You may remember Gilbert Lee when he was a web designer for Utah.gov. He left us to design for Northrop Grumman and now has his own successful firm PlainSimple Design, LLC at www.plainsimple.org. Gilbert has just volunteered to organize the Salt Lake City Weblogger Meetup. He encourages SLC bloggers to come out and meet others doing the same. The first meeting is Wednesday, September 15 at 7:00 p.m. at the Barnes & Noble Booksellers, 1104 East 2100 South (Cafe), Salt Lake City.

FCW.com reports today that Webcontent.gov wil be unveiled on September 29. This site will help federal agencies put up more uniform content and adhere to laws and best practices for information accessibility.

Jeremy Zawodny has announced how to ping Yahoo's RSS database when you post to your Movable Type weblog. Yahoo joins weblogs.com, blo.gs, and several others in offering the XML-RPC ping interface. Pinging has the advantage of getting your content much faster into those sites that crawl RSS feeds for news.

Great news for agencies, developers and freelancers! We’ve heard that while many of you love our Webmail service, the 5GB storage limit is getting tight. That’s why we’re introducing our new range of expanded Webmail plans to help take your email capabilities to the next level. More Space, More Flexibility, More Power We’re expanding our […]

2024年10月31日、電子コミックのプラットフォームWEBTOONを提供するWEBTOON Entertainment社が、触って楽しむことのできる電子コミック（tactile digital comics）を韓国のベンチャー企業Dot Inc.と共同で作成したと発表しました。

発表によると、これは視覚障害者向けに画像を点字に変換して表現するDot Inc.の技術を活用した取組です。今回作成されたのは電子コミックシリーズ“Yumi’s Cells”と“Hooky”の2タイトルで、Dot Inc.の点字ディスプレイDot Padで利用可能となる予定とあります。

WEBTOON Entertainment and Dot Inc. Release World’s First Tactile Digital Comics（WEBTOON, 2024/10/31）
https://about.webtoon.com/press-release/164

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Tired of Chrome? While Google Chrome is a popular choice for many due to its speed and extensive library of extensions, it’s not the only option out there. If you’re looking for a change, here are three web browsers that offer unique benefits and might just enhance your browsing experience. DuckDuckGo  Known primarily for its […]

If you are into the World of Web Development then you might be aware of the great innovations that are happening in the gaming industry. If you are among those people who have the enthusiasm to create their own web games in that case you might be aware of the novel technologies such as HTML5, …

Top 7 CSS3 Games ruling the World of Web Games Read More »

If you are a professional Mobile Web Developer looking to develop Mobile Websites and Web Apps then Kendo UI is the Mobile Framework for you as it has all the features and functions that are needed for easy Mobile App Development. Kendo UI Framework has a very simple and easy to use consistent programming interface …

Master the Art of Mobile Web Development with Kendo UI Framework Read More »

A new report finds that 75 percent of the 100 most visited websites in the US and Europe are not compliant with current privacy regulations. The study from privacy solution provider Privado.ai shows despite stricter privacy enforcement in Europe a surprising 74 percent of top websites do not honor opt-in consent as required by Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Although top websites in the US have a similar non-compliance rate of 76 percent for not honoring opt-out consent as required by the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), Privado finds the median volume of compliance risks to be three times… [Continue Reading]

Offering an array of choices might seem like an excellent way to cater to diverse user preferences, but more often than not, it can cause decision fatigue, negatively impacting the user experience and conversion rates. So, how do we strategically …

  The most powerful place to be located as a business, at this time, and for the last decade or two, is on the web. With numerous companies vying for consumer attention in the digital sphere, each and every industry is grappling for the top spot on the world’s most popular search engine – Google. […]

The post Pop Art’s Influence on Web Design appeared first on The Design Inspiration.

While Google has yet to confirm a Google search ranking update, we have seen tremendous volatility in the Google Search results this month. Google did, however, confirm it can downgrade sections of content that are starkly different from the main content. We also posted an update on the helpful content update. Finally, Google did say a new Google update is coming soon.

