Good Website Design Questions

As a content owner or a music fan I want to know:

• What's the point of Kendra?
  • The point of Kendra is to push for the creation of a open and level marketplace for content. Enabling consumers to:
    • Get access to all of the global digital media catalogue via the interface/application/device of their choosing.
    • Use the payment system/methodology of their choosing.
  • And enabling content owners to:
    • Publish their content to the global content catalogue.
    • Attach business rules to their content defining cost, methodology and context.
    • Collect payment for content using the merchant system of their choice.
• What can it do for me?
  • If you are either a content consumer or content owner then see above answers. Otherwise state your role and I'll give you an answer.
• Why should I care?
  • If you are frustrated by the current fragmentation of current marketplace then you should care. If you are bewildered by the choice of applications/services/devices from where you can purchase/sell your digital media content then you should care. Note: Kendra is not a proposal to do away with all these applications/services/devices, it is a proposal to get them all to work in harmony. So, if you publish a tune on iTunes you can also see it on Napster (legal version).

• what Kendra is meant to be
  • See above. Also, Kendra is intended to be a very thin layer of "glue" to enable disparate and distributed systems in the content value chain to interoperate with one and other. We are not sure exactly what Kendra will look like but we envisage a type of protocol/language to enable these different systems to understand each other.
• what it's not meant to be
  • Kendra is not meant to be a system to replace all the current systems (for payment, distribution, copyright control, etc).
  • Kendra is not a service provider.
• what its practical benefits are intended to be for:
  • the content owner:
    • major label
      • To be able to sell their content on any device/application/service without having to manually contract with each service provider. Repurposing content for specific devices/applications/services - not a direct function of Kendra - will be made easier by service providers having access to metadata about the content.
    • indie label
      • Same as for major label
    • unsigned artist
      • Same as for major label
    • filmmaker
      • Same as for major label
  • and for the music/film fan
    • Ability to get all content via the interface/application/device of their choosing. Using the payment system/methodology of their choosing.
• how it's setting about achieving those practical benefits
  • Each key layer of necessary interoperability has