I’ve been tasked with coding the front-end on a new-fangled wish list app for my dear Co., Inc. While that isn’t particularly exciting or interesting, these days I’m always looking to throw a little semantic twist in there, usually along the lines of a rel tag here, full-on microformat there. Since we’re talking product lists here, I’d be remiss if I didn’t use the emerging hProduct draft spec in my markup, which is already part of the plan.

In talking with the project brain wizards and a colleague, it appears one of the requirements is to make these lists “portable”. This I’m a fan of. I sport a dataportability.org sticker on my laptop, but haven’t necessarily found an outlet to use the portability techniques prescribed. This could be a perfect opportunity.

It should be relatively straight forward to build unique list-based Atom feeds (I’m assuming the best out of our technology partners here, they’ve been much maligned in my blog comments before). This may be perfect to build a basic list to share via a feed reader. But what about an open standard similar to hProduct that would more fully define the products in lists to the apps that want it?

Extending the data elements of hProduct to an atom feed may be just the fix. With a simple hProduct namespace (or other aptly-named namespace) we can define rich product details outside of the current atom spec to machines and applications while preserving the integrity of a basic feed for those who want to utilize it in a reader.

A quick example:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:hproduct="http://microformats.org/hproduct/namespace/1.0">
 <id>http://www.jaysstore.com/gifting/lists</id>
 <updated>2008-01-14T08:06:21+01:00</updated>
 <title>jaysstore.com Gifting list for Bill Morgan</title>
 <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.jaysstore.com/gifting"/>
 <link rel="self" href="http://www.jaysstore.com/gifting/bmorgan/list" />
 <author>
 <name>jaysstore.com</name>
 <email>gifting@jaysstore.com</emai>
 </author>
 <generator version="1.0" uri="http://www.jaysstore.com/gifting">jaysstore.com gifting list generator</generator>
 <entry>
 <title type="text">Flip Video MinoHD Camcorder</title>
 <link href="http://www.jaysstore.com/gifting/lists/bmorgan#minohd"/>
 <id>urn:uuid:26d11340-c155-11dd-9711-0002a5d5c51b</id>
 <category term="Products"/>
 <updated>2008-12-03T08:06:21+01:00</updated>
 <content type="html">Product short description</content>
 <author>
 <name>Bill Morgan</name>
 <email>bill@billmorgan.com</email>
 </author>
 <hproduct:availability type="online">This product is available online</hproduct:availability>
 <hproduct:brand type="text">Pure Digital</hproduct:brand>
 <hproduct:buy type="url">http://www.jaysstore.com/site/minohd/9077054</hproduct:buy>
 <hproduct:category type="text">Video Cameras</hproduct:category>
 <hproduct:condition type="text">New</hproduct:condition>
 <hproduct:description type="text">This camcorder offers true high-definition recording in an incredibly compact body, so you can be sure you won't miss a minute of recording time</hproduct:description>
 <hproduct:model type="text">F460B</hproduct:model>
 <hproduct:n type="text>Flip Video MinoHD Camcorder</hproduct:n>
 <hproduct:photo type="url">http://images.jaysstore.com/images/products/9077054.jpg</hproduct:photo>
 <hproduct:price type="sale">206.99</hproduct:price>
 <hproduct:quantity type="int">1</hproduct:quantity>
 <hproduct:shipping type="text">Usually leaves our warehouse in 1 business day</hproduct:shipping>
 <hproduct:url type="url">http://www.jaysstore.com/site/minohd/9077054</hproduct:url>
 <hproduct:version type="text">1.0</hproduct:version>
 <hproduct:identifier type="sku">9077054</hproduct:identifier>
 <hproduct:p-v>
 <hproduct:property type="color">black</hproduct:property>
 <hproduct:property type="height">3.9"</hproduct:property>
 <hproduct:property type="width">2"</hproduct:property>
 <hproduct:property type="format">Flash memory</hproduct:property>
 </hproduct:p-v>
 </entry>
</feed>

I’m thinking out loud on this one. Please feel free to poke holes in my idea here…

A couple of nights ago I was concepting an ecommerce solution for a friend-of-the-family small jewelry business using the shopify platform. For $24 a month and very little time on my part, I could have a fully functioning ecommerce solution I could confidently hand over to a non tech-savvy small business client with the assurance that they could easily update their catalog, blog, and secondary content pages without much hand holding from me. Plus, the front-end was almost completely customizable, template-driven, and already contained many of the SEO and ecom techniques we covet in the world of corporate ecommerce (SEO, Google Sitemaps, etc., etc.).

I was incredibly excited at the prospect of introduing it to this business. As with most businesses recently, the downturn in the economy has hit him hard. This well-built, cheap, and easy to learn tool could be the key to opening up avenues of business he may have never dreamed of — and an opportunity to level the playing field against the giants of his industry.

It’s just this leveling of the playing field that should be an ever-growing concern of large ecommerce sites across the web. My bread and butter comes from working at a large corporation selling consumer electronics. One thing you should (or maybe do) know about many corporate web shops is they are slow, lumbering giants when it comes to current trends, standards, and change. Often times their web operations are controlled by outside consulting firms, which in my experience are mired in the same red tape that prohibits progress in their clients. Or better yet, the big consulting firms actually inhibit progress with their lack of knowledge (or is it denial?) of the way things work. Regardless of the situation, just keeping up is incredibly expensive, difficult, and time consuming. And once a corporate project is approved, funded, fought over, and finally implemented, the new concept or fix has already fallen woefully behind the technology curve.