It slipped my mind and I forgot to post the Google Webmaster Report at the beginning of the month, so here it is, the November Google Webmaster Report.

Google said the sitelinks search box is going away soon. Google tested showing the full recipe in the search results, which was upsetting. Google rolled out AI Overviews to a 100+ countries, added new AI Overview features and much more. Google also launched AI features in local search and maps.

Finally, the DOJ said they may break up Google but that was before Trump won the election. Google ad revenue was way up again this past quarter. And Google replaced Prabhakar Raghavan with Nick Fox.

If you missed the last recap, it is at the October 2024 Google Webmaster Report.

Here are the important stories for the past month:

Google Updates

• Election 2024 Google Search Ranking Update ð>ð'
• Halloween 2024 Google Search Ranking Update ð'>>
• Google Search Ranking Volatility Again On October 26th & 27th & 23rd & 24th
• Google Search Ranking Volatility Continues October 19th & 20th
• Google Search Ranking Volatility Again Heats Up (October 15th)
• Google Search Ranking Volatility Rumbling Again October 10th
• Record-Breaking Google Search Ranking Volatility Continues Into October
• Google Search Downgrading Rankings Of Content Starkly Different From Main Content
• Google: Search Ranking Update Coming Soon But HCU Victims May Not Recover
• Report: 22% Of Sites Hit By Google's Helpful Content Update Are Up 20%+

• Google Search Console Partial Data Reports With Dotted Lines
• Google Search Console Performance Report Showing Almost No Data Today

• Did Google Hit Fortune Recommends With A Search Penalty Over Site Reputation Abuse?
• Google AI Overviews Not Linking To Sites Hit By Helpful Content Update
• Google: Doubtful You'd See Big Ranking Drop Over Core Web Vitals Issues
• Google: Having Different Links On Mobile vs Desktop Pages Can Slow Crawl
• Google Proposes New Shipping Data Schema Including Type ShippingService
• Google Warning On JavaScript-Generated Product Markup
• Google Updates URL Structure, Favicon & Adds Google Trends Docs
• Google Clarified Support For Robots.txt Fields With Tiny Change
• Google Drops Support For Noarchive Meta Tag Directive
• Google Merchant Listings Adds Certification Markup Support
• Google To Host Creator Summit At GooglePlex Later This Month

• Google Sitelinks Search Box Going Away Next Month
• Google Tests Quick View Button For Recipes That Keep You On Google
• Google Tests Dropping Results Count After Moving It Under Search Tools
• Google Search Tests Verified Labels For Product Results
• Google Tests Frequently Saved Label On Search Result Snippets
• Google Menu Highlights Search Carousel
• Google Search Entity Trust Scores From APIVoid & ScamAdviser
• Google Search Snippet With Mentioned Products Carousel
• Google Other People Search Box
• Google Search People's Insights For Unprofessional Medical Advice
• Expandable Google Knowledge Panels On Desktop Search
• Google Search Tests List Articles
• Google Search Tests Top Links Title For Sitelinks?
• Google Search Tests Replacing Google Logo With Super G Logo

• Google AI Overviews Rolling Out To 100+ Countries & Billion+ Users
• Google AI Overview Ads, New Link Format, AI Organized Search Results & More
• Google AI Overviews Highlight Feature Expands AI Responses
• Google Generative AI Snippets Throughout Search Results
• Google Shopping "Researched with AI - Experimental" Answer

• Google AI Answers In Google Maps: Things To Do, Review Summaries & About This Place
• Google Local Service Ads To Soon Require Google Business Profile
• Google Business Profiles Learn Something Specific Question Box
• Google Business Profiles Removes Health Insurance Accepted
• Google Tests Discover More Places & Explore Places Nearby
• Google Business Profiles Testing Reviews Within Photo Carousels
• Google Business Profiles: Answer Questions About Your Inventory
• Google Drag & Drop Reorder Your Restaurant Menu Items

• DOJ May Breakup Google As Remedy To Monopoly Ruling
• Google Ad Revenue Up 10% - With Biggest Ad Revenue Quarter Ever
• Nick Fox New Lead Of Google Search; Replaced Prabhakar Raghavan

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Welcome back, everyone, to the latest episode of the Niche Pursuits News Podcast, where we bring you the biggest headlines in the industry over the last week and a good dose of inspiration for your personal projects. Jared and guest…

The post Married Couple Wins €2 Billion from Google for Deranking Their Website appeared first on Niche Pursuits.

Google is replacing FID with Interaction to Next Paint (INP) as a primary Core Web Vitals metric. Understand how INP works and what it means for site owners.

The post Interaction to Next Paint (INP) – New Core Web Vitals Metric appeared first on Portent.

If you've looked into search engine optimization as a promotional technique for your website, you have likely come across the advice to make your website secure (having an https:// appear in front of your URLs instead of http://). Google has been very vocal in pushing for all websites to make the move to being secure,…

The post How to Make Your WordPress Website Secure (SSL) in 6 Steps appeared first on Sugarrae.

On the 15th of January 2008 the domain name Groupon.com went live for the first time. 2008 was also the year that IndieGogo became one of the first ‘crowdfunding’ websites. A year later, the biggest rivals of each would launch in the form of Living Social and Kickstarter. At the start of 2012 Uber – […]

The post How to Steal the Next Billion Dollar Website Idea: A Case Study appeared first on ViperChill.

Join Michael as he explores the webs and patterns of our life, and uses poem, story, myth, metaphor, and examples from his own life to show how we can recognize God and continuity within our myriad choices, and know His peace.

In this episode, Fr. Anthony talks about the phone apps he uses to slay the morning dragon of the desert and redeem the time. After a brief advertisement for an exciting new (bogus) app, he uses Max Weber to explain part of the frustration (and trust issues) on the part of clergy. Enjoy the show!

In this episode, Fr. Alexander Webster, the Dean of Holy Trinity Orthodox Seminary and a retired Army Chaplain, shares his thoughts on the challenges of the priesthood and describes how Holy Trinity prepares men for it. Enjoy the show!

Dean The Very Rev. Dr. John Behr, author of academic, popular, and spiritual works, presented the keynote address at this year's Education Day at St. Vladimir's Seminary. Fr. John highlighted the symbiotic relationship between Christianity and books, and described how the development of the internet has changed the way people read.

Steve interviews Fr. Meletios Webber, the Abbot of St. John's Monastery, on what the "grace of the priesthood" bestows on a man and what the priest's authority and role is in the life of the parish and in his relationship with his parishoners as his spiritual children.

Steve continues his interview with Fr. Meletios Webber and they discuss the role of the parish priest as a Father/confessor, confession and counseling, penances, clairvoyance and much more.

Steve finishes his interview with Fr. Meletios and discusses spiritual directors, accountability groups and obedience.

If you’re a remote worker, or even work remotely part-time, you can step up your video conference game by investing in a good webcam. Built-in cameras on laptops and desktops have improved in recent years, but you typically still get higher quality and more personalized controls with an external webcam. And if you plan on video chatting with friends across the country or game-streaming regularly, you’ll want the best webcam experience possible. But there’s a lot of junk out there, as is typical in an overcrowded space. In this buying guide, we'll dive into the best webcams that will help you look sharp, no matter where you're dialing in from.

Factors to consider before buying a webcam

Resolution and field of view

While some newer computers have 1080p webcams, most built-in cameras have a resolution of 720p, so you’ll want to look for an external webcam that has a higher resolution. FHD webcams will give you better video quality; ideally, you’re looking for something that can handle 1080p at 60fps or 30fps. If you’re considering a cheap 720p webcam, make sure to get one that supports at least 30fps (most will) or, even better, 60fps. However, if your primary concern is better picture quality during video calls, 1080p is the way to go.

Some webcams can shoot in 4K, but that’s overkill for most people. Not to mention most video conferencing services like Zoom, Google Meet and Skype don’t even support 4K video. When it comes to streaming, Twitch maxes out at 1080p video, but YouTube added 4K live streaming back in 2016. Ultimately, with 4K webcam shots having such limited use, most people can get by with a solid 1080p camera.

Field of view (FOV) controls how much can fit in the frame when you’re recording. Most webcams I tested had a default field of view of around 78 degrees, which captured me and enough of my background to prove that I really need to organize my home office. On cheaper webcams you’ll usually see narrower fields of view (around 60 degrees), and those aren’t necessarily bad. They won’t show as much of your background, but that also means you won’t be able to squeeze as many friends or family members into frame when you’re having Zoom birthday parties. On the flip side, more expensive webcams may let you adjust the field of view to be even wider than average, and some even offer features like digital zoom.

Autofocus and other “auto” features

Webcams with autofocus will keep the image quality sharp without much work on your part. You should be able to move around, step back and forth, and remain in focus the whole time. Some standalone webcam models let you manually adjust focus, too, if you have specific needs. Devices with fixed focus are less convenient, but they tend to be more affordable.

In the same vein is auto framing, a feature that some high-end webcams now offer. Similarly to Apple’s Center Stage feature, the camera automatically adjusts to keep you in the center of the frame even as you move around. This used to be a feature only available on the most premium webcams, but now you can find it on sub-$200 devices.

You’ll also see other “auto” features listed in webcam specs, most notably auto light correction. This will adjust the camera’s settings to make up for a dimly lit room. If you don’t have bright lights, or often take calls in places where you can’t control the lighting, this feature will be valuable. Alternatively, you might consider using your mirrorless camera as a high-quality webcam solution, taking all of the benefits and features with you (albeit in a cumbersome package).

Microphones

Most webcams have built-in microphones that, depending on your setup, might end up being closer to you than your computer’s own mics. Check to see if the model you’re considering has mono or stereo mics, as the latter is better. Some even use noise-reduction technology to keep your voice loud and clear. While audiophiles and streamers will want to invest in a standalone microphone, most others can get by using a webcam’s built-in mic.

Design

There aren’t a ton of fascinating breakthroughs when it comes to external webcam design. Most are round or rectangular devices that clip onto a monitor or your laptop screen. Some have the ability to swivel or screw onto a tripod stand and others can simply sit on your desk beside your computer. But unless you really like having people stare up your nose, the latter isn’t ideal. We recommend clipping your webcam to your monitor and ensuring that it’s at or slightly above eye level.

A few webcams go above and beyond by adding hardware extras like built-in lights and lens covers, too. The former can help you stand out in a dark room, while the latter makes it so hackers can’t view you through your webcam without your knowledge.

Price

Most external webcams that are just good enough to be a step up from your computer’s built-in camera cost between $60 and $150. If the webcam has the same resolution as the internal one on your laptop, you should look out for other specs like auto light correction, a wider field of view or an extra-long connecting cable that can provide a step-up in quality or ease of use.

Spending $150 or more means you might get advanced features that tend to be present in a pro webcam like 4K resolution, vertical and horizontal recording options, stereo mics, customizable video settings and more. But unless you’re spending hours on video calls each day or streaming multiple times each week, you can settle on a budget webcam and safely skip most of those high-end options.

How we test webcams

We primarily test webcams by putting them through as much real-world use as possible. We examine their design, how flexible they are and how easy they are to reposition, and make note of how heavy they are and if that affects their ability to stay put while sitting on top of a screen. We use each webcam for at least a week straight as our primary camera for all video chats, and we make sure to use the device in different lighting environments to test low-light performance. We also use any built-in microphones as our primary audio inputs on video calls as well. Finally, although most of these webcams are plug-and-play, we test out any proprietary software that’s intended to work with each webcam, tweaking things like field of view, video resolution and effects, and using any special features like Show Mode on Logitech webcams.

Best webcams for 2024

Others webcams we tested

Logitech C920s Pro HD

Our previous top pick, the Logitech C920s Pro HD webcam remains a solid option for those with less than $100 to spend and really only need a basic 1080p camera to upgrade their setup, or something affordable to make them look better on those inevitable Zoom calls. It has a 78-degree field of view, decent microphones and handy privacy shutter built in. The Brio 500 took the top spot away from this model thanks to its advanced light correction, auto-framing and Show Mode.

Bobby Maddex interviews Fr. John Parsells, the man behind both Orthodox Web Solutions and Orthodox 360.

The product that drove webmasters crazy was back...for a moment, at least.

A free version of Urchin, a company Google bought. (official blog post)

About nine months ago, I ran into Evan Prodromou at an event at Meta. The social media giant was telling an audience of Fediverse and decentralized social veterans about its plans for its social network product Threads – focused primarily on its quite extraordinary plans to integrate it with the wider Fediverse. At the time, […]

“Investors, both individual and professional, want more than just the data that independent services can provide. They want the company’s own story and investment vision. What they don’t want is to wade through complex or irrelevant information.” Investor Relations on Corporate Websites, Nielsen Norman Group

Understand investor jobs-to-be-done

Primary users of investor relations areas on a website include, obviously, investors themselves but also analysts and financial journalists. There is an important secondary audience of potential customers and employees too. But the core audience is generally looking for:

• Company background and overview
• Press releases
• Stock exchange filings
• One-page financial overview
• Annual reports
• Quarterly reports
• Historical financial information
• Executive biographies
• Share price information
• Press and IR contact details
• Corporate governance information

Of course, each company will go beyond statutory reporting to add content and user journeys specific to their needs. For example, if they are dealing with specific events in their company history, such as acquisitions, crises or if they are approaching an IPO.

Interestingly, according to NN/Group, some of the fancier functionality that you often see on an IR site, such as webcasts, slides and investment calculators, were less important to real users. “People research company financials are more interested in getting facts quickly than in the technology used to deliver them.”

Best practice examples

GE Aerospace does well with very clear navigation on a fast-loading site that is designed to get people to the information they are looking for quickly.

Microsoft’s IR site clearly surfaces stock price information with a tidy design and recent company news, but we are not fans of carousels as a user interface solution.

In contrast, Alphabet (Google’s parent company) has the leanest, text-only IR page, which, like GE’s, aims to get visitors to key information as quickly as possible. Notably, they offer HTML and PDF versions of key reports, and we think this is good practice. PDFs are not great for usability but have an important role in communicating statutory information in a compliant way, so it’s important to find a user-friendly, SEO-friendly parallel structure to sit alongside them.

Michelmersh combines Microsoft’s visual approach with direct access to the most important information.

Core and optional functionality

We use a tool called Octopus to collaborate with clients to design a website’s information architecture and the high-level structure of individual pages.

For investor relations areas, the following site map templates from NN/Group are good starting points for high, medium and low-priority content. But each client is different and so understanding client needs and their users’ needs is always a project in itself.

Don’t forget basic website usability

For more information about how Articulate tackles the website design and development process, including information architecture and user journeys, see How we build websites at Articulate. For the end results, take a look at our Portfolio.

We think all sites - and all visitors - deserve a well-designed, easy-to-use website that helps them find the information they want. In particular, this means that IR areas need to be:

• Mobile-friendly. The widespread use of PDFs makes many IR sites difficult to use on mobile devices, representing an opportunity for forward-thinking companies to improve the user experience by offering HMTL options.
• Searchability. IR information should be searchable alongside other site content, either with a domain-specific search box (i.e. just the IR section) or as part of an integrated site-wide search.
• Accessibility is a basic requirement for a modern website, yet 97 percent of websites have fundamental accessibility issues. Designing for accessibility is good for every visitor. For example, our blog’s speed reading mode and audio player help people engage with our content whether they have specific needs or not. See our article about why accessibility is crucial for website design.
• Loading speed. Google and GE prioritise loading speed and ‘time to find’ for visitors over fancy imagery and functionality. This is in line with NN/Group’s user study findings. Some clients prefer more fizz and ginger on their IR sites as part of their investor brand, but this should never come at the expense of loading speed. For more on improving Core Web Vitals (as Google calls them) see: Don't lose traffic because of Google’s Core Web Vitals.
• SEO. Investors, journalists and advisors, like most of us, use Google to find information. IR areas should get the same SEO attention as the rest of the site. For more on our approach to SEO see: The ultimate SEO guide for B2B technology companies.
• PDFs vs. web pages. IR pages are loaded with PDFs for annual reports, statutory filings, and other important documents. It may be the case that these files have to be in PDF format—we’re not lawyers, so we can’t say for certain—but we think it would be valuable, as with Google, not to also make them available as web pages, even if it is a high-level summary page with a link to the downloadable PDF. There are strong usability reasons to avoid PDF files if at all possible.
• Carousels. We strongly recommend against Carousels. Buy us a pint, and we’ll bore for England about why.
• Use of videos, webcasts and podcasts. IR pages often feature investor briefings and other content in video format. This should never be a substitute for clear, scannable, searchable text. Where possible, provide transcripts or summaries. Where possible, provide short (<4 minutes) highlight reels as well as longer content. Videos should have captions and chapter headings so that people can find what they need quickly. Never autoplay videos.

Examples of investor-specific functionality

Company overview

“Offer a brief company overview that highlights a few significant facts, along with a link to more detailed corporate information.” For example, Causeway’s website has this succinct summary right on its homepage as well as more detailed information in a ‘Why us’ section.

Biographies

“Provide information about the company’s high-level managers, including each person’s name and job title, a recent picture, and a link to a full biography,” advises The Nielsen Norman Group. For example, HealthHero has a really easy-to-use, highly visual, and on-brand biographies section on its About Us page.

Press information

Journalists don’t just need press information, they need relevant, high-resolution images, logos, PR contacts and company information.

Press releases

Your news page should look like high-end news site or blog with all the support infrastructure such as the ability to sign up for alerts, search for specific information, filter and sort the information, as on this example from TCN.

ESG reports. Your investor brand goes beyond statutory reporting. Increasingly, environmental, social and governance information influences investment decisions and build investor confidence. HPE does a great job of communicating its progress in this area, and, ahem, we think our own Impact Report is pretty good, too. (Related to this, see our guide to establishing a strong ESG tone of voice.)

Security, availability, access controls and approvals

• Security and access control. IR areas often include market-sensitive information such as earnings announcements or new product introductions. For this reason (and others), it is important that any content management system (CMS) used for IR pages should have robust security and access controls, meaning that only authorised users can add or modify IR pages. We recommend HubSpot Content Hub which has granular user permissions, access control to specific assets (e.g. individual web pages) and (with an Enterprise tier) SSO integration and role-based permissions.
• Content approvals. HubSpot also has the option to require approvals before website changes are published. This may be valuable to ensure that legally responsible people, e.g. directors, have a final review and approval of statutory updates to the site, even if they delegate the content creation to others.
• Scheduling for publication. With time-sensitive and embargoed information, it is important to be able to set a specific publication time and date for content so that you can prepare the pages in advance but make sure they are published at the right time. With HubSpot, this is possible for pages and blog/new posts.

How Articulate can help

We design and code signature websites using our proprietary Nucleus technology, which are hosted on HubSpot Content Hub (CMS). See our website services page for more information.

Brochure websites are old-school. Instead, our team will build you a marketing engine that drives traffic, leads and customers, all while telling your brand story.

If you’d like an SEO, usability, or content review of your investor relations website or if you’d like us to help build a new one, please get in touch.

Every website project starts with a leap of faith.

Content may be king, but data sits behind the throne and has the king’s ear. 

You want to be informed by data before you make changes to your marketing strategies. This is never truer than in the case of your website, which is a rich source of behavioural analytics and, therefore, a valuable insight into your audience’s interests.

