadata suffer from a fundamental structural weakness as it is normally impossible to issue queries which examine both the full text and metadata within a single request. RDF suffers particularly in this respect as it has no support for XML mixed content; full text search plays no part in the RDF world view. Furthermore, such systems also often require content to be ‘loaded’ into several different internal content stores (e.g. once for full text index, once to ‘strip’ metadata to the RDF/SQL store). This builds a structural inefficiency into the system as content must be found, queried and updated in multiple locations.

When we design the architecture for our publishing platforms we like to think hard about these problems. Often we conclude that XML database technology (such as MarkLogic Server) provides the best solution because it allows content to be stored and queried in a single place. Using an XML database removes the artificial split between content and metadata inherent in conventional journals systems and allows us to build search queries across an entire collection of content. This in turn helps to drive discovery and usage by building deeper links between related content and combining and assembling content from an entire collection in new ways.

However we also realise that different clients have different needs and that it is critical to prioritise meeting business goals ahead of making specific technology choices. The motivation for our overall technical architecture choice in a given project is simple; to learn the lessons of past systems and ensure we choose the best possible technology basis for any new system. Understanding the problems publishers have faced in trying to adapt legacy journals systems to the more challenging world of books and reference helps us to make the most appropriate technology choices for future publishing platforms.

Queue for the launch of iPhone 4.0 in Brighton

Clearly not everybody knows about ‘The Apple Effect’. While I was taking this picture outside the O2 shop in Brighton, a bystander asked me what the queue was for. I told him it was for the new Apple iPhone 4.0, which is launched today in the UK. ‘So is that free or what?’ was his incredulous reply.

Er, no. There is no free lunch – not this year anyway – as George Osbourne, the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer was at pains to tell us this Tuesday, though perhaps not in so many words. In tune with the new spirit of austerity and restraint we also learned recently that O2 is putting a cap on data downloads, replacing its previous ‘unlimited’ data contracts, for all new and renewed iPhone contracts. Though the download limits are fairly generous, those eager early adopters queuing up for their new iPhone’s will be getting a marginally less good deal than iPhone users have enjoyed previously. Although they will of course enjoy a more richly-featured handset.

O2, the first network operator to have offered the iPhone in the UK has introduced the measure following serious overload problems in 2009 that brought the network to its knees, necessitating a costly emergency upgrade.

It seems that the runaway success of smartphones and smartphone apps is putting serious strains on network infrastructure. And the situation is only going to get worse, with sales of smartphones, internet-enabled mobile devices and mobile apps all on steep upward sales curves.

If O2’s data cap catches on with other network operators it could be one to watch. Together with the Digital Economy Act’s punitive measures on illicit downloading, which if they remain unaltered look likely to seriously curtail the spread of wi-fi coverage, limits to mobile data could seriously slow the growth of the mobile internet, which is currently forecast to pass internet access from desktop computing as early as 2013.

Since its launch, the App Store has enjoyed tremendous success. There are now over 100,000 Apps in the store, which logs over 10,000 downloads a day. But the market for smartphone apps is heating up. So let’s take a look at some of the contenders who are going to be snapping hard on Apple’s heels.

In terms of usability which App store comes out on top? In order to help you answer this question I look at what’s good and what’s not in each of the major App stores.

Currently most of the App stores are so similar in name, pricing and content that there is very little to tell them them apart. However, image is everything. Despite Blackberry’s tempting developer rates, Apple still manages to eclipse the competition with its media and marketplace dominance, as well as the sheer number of apps available.

It seems that, for now at least, despite there being a greater array of apps now with their own dedicated providers, it will be some time before someone manages to take a major bite out of Apple.

For those who were unable to attend, or would like to listen in full again, you can listen to a recording of eBook readers and the Future of Other New Technologies and view the accompanying slides below.

If you would like to view the slides or listen later at your own leisure I have made the accompanying slides and an mp3 recording of the presentation available here.

The inaugural Semantico Symposium was held recently in London to discuss implications of the shift to mobile for publishers and information providers. An invited audience of publishing industry leaders debated the issues under Chatham House rules, covering the following three themes:

• Devices and technology
• Business models
• Future strategy options

This was a stimulating event with a high calibre guest list, delegates attending from organisations including Oxford University Press, Nature Publishing Group, Macmillan Education, Wiley-Blackwell, CrossRef, CABI, BSI Group and the Institute of Engineering and Technology. To do justice to the discussion, we’re going to report it over a couple of blog posts, starting with initial theme of devices and technology (yes, it’s a partwork!).