Meanwhile, smart new startups continue to emerge to wage a battle against the big guns for marketshare — hence the title of this piece, “Guerrilla Webfare”. These nimble, agile, savvy, forward-thinking groups have the ability to take big chunks of market share away from big corporate sites. Outside of the sheer number of products, what advantages do larger corporate web operations hold over their smaller counterparts?

If the corporate ecom sites of the world truly want to deliver the best to their customers and continue to survive and thrive, a different mentality has to be put into place. Adopting iterative, agile practices on flexible core systems is key. Embracing and implementing standards makes the internet a better place for all. And for God’s sake, stop paying through the nose for overly-expensive consulting that has little ROI and cripples innovation when you could be passing those savings on to a grateful and deserving consumer.

hProduct parsers and crawlers, rejoice — there is an even better reason to use bby.com shop URLs… if you knew what they were. A while back, a forward-thinking gentleman had the insight to put these human-readable URLs on the site, which deliver a result set of products, based on term. Now that an experimental version of hProduct has made it out to the site on some pages, it could be a nice asset for people to use.

In simple terms, a query looks like this:
http://www.bestbuy.com/shop/term

Some examples:
http://www.bestbuy.com/shop/cartman
http://www.bestbuy.com/shop/eee

More complex example with additional search parameters:
http://www.bestbuy.com/shop/tv+samsung+1080p

No matter how you feel about the hListing vs. hProduct argument, or Microformats in general, I’m always excited to see experimentation with new and existing Microformats across the web. In an experimental move, we are adding hProduct to all search result, listing pages (faceted navigation), and “shop URLs” (http://www.bestbuy.com/shop/term) on the site with a pre-holiday code deployment.

Admittedly, there is still much work to be done. The source is only a little closer to being truly human-readable, and there are always those “other” things: UI/UX considerations, business “needs”, poor data, and non-semantic markup welded to critical back-end files. In order to get to a better place with hProduct and semantics, I have a personal agenda:

• Get closer to POSH templates with front-end template refresh
• Recognize and perform data cleanup operations, and start teaching out the importance of clean data
• Deploy fuller, more complete hProduct to product detail pages

All this being said, within the confines of this big corporate machine, it feels like progress… or at least a cool experiment that we happened to sneak in without anyone seeing.

Do I mean nothing to you anymore? I mean, we sit in these meetings together and you pretend like I don’t even exist. Take yesterday for example: one of your cronies even said something like, “I don’t consider it code, like in the truest sense of the word”, or something along those lines. Oh, the arrogance and ignorance you portray sometimes. You and your buddies pacify me for a while, listening as I name off a growing list of needs that will help drive our business and utilize true and open standards for our markup, providing rich user experiences and a more informed consumer. But at the end of the day I always seem to come in last. The important conversations eventually trail off into some incomprehensible business cliche-ridden rant, in which the “action items” are really never acted upon.

Let me be frank. I am important. I provide lightweight, semantically rich markup DIRECTLY to the browser. I sit at the heart of most “Web 2.0″innovation (I hate to use the term, but I feel it’s the only language you might understand). While you languish in the background, stumbling over little details and wasting time in futile attempts to get it right, I am out there doing things that make a difference in an agile and cost-effective way.

I realize you may be a little threatened by all the focus on my front-end, as your bloated back-end has been used to all the attention for a while. There’s no shame in admitting that you don’t quite get what I do. It’s time to admit that the times are changing, and you should change as well, or I fear we will have to part ways – me, innovating, changing and evolving, and you, wallowing in yesterday’s glory years.

Oh, by the way, I’m platform AGNOSTIC… and it’s fantastic.

To start, I first want to say “thanks” for employing me and helping me grow my career. I appreciate the opportunities afforded by a company of our size and influence to give me the visibility and access to expand my knowledge, make industry contacts, and grow beyond the confines of our corporate walls.

That being said, we need to talk.

All of this outside exposure has really opened my eyes to the issues we have internally. Sure, we know we have things to work on, but like any long term relationship, we have learned to ignore the bigger stuff, or create temporary workarounds (I call them “hacks”). Unfortunately, it is clear that this method of operation no longer suits our needs. In order for us to survive, thrive, iterate and innovate, I have a “honeydo” list of activities you should strongly consider to regain my trust and admiration.

In no particular order:

• Identify (org chart, heirarchy), grow, and properly fund web silo, handing reponsibility to those who truly “own the web site”. Please pull front-end development, design, and innovation out of marketing and IT.
• Truly separate back end from presentation layer.
• Fund and implement continual upgrade plan for core systems.
• Stop creating disjointed user experiences by farming out work to random agencies and slapping the brand on their work.
• Say no to “rush jobs” or solutions that need hacks/ workarounds.
• Start creating customer-centric design, not driven by corporate requirements, but customer needs.
  • Transition from manufacturer-funded model to independent model that serves customer needs better.
  • Continually perform analysis of features of the site and iterate off those findings
• Develop clean data models worthy of distribution, realizing that the web site isn’t the only place this will be used. Once clean data is established, design the web tools necessary to allow individuals to create their own experience, and help them make sense of the data.
• Stop making poor decisions (or no decisions at all) based off “political” considerations.
• Be OK with failure. When things do fail, be willing to admit it and do the analysis so you don’t make the same mistake in the future.

I will be watching anxiously at the progress you make in completing these goals. Remember, our future together and that of subsequent brands and initiatives depends on it!

Yours,

Jay