It seems that the retirement of Adobe’s Flash® is coming sooner than later. This week, a business colleague sent me a link to an article on CNN.com (Adobe abandons mobile Flash development, report says) which reported that Adobe is abondoning its attempts to get Flash® to work on mobile devices. In addition, it says that Adobe sent an email to its partners…

“And with that e-mail flash, Adobe has signaled that it knows, as Steve Jobs predicted, the end of the Flash era on the web is coming soon.”  [bold added by me]

Portion of home page at the Adobe Flash website 11-13-2011

The article goes on to say that Adobe will focus “on alternative application packaging programs and the HTML5 protocol. ”

“Flash became a dominant desktop platform by allowing developers to code interactive games, create animated advertisements and deliver video to any browser that had the plugin installed, without having to take into account the particulars of any given browser. However, with the development of Javascript, CSS, and HTML5, which has native support for video, many web developers are turning away from Flash, which can be a resource hog even on the most advanced browsers.”

And if your website is Flash-based?  What do you need to do?
You need to convert your website using other web-development tools that will give you a similar look-n-feel. Converting your website means having your website re-developed by a web developer familiar with the latest versions of web-development software tools like CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and HTML. Each of these tools now has video capabilities that when combined, create powerful videos for your website.

If you want your website to be seen on mobile devices, you will convert your website sooner than later. If that is not a priority, you can plan ahead and have your website converted over the next year or two. Either way, your website needs to be re-developed. [Which is a good reason to call us 508-480-8833... Shameless plug..but hey!]

Caution: HTML5 is a radical upgrade from previous versions of HTML. The HTML5 protocol is very new and you should ask your web developer about their experience with HTML5. Even if you don’t understand everything they say, look at their body language to determine for yourself their level of comfort with HTML5.

In mid-November, WordPress® won the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. WordPress has been nominated in the Overall Best Open Source CMS category 4 years in a row. It’s win this year makes it eligible for the Hall of Fame category in 2010.

There were over 12,000 nominations and over 23,000 votes. Awards were given in 5 CMS (Content Management System) categories;

1. Overall Best Open Source CMS
2. Most Promising Open Source CMS
3. Best Open Source PHP CMS
4. Best Other [non-PHP] Open Source CMS
5. Hall of Fame Award

Since 2004, Adventures Online has been installing and customizing WordPress® blogs for its customers. WordPress has grown from a bare-bones blog post management system into a full-blown CMS, and, Adventures Online has experienced the growing pains and triumphs of its journey. Congrats to the WordPress developers!

While pleased with the progress, I have concerns about the “fat” that has been added in order to support being a CMS and the “assumptions” the WordPress editor “intuits” regarding the formatting of text. The most recent versions of WordPress produce less search-engine-friendly behind-the-scenes code, store multiple versions of posts for infinity, add links to other posts in the Comments section as if they were real comments by people, and make (sometimes maddening) decisions about what the human editor intends in formatting.

On my wishlist for future features are:

1. The ability to purge versions of posts by number. Like ”Keep the Previous “n” Versions of Posts” where “n” is a number (2, 6, 10) filled in by the Admin user.
2. The ability to decide whether links to previous posts should be added to the Comments section or not. Like “Add Links to Previous Posts to Comments” Yes___  No___   
3. The ability for edits made in HTML to “stick” for the life of the post/page. As in “do what I have written and don’t re-interpret it to your liking”. 

Moving forward, Adventures Online will continue to promote WordPress…with a cautious eye to the future.

What’s on your wishlist for WordPress? Use Comments to tell us what you would like to see.

Current search technologies are based on statistical algorithms that match the words you enter in the search box with words that exist at a website. Search engines attempt exact matches, and present the results on the search engine results pages (SERPs) ranked according to how closely the website’s words match the search words you entered.

The next generation of search engines will use techniques from linguistic science to determine the semantic relationships between words and the contexts in which they occur.

Wikipedia defines the Semantic Web as

The semantic web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which web content can be expressed not only in natural language, but also in a form that can be understood, interpreted and used by software agents, thus permitting them to find, share and integrate information more easily.

For the purposes of this post, the “software agents” would be the search engine programs that process your search. Wikipedia goes on to explain:

Humans are capable of using the Web to carry out tasks such as finding the Finnish word for “car”, to reserve a library book, or to search for the cheapest DVD and buy it. However, a computer cannot accomplish the same tasks without human direction because web pages are designed to be read by people, not machines. The semantic web is a vision of information that is understandable by computers, so that they can perform more of the tedium involved in finding, sharing and combining information on the web.

For example, a computer might be instructed to list the prices of flat screen HDTVs larger than 40 inches with 1080p resolution at shops in the nearest town that are open until 8pm on Tuesday evenings. To do this today requires search engines that are individually tailored to every website being searched. The semantic web provides a common standard (RDF) for websites to publish the relevant information in a more readily machine-processable and integratable form.

The difference between the two search techniques is the results they produce. The search engines using semantic search will attempt to interpret your intention and serve up information that is “related” to your search terms while the engines using the “exact match” technique will continue to serve up information that matches words, but, that may not be relevant to your intention, requiring your discretionary powers (human intervention) to determine the most relevant information.

Try this Semantic Search-based search engine: Hakai

Nov. 15, 2005 – Editors at PCMag.com introduced a new resource at their Web site. Editors promise

“This new Web resource serves up-to-the minute news on spyware threats alongside the information you need to protect yourself against them. Product reviews, feature articles, how-tos and tips will help you prepare for and prevent catastrophe. “

Visit PCMag.com’s antispyware resource.

In September I attended the 2005 Get Found! Conference (about search engine marketing and optimization) in Connecticut. Here are some interesting statistics about search engines that I hope will provide food for thought as you prepare your 2006 marketing strategy.

These statistics were shared during the opening remarks by Emily Merkle and Jarod Caporino from MIVA.

• 41% of the activity on the Internet is “searching”
• 60% of people search from work
• Google, Yahoo, and MSN account for 93% of the searches performed on the Internet