Forget devices, focus on the underlying technology

If proof were needed that these are nervous times for publishers, just consider the case of Flash. Not only does Apple not support Flash technology on the iPhone or iPad, but the world’s most popular video-sharing site, YouTube (owned by Google), is quietly in the process of moving away from Flash video. In addition the emerging HTML5 standard, which aims to reduce the need for such proprietary plug-ins, looks likely to make it all but obsolete.  So will Flash die? Almost certainly, say the tech-heads.

This is appalling news for publishers with large amounts of legacy online content in Flash. It also serves as an example of one of the strongest themes to emerge from our Symposium, which is that publishers and information providers who hope to thrive (or at the very least survive) in the turbulent times ahead would be well-advised to disregard, to a certain extent, the hype and wow surrounding high-profile device launches like that of the iPad, and focus on the underlying technology issues in cross-platform delivery. That’s where the real uncertainty lies. Marvellous though they are, it’s not about the devices – but about the content, and the user’s experience of the content.

There is no denying that the iPhone has instituted something of a paradigm shift in the delivery of content, but notwithstanding this undoubted fact, a good deal of skepticism was evinced by our delegates about what is perhaps the most significant innovation to be introduced along with that device, the App Store.

A significant strand of opinion believes that an app is really not that much different from a mobile-optimised website. As far as the user is concerned there is little difference. In the not-too-distant future, it was predicted, you will download something you think is an app but you will actually be interacting with a website optimised for mobile use.

The iPad experience of web surfing (about 42% of our small but select sample had had hands-on experience of the device) might make us question whether we need apps at all, in the opinion of one delegate. Maybe what we need is not apps but better-designed, more mobile-friendly websites.

So far, so heretical

However, there is another strand of opinion. From the user’s point of view, the experience of using an app is utterly different from that of using a PC. One virtue of the app is that it does a very narrow, specific thing. Apps streamline our use of the internet and cut out – or at least reduce – much of the pain associated with PCs (e.g. constant downloads of plug-ins, patches and updates, the state of total war we have to live in with viruses, spyware and spam, etc.).

A website is always going to feel like a place you go to, to harvest a crop of information. In the case of an app, the crop is turned into biofuel: information becomes the petrol that gets your knowledge car from A to B – to a designated destination. A website might be a field of dreams (if you’ll excuse a criminally over-used film reference), but an app helps you actually do something.

These two points of view are not, in essence, irreconcilable. It’s a matter of perspective; of whether you are looking at things from the producer’s end of things or from the consumer’s. If you strip away the wow, yes, an app is no more than a website. But what produces the ‘wow’ is fantastic usability – and that’s a matter of primary importance for most end-users.

Search lags on mobile

… Which is not to say at all that the current generation of mobile devices together embody a giant leap forward for usability. In actual fact they can look like a bad step backwards.

In particular, search took a while to get established on the desktop internet, and to reach its current state of utility. By comparison, search on mobile is very slow at the moment, even on 3G networks. Also, it is not that easy to find the app you want: the discoverability of apps is not great. This situation is liable to get worse before it gets better, as apps and app stores proliferate.

A certain frustration is surely excusable for those who soldiered through the difficult early years of the millennium when publishers were just beginning to build their first sites, and had to cope with the teething troubles of the early web – only to see many of the same problems coming back to them in 2010. There is a new network, and it has yet to organize itself effectively.

Monitoring the Big Tech face-offs

Focusing on underlying technology and networks throws a deal of emphasis on the importance of monitoring and understanding what is going on with some of the major tech companies – and not solely because a few (particularly Amazon and Google) have forged themselves into the publishing value chain, where they are fast becoming almost unavoidable links. We mentioned Flash earlier, owned by Adobe, but there are others to consider as well.

Apple’s new prominence, which has come about largely as a result of the huge success of the iPhone, is beginning to foreground some of the ways it has of going about things that most annoy people. The dead hand of control that it exercises over what can and cannot be offered through the App Store – amounting to censorship – has led to comparisons with China. Will Google’s Android prove to be a viable Open Source alternative?

Apple has become the company to attack, and the company to position against.

Microsoft appears to be positioning against Apple with Windows 7 by placing emphasis on social networking. This is an important battleground if it really can be established as a point of difference. RIM’s Blackberry Curve phone has crossed over into the teenage market not only because it is a lot cheaper than an iPhone, but because it offers their young audience a more effective way of interacting with their online social networks. It is too easy to write off Microsoft and believe that the important dust-up nowadays is between Apple and Google, but there may well be life in the old dog yet – and Microsoft still has significant market share in mobile operating systems.