Today we announced the March 2024 core update. This is designed to improve the quality of Search by showing less content that feels like it was made to attract clicks, and more content that people find useful. We also shared that we have new spam policies to better handle the practices that can negatively impact Google's search results. In this post, we'll go into more detail for creators about both the update and the spam policies.

Currently, the World Wide Web is mostly composed of isolated and loosely connected "data islands". Connecting them together and retrieving only the information that is of interest to the user is the common Web usage process. Creating infrastructure that would support automation of that process by aggregating and integrating Web data in accordance to user's personal preferences would greatly improve today's Web usage. A significant part of Web data is available only through the login and password protected applications. As that data is very important for the usefulness of described process, proposed infrastructure needs to support authorized access to user's personal data. In this paper we propose a semantically enhanced Web portal that presents unique personalized user's entry to the domain-specific Web information. We also propose an identity management system that supports authorized access to the protected Web data. To verify the proposed solution, we have built Sweb - a semantically enhanced Web portal that uses proposed identity management system.

With the emergence of the Web 2.0 phenomena, technology-assisted social networking has become the norm. The potential of social software for collaborative learning purposes is clear, but as yet there is little evidence of realisation of the benefits. In this paper we consider Information and Communication Technology student attitudes to collaboration and via two case studies the extent to which they exploit the use of wikis for group collaboration. Even when directed to use a particular wiki designed for the type of project they are involved with, we found that groups utilized the wiki in different ways according to the affordances ascribed to the wiki. We propose that the integration of activity theory with an affordances perspective may lead to improved technology, specifically Web 2.0, assisted collaboration.

E-speranto is a formal language for generating multilingual texts on the World Wide Web. It is currently still under development. The vocabulary and grammar rules of E-speranto are based on Esperanto; the syntax of E-speranto, however, is based on XML (eXtensible Markup Language). The latter enables the integration of documents generated in E-speranto into web pages. When a user accesses a web page generated in E-speranto, the interpreter interprets the document into a chosen natural language, which enables the user to read the document in any arbitrary language supported by the interpreter.

The basic parts of the E-speranto interpreting system are the interpreters and information resources, which complies with the principle of separating the interpretation process from the data itself. The architecture of the E-speranto interpreter takes advantage of the resemblance between the languages belonging to the same linguistic group, which consequently results in a lower production cost of the interpreters for the same linguistic group.

We designed a proof-of-concept implementation for interpreting E-speranto in three Slavic languages: Slovenian, Serbian and Russian. These languages share many common features in addition to having a similar syntax and vocabulary. The content of the information resources (vocabulary, lexicon) was limited to the extent that was needed to interpret the test documents. The testing confirmed the applicability of our concept and also indicated the guidelines for future development of both the interpreters and E-speranto itself.

The paper explores the application of Web 2.0 technologies to support product development efforts in a global, virtual and cross-functional setting. It analyses the dichotomy between the prevailing hierarchical structure of CAD/PLM/PDM systems and the principles of the Social Web under the light of the emerging product development trends. Further it introduces the concept of Engineering 2.0, intended as a more bottom up and lightweight knowledge sharing approach to support early stage design decisions within virtual and cross-functional product development teams. The lessons learned collected from a cross-company study highlight how to further developblogs, wikis, forums and tags for the benefit of new product development teams, highlighting opportunities, challenges and no-go areas.

In this paper we present an approach to improving navigability of a hierarchically structured Web content. The approach is based on an integration of a tagging module and adoption of tag clouds as a navigational aid for such content. The main idea of this approach is to apply tagging for the purpose of a better highlighting of cross-references between information items across the hierarchy. Although in principle tag clouds have the potential to support efficient navigation in tagging systems, recent research identified a number of limitations. In particular, applying tag clouds within pragmatic limits of a typical user interface leads to poor navigational performance as tag clouds are vulnerable to a so-called pagination effect. In this paper, a solution to the pagination problem is discussed, implemented as a part of an Austrian online encyclopedia called Austria-Forum, and analyzed. In addition, a simulation-based evaluation of the new algorithm has been conducted. The first evaluation results are quite promising, as the efficient navigational properties are restored.

Online communities and institutions create new spaces for interaction, but also open new avenues for the emergence of grievances, claims, and disputes. Consequently, online dispute resolution (ODR) procedures are core to these new online worlds. But can ODR mechanisms provide sufficient levels of reputation, trust, and enforceability for it to become mainstream? This contribution introduces the new approaches to ODR and provides a description of the design and structure of Ontomedia, a web-based platform to facilitate online mediation in different domains.

Web Services have become a standard for integration of systems in distributed environments. By using a set of open interoperability standards, they allow computer-computer interaction, regardless the programming languages and operating systems used. The Semantic Web Services, by its turn, make use of ontologies to describe their functionality in a more structural manner, allowing computers to reason about the information required and provided by them. Such a description also allows dynamic composition of several Web Services, when only one is not able to provide the desired functionality. There are scenarios, however, in which only the functional correctness is not enough to fulfill the user requirements, and a minimum level of quality should be guaranteed by their providers. In this context, this work presents an approach for dynamic Web Service composition that takes into account the composition overall quality. The proposed approach relies on a heuristics to efficiently perform the composition. In order to show the feasibility of the proposed approach, a Web Service composition application prototype was developed and experimented with public test sets, along with another approach that does not consider quality in the composition process. The results have shown that the proposed approach in general finds compositions with more quality, within a reasonable processing time.

The massive growth in ontology development has opened new research challenges such as ontology management, search and retrieval for the entire semantic web community. These results in many recent developments, like OntoKhoj, Swoogle, OntoSearch2, that facilitate tasks user have to perform. These semantic web portals mainly treat ontologies as plain texts and use the traditional text classification algorithms for classifying ontologies in directories and assigning predefined labels rather than using the semantic knowledge hidden within the ontologies. These approaches suffer from many types of classification problems and lack of accuracy, especially in the case of overlapping ontologies that share common vocabularies. In this paper, we define an ontology classification problem and categorize it into many sub-problems. We present a new ontological methodology for the classification of web ontologies, which has been guided by the requirements of the emerging Semantic Web applications and by the lessons learnt from previous systems. The proposed framework, OntClassifire, is tested on 34 ontologies with a certain degree of overlapping domain, and effectiveness of the ontological mechanism is verified. It benefits the construction, maintenance or expansion of ontology directories on the semantic web that help to focus on the crawling and improving the quality of search for the software agents and people. We conclude that the use of a context specific knowledge hidden in the structure of ontologies gives more accurate results for the ontology classification.

The increased volume of accessible internet data creates an opportunity for researchers and practitioners to improve time series forecasting for many indicators. In our study, we assess the value of web traffic data in forecasting the number of short-term visitors travelling to Australia. We propose a feature-based model selection framework which combines random forest with feature ranking process to select the best performing model using limited and informative number of features extracted from web traffic data. The data was obtained for several tourist attraction and tourism information websites that could be visited by potential tourists to find out more about their destinations. The results of random forest models were evaluated over 3- and 12-month forecasting horizon. Features from web traffic data appears in the final model for short term forecasting. Further, the model with additional data performs better on unseen data post the COVID19 pandemic. Our study shows that web traffic data adds value to tourism forecasting and can assist tourist destination site managers and decision makers in forming timely decisions to prepare for changes in tourism demand.

Improving website structures is the main task of a website designer. In recent years, numerous web engineering researchers have investigated navigation recommendation systems. Page recommendation systems are critical for mobile website navigation. Accordingly, we propose a smart and adaptive navigation recommendation system based on reinforcement learning. In this system, user navigation history is used as the input for reinforcement learning model. The model calculates a surf value for each page of the website; this value is used to rank the pages. On the basis of this ranking, the website structure is modified to shorten the user navigation path length. Experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed system. The results revealed that user navigation paths could be decreased by up to 50% with training on 12 months of data, indicating that users could more easily find a target web page with the help of the proposed adaptive navigation recommendation system.