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The initial motivation for JamPaw was personal -- I needed a directory to mobile-useful and mobile-usable Web sites that worked on my relatively simple mobile phone. In mid-2006, I started invested limited weekend time, outside of my job as CEO of the World Wide Web Consortium, building a simple directory of sites that I found useful and usable. This was installed at the current JamPaw.com site in April 2007. I add new sites as I discover them and when I have time.
The metrics that suit my needs are:
- Fewest keystrokes and shortest wait to get to the most useful Web sites
Accordingly, I err here toward small pages (except this one) and the use of access keys, instead of larger pages with more content that requires a lot of scrolling.
The current site is far, far from what it could be. No content management, no user-configurability, lots of in-active links, etc. However, with more time and talent (I'm no Web programmer), one could improve the site by implementing:
- location-based emphasis (input city, postal code, etc., then bias director and queries toward this area)
- a Web-site ranking scheme that, in addition to location, combines measures of mobile-OK-ness, with measures of mobile-usefulness (popularity, user-suggestions, linked-to, etc.), and that can be tuned by users.
- an ability for users to easily customize their top-level myJamPaw pages (see mine) so they can “speed surf” (using access keys) to the categories and Web sites of greatest importance to them, or select different styles (see "cool" example).
- semantic Web technologies to manage content and user-specific data in a flexible and extensible manner.
- tools to enable a global community to work together to bring the mobile Web to people in the developing world.
- (if this were a commercial site) a mobile advertising scheme that makes it easy for users to specify how and when they connect with mobile advertisers, thus increasing satisfaction on both sides.
There is still a lot to do. The News category is the most advanced, and the other categories are far behind.