Publishers likewise dare not forget, in the age of the read/write web, that online publishing is not just about how the stuff gets delivered, but also about how it gets produced, edited, commented, redacted, peer-reviewed … etc., etc. Nowhere is this more true than in the field of academic publishing – because one of the central concerns of academic publishing is scholarly communication.

What this becomes is a debate about how we consume and produce information. Corporate positioning takes on a philosophical, even ideological aspect, the nuances of which publishers have to tune their ears to detect. The first task is to be aware.

Government unhelpful

Someone who seems to have a bit of a tin ear in this regard is the great clunking fist himself – if Gordon Brown can be held responsible for the controversial Digital Economy Bill which, at time of writing, is awaiting Royal Assent. There wasn’t much controversy here: instead it was roundly condemned as a piece of rushed and unworkable legislation that will, nevertheless, no doubt remain on the statute books for many years to come.

The debate continues

Tune in next time for a further report from the Symposium, as we move to discuss business models.

So here’s one good piece of news for those whose blog or website, like the Discovery Blog, is based on WordPress: a plugin that does the job simply and well.

WordPress is a freeware that allows its users to produce professional results whilst still retaining administrative control of all a web page’s features. WordPress also has additional features which can enable users to optimize their web page for viewing on mobile browsers.

Semantico has helped many clients to get the best out of their e-Books and online journals; ensuring that they are easy to discover, easy to navigate and suited to the browsers on which they are being viewed. When we decided to optimise our own Discovery Blog for viewing on smart phones we saw this as an ideal opportunity to experience personally some of the issues that delivering optimized content for mobile users presents to publishers.

Luckily, the experience was close to painless, thanks to the WPTouch plug-in. This new plug-in means that we can now offer a mobile browser-friendly version of our blog which is smaller, cleaner and faster to load (if you’re reading this post on one of the smartphones supported by the plug-in you’ll be able to see what we mean very clearly!).

The way that the WPTouch plug-in works is that it replaces the clunky loading of multiple CSS (Cascading Styling Sheet), Javascript and image files by creating a streamlined iPhone app-like version of the website. In effect it detects the user agents of the mobile devices and delivers its custom theme to those visitors only, delivering a lightweight version of your site but still with all the standard WordPress website features.

This alternative version of the site is only visible to certain mobile browsers, and if the user wishes to do so they can still choose to revert back to the regular version of the site. The browsers and devices which this WPTouch plugin supports by default are:

• Android
• Aspen
• Blackberry 9500
• Blackberry 9530
• Cupcake
• Dream
• Incognito
• iPhone
• iPod Touch
• Opera Mini
• Webmate
• WebOS

it is also possible to add custom user-agents and extend support to other mobile browsers as well. For example, we have added support for ‘Dolfin’ browsers like the ones used in Samsung phones. This ensures that all our visitors who are using a mobile device to access our website can see exactly the same version without experiencing rendering or layout issues.

The transition from our theme to the new one was smooth, although we did have to slightly modify the plug-in’s CSS. We had to ensure that there was adequate spacing around the images included in the posts to avoid text-wrapping issues. We also increased the default font size a bit to make the text easier to read without having to zoom in.

The WPTouch plug-in allows you to add your own Google Analytics code into its Administrative panel, maintaining the integrity of usage statistics from the site when it is being viewed on computers and on mobile devices. We believe that it is an essential tool for all WordPress-powered websites and will save you the trouble of having to redesign your website to accommodate mobile browsers.

Implementing this plug-in did involve some decisions about what the priorities were when our blog is viewed on a mobile device For instance, some of the functionality which required additional plug-ins, such as the side-bar which enables users to view all the authors of the blog, has been lost; however the trade off is that you are left with:

• An incredibly fast-to-load website (our home page is about 8KBs big!)
• A menu which allows you to easily jump to different sections of the website
• A cleaner, more streamlined design
• An integrated search facility
• The reassurance that you don’t have to worry about display issues on mobile browsers

The Discovery Blog has retained its core functionality and features whilst catering for the needs of users of smartphones and other web-enabled phones.

This exercise was a particularly interesting and useful one for Semantico. Not only did it benefit us to provide an optimized version of our Discovery Blog to our mobile users but it also taught us a lot about the difficult decisions which publishers face when providing content to Smartphone users. Nobody wants to sacrifice content, but ultimately this is one of the major issues when optimizing web content for mobile browsers which as yet do not support Flash.

This article by Alex Blackman, our brilliant marketing intern, is posted with thanks to Nik Afentoulis,  Semantico’s QA assistant / junior developer and wordpress guru.