Charles Gallant

As of yesterday, Google has added traffic reports for major cities to Google Maps. Their growing collecting of data related to physical (mappable) space seems limitless in its potential. They could…

- Integrate this data into their “Get directions” feature on Google Maps, and suggest an alternate (faster) route.

- Allow commuters to subscribe to RSS feeds about the highways that they frequent, making for automatically informed updates.

- Keep track of which particular roads certain users were subscribed to, estimate their traveling needs, and deliver custom ads. For example, if a user’s data suggests that he goes up to Vermont every weekend, show them ads for ski boots on the Friday before the trip.

- Partner with car navigation systems, and offer customized ads/coupons to people stuck in traffic. For example: “Looks like you’ll be here a while, and it’s dinner time. Stop over at the next Bob’s Big Boy. It’s just 700ft ahead”.

- Keep track of regular statistics on traffic conditions, and provide insights to newcomers. For example, major arteries departing from Manhattan tend to slow down on Fridays after 6:00pm. For some highways, they should be able to roughly estimate future traffic conditions.

- Combine their calendar data into this system, and sync it up with events. For example, if a large accident happens close to a particular meeting (Google Calendar can store an event’s location), it can send notices out to all those who share the calendar.

- Create traffic APIs of traffic data to be accessed by car navigation systems for additional traffic info.

- Use the chips that they’ve planted inside the public to start work on a sidewalk traffic system.

A few months ago I wrote a post about a guitarist named John Petrucci. I used to have a section of my site dedicated to posting silly crap, and this fit right in. I called my post “John Petrucci: Gear”, and then forgot about it. Since then, I’ve written about many other things, all unrelated to John and his guitar shredding fury.

In looking at this site’s traffic reports, I noticed something interesting. Apparently, when people search Google for “john petrucci gear”, my site is on the front page of search results. I’m even surprisingly high in the ranks when searching for just “john petrucci”. For a moment, I thought of how easy (and ridiculous) it would be to support this new traffic. In a way, this was a strange way of the community telling me that my site is a useful resource for this guitarist, and that people find what I wrote about him useful. All I did was post a link that makes fun of him… what if I had a whole website that makes fun of him?

Today’s linking/sharing/searching community has the power to dictate importance and relevance wherever they want. If my site’s homepage design fails to display my most important content, users (and search engines) will link to what does. In some sense, the Web2.0 mindset has made the web designer even more passive. Technologies like RSS readers, webclip widgets, and Pipes can let users pull information off this site entirely, reformat it, and utilize it however they want. Sites designers can suggest importance via visual cues and architecture, but in the end, it’s the community’s decision. My ability to react to the community’s indirect suggestions becomes my most important design skill.

So will websites of the future be huge pages of collected content? How can web publishers and advertisers get people to visit their site directly if the indirect method is so much easier? Why would someone want to read my site if the RSS feed did just as good of a job? John Petrucci fans (who may have arrived at this page because of the many occurrences of his name), what do you think about all this?