Hopefully, HTML 5 can begin to address this quagmire by making the underlying markup both relevant and applicable to what the web is actually used for these days. I won’t go into detail with regard to the specification and it’s potential,  but instead focus on how it will change the game specifically for the CMS software industry.

So how will this impact authors, administrators, contributors on the web? Let’s dive into the features and see how.

Clearer separation of navigation, header and footer elements

With the new elements types for navigation items and such, you’ll not be surprised that browser safe, standardised and design-agnostic navigation can be provided out of the box in CMS. With standards around the underlying HTML of the navigation, CMS vendors can reliably provide more advanced site creation, navigation management wizards without having to worry about supporting the top 15 AJAX libraries and approaches out there. This portability can be achieved today with good effect using CSS and List elements, but these new elements should also help put to rest the debate about what type of navigation model to use and perhaps more importantly, provide the syntactic sugar to help search engines understand your site structure that much easier; for example, without the need to generate an XML sitemap.

Local storage database

Arguably the most obvious benefit to software vendors of all types is the local storage facility. No longer do we have to worry about flaky connections and long-workflow-abandonment. With local storage comes the promise of authoring web pages while on your flight to Texas, replying to blog posts in the train tunnel and a slew of other offline scenarios. Immediately, the mobile application development realm becomes far more interesting as offline caches can be stored in the device for interrogation when not connected, and in general, a faster experience when checking the local cache for your documents, as opposed to constantly “pulling” from the web server.  Long, multi-step online business processes won’t be abandoned as often when users realise they can pick up right where they left off. Essentially, web apps will behave much more like desktop applications in their statefulness. I expect the memory allocation for each domain to be increased quite quickly, as pressure from vendors to store local caches of binary documents and other rich media will quickly surpass the 5MB suggested limit.

Flash, Silverlight and Applets, oh my!

The impact of web sockets, or the ability of web pages themselves to call and respond data sources, based on the socket pattern. If that sentence just flew right over your head, think about chat or instant messaging applications. They have traditionally been implemented in Flash or other RIAs du to the in built capabilities of the 3rd party plugin to supply the infrastructure. Although corporations like Facebook and Google have overcome this with their COMET based chat clients at significant development cost; this new infrastructure provided in the specification, could level the playing field for everyone else that is not as fortunate. “Essentially, what it does is lays the groundwork to have equivalent functionality that Flash or Silverlight provides,” says RedMonk analyst Michael Cote. With the addition of new elements or tags for video and audio, the specification is pointed squarely at vendors like Adobe and Microsoft in an attempt to swing the balance back in favor of Google, who employ’s HTML 5 lead editor Ian Hickson open standards.

What does this mean for CMS software as we know it? For one, vendors will have an option outside of siding with Adobe or Microsoft, avoiding allegiance and licensing headaches when it comes to picking a video player of choice. Outside of the media player debate, CMS vendors can hope to bring a level of control and configuration not found in RIAs today. Most CMS struggle with anything besides supplying a basic XML file for Flash objects to ingest. That’s about as far as they go today. With the new specification opening up the breathing room a bit, we could see a standardised approach to feeding parameters, content and even deploying objects within the RIA. CMS are great when it comes to deployment, rollback and versioning of code, and up until now, CMS functionality has been for the most part shut out of the equation because it had to hard stop at the executable level: the .SWF file. It was impenetrable. Now, CMS vendors can perhaps go deeper into the actual DNA of the RIA and allow authors to probe, create and adjust the contents and interactions just as richly as pure HTML or any other text markup.

As with most trends, we’ll have to watch for the final evolving uptake and following impact of these new standards. If the mind-bending Jedi tricks AJAX developers have crammed into ailing browsers is any indication of the future, we’re sure to see many uses no one can anticipate right now.

What are some ways in which you think the popular CMS platforms will be affected by the coming of HTML 5?

Finally, a startup that addresses the most glaringly obvious feedback from the user community who wish to leverage the inherent benefits of GoogleDocs yet still are hesitant to make the switch. In my consulting organisations who are trying to make the switch, they see the value in GoogleDocs - I mean, who doesn’t? A free ECM system by Google is nothing to shake a stick it.

However, in practice, everyone who has actually tried to use this web office platform in earnest realises that for the enterprise space, there’s very little chance you could actually get a researcher, or business analyst at a firm to sincerely drop MS Office in favor of Writely. The reality is that users, as always, fear change are not willing to abandon their most sacred of trusty tools. And for good reason, the online variants are clearly leagues behind at present.

Enter OffiSynch. Reiterating my advice to my clients, I’ve blogged before about the need to maintain the desktop productivity tools such as Word and Excel, and layer in the content management and collaboration goodness of GoogleDocs. This is what my clients have been doing manually with good success, and I can guarantee you that these synching tools will become mainstream tools for the web office innovators and leaders.

Then I hear the discussion of business model, monetization. I regret to inform you that there is but a single, uninteresting business model for these companies. There’s little doubt in my mind that tools like OffiSynch are aiming purely to be purchased by their friendly ecosystem giant. It’s a path several prior ventures have taken to great success, and will continue to do so.

From a Google product management standpoint, what I find most interesting is that these synching tools are noticeably missing from so many Google product lines. Google Reader lacks a native synching tool for the iPhone, lacks a synching tool for Outlook, etc. Contrast this to the understanding of prior ECM software vendors who immediately knew that to make an impact upon the existing customer base, they created desktop file explorer and Word integrations immediately because they analysed a typical user’s day to day work patterns and approached their product from a user-centric design philosophy. This is opposed to Google’s browser-centric philosophy, that continues to hold them back from virally growing their application suite. Good thing smaller players like OffiSync can fill the gap.

We all throw out things we shouldn’t. The VCR remote that has a single broken button, the microwave that simply had its turntable belt snap yet still warms food fine or the laptop with the broken screen.

Naturally, the “repair vs. buy a newer better version” decision is one that we have traditionally chosen to favor cost over environmental responsibility. What better excuse is engrained upon consumers than “if it’s broken, don’t fix it. Buy a new one?”

As we see the perils of this shortminded logic come to the forefront of politics, I can’t help but think about a primitive idea I had. What if we could begin to explore repairing items and craftsmanship again in the United States and other developed nations? Why is it that we can’t repair the microwave in today’s day and age? Becauase it costs you $100 dollars just to have a technician (if one even exists in your town) look at your microwave, when you could buy a brand new one from China, albeit of crap quality that will fail in a year, with some new trendy feature of allure.

I thought about this on my commute as my bus rolled past a TV and Electronics repair store, in shambled and definintely without marketing investment since the 1960s. Transistors and tubes anyone?

I won’t go into the obvious follow on costs that we as a nation are oblivious too when chosing to buy the new microwave: the cost of waste, removal, impact on the environment, lost service revenue and economic stimulus for the repair person, etc. I can hear the greed-driven counter argument from capatalism: if consumers were taught to spend less, how would that adversely affect the economy? Simple: it would hurt China’s trade surplus and corporate shareholders, it would only help local consumers.

“We are living in a false economy where the price of goods and services does not include the cost of waste and pollution,” Lynn Landes, Founder and Director of Zero Waste America.

Fact is, we are finally coming to terms with the 1980s “greed is good” lifestyle and the hangover is sobering. With less and less value creation occuring within US borders and as a result of true US GDP (hint: try adjusting our GDP for goods produced locally with local resources, very enlightening) we are simply siphoning the consumer spend out of this nation. Now, this is a gross over simplification of a long term trend towards globalisation, and taking advantage of labor price differences. The US auto-industry is a great example of our failures to capatilise on local resources and ingenuity.

But I digress.

This train of thought made me recall an idea about leveraging labor price differences in developing countries for the sake of good. Imagine the possibility that these often discarded yet serviceable goods were made availible for repair. Based off of the model of self-sufficiency, capatlist farming schemes used in Africa to teach economics to fringe villages, this method could be applied to harnessing the latent value in all things we typically call “garbage.” Instead of filling up landfills, goods in need of minor repair could be donated for free to these trade schools and the students would learn vocational skills to repair these household goods: either selling the refurbished unit or simply donating to needy homes. Although a microwave may not seem necessary to the average sub-Saharan tribal villager, these goods could be of value to neighboring cities and metropolitan areas in poor socioeconomic standing.The students in return get vocational and business skills necessary for partaking in the global economy.

Naturally, there are many hurdles: logistically transporting tons of microwaves and washing machines from other nations, funding for the teachers, incentivization for donations, etc. By no means small hurdles. However, at some point, self-sufficient agriculture is not going to be a feasible trade for villagers looking to enter society as whole. This could simply be another venue for value creation, fortunately out of thin air.

Please, send your thoughts and poke holes in the idea. Its far from pefect, so I’d love to hear your thoughts on making it so.

Let’s breakdown the ways in which this active signage is confusing.

1. Primarily, instead of the previous congruous interface on one screen - two screens are now provided, yet the interface is divided. This immediately separates the information uneccessarily. confusion around what the purpose of each display is immediate, especially for existing commuters who are accsutomed to the single screen, single interface of yore. The real estate of the prior single plasma panel is probably 75% of this combined two screen format. This could unfortunately be an example of the classic management mistake of a) having the requirement to expand the visible area (the new 25% provided by 2 smaller screens combined) yet b) realising that the software to run the screens cannot merge the information into 1 display or otherwise remove the vertical separator that divides the displays. This may be the inital culrpit behind why usability was lost, very early on in this civic projecte.
2. Eye tracking will show that the most prominent and inital hot spot is actuall the “Following Trains” which look like embossed buttons on top of a contrasting blue display. This is unfortunate for someone who didn’t bother to look back up and to the right for the “Next Train” which is camouflagued amongst a wash of white in the right scrolling monitor. Incidentally, I assume the business requirement here was to provide “more information about following trains;” something which was not availible in the prior interface. So, what should have become a benefit, implemented incorrectly, now is a distraction to the single most important use case: “When is the next darn train?” I can almost imagine a designer reflecting that the right screen should be used to replicate the original display (from an information architecture perspective, it does) and simply using the left panel to display otherwise new and auxilliary information. This approach fails to appreciate overall analysis of the combined result, while trying to correctly minimise changes to existing commuters.
3. In fact, the effect power of borders and box shapes even creates an area of more attention towards the blue box for “8 cars” than the time of the next train. Now let me  ask you as a commuter, how many times have you really cared about the exact number of cars on a given train, or how often this actually factored into a decision about your travel? I can honestly answer never for me - perhaps more important for the staff or authorities on patrol.

We’ll look in our next blog post on how I would have redesigned this interface for greater usability.

Here are the key findings on the survey of experts by the Pew Internet & American Life Project that asked respondents to assess predictions about technology and its roles in the year 2020:

The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020.

Nothing surprising here, compare the number of cell phones to personal computers and we’re talking orders of magnitude difference. 2020? That’s quite a safe margin. I would place this closer to the 2015 mark, depending on how you define “primary.” Are we talking total time spent online, frequency of usage, availibility or an aggregate metric? Either way, the masses of non-PC owning, lower income populations will easily sway this in the favor of the mobile.

The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness.

I refute that personal integrity does not grow with transparency, in as much that personal integrity to a degree requires transparency. Just look at Obama’s tactic of clearly stating his stance on political issues in an easy to access format on the web for everyone to read. Consider the opposite case: could you entrust someone who rarely divulged any personal information?As for social tolerance or forgiveness, I wouldn’t suspect these to ever necessarily be tacit outcomes of transparency

Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020.

Meh, no offense, but this proposition smells as if the researchers were searching for a theory due to lack of standouts. Consider how it is written… these interfaces coupled with internet usage. Of course, these interfaces have been around for sometime. Heck, my current employer made touchscreen kiosk software in the early 1990s that were in fact remotely updated over the internet. Surely, the prevalence of the intersection of “voice and touch interfaces” with “internet” will grow, as this is a fairly new space. The researchers aren’t really going out on a limb to state that these will be dominant forces in UX or become mainstream. Or, we could just sum this up as 2 good features from the iPhone and call it a day.

Those working to enforce intellectual property law and copyright protection will remain in a continuing arms race, with the crackers who will find ways to copy and share content without payment.

Considering there’s been very little grounbreaking enhancements in pircay in the last decade, this is also another non-surprise. Perhaps content producers will sooner realise that piracy, in its current definition, is flawed. Much like the quote that an idea can never be destroyed, content producers should focus on creating revenue streams from their content that don’t rely on distribution or consumption (read: middlemen). Sigh.

The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who is connected, and the results will be mixed in their impact on basic social relations.

Completely agreed. As I just tweeted, I am a nanabot.

Next-generation engineering of the network to improve the current internet architecture is more likely than an effort to rebuild the architecture from scratch.

If you’re a fan of software and systems design, you’ll know this as an old truth. How often do projects or vendors succeed in ground-up rewrites or masse switches? Without totalitarian control, this is typically a death march. Just look at attempts to ratify HTML 5.0, the lingua franca of the web, let alone rewriting HTTP.

In summary, nothing groundreaking. Move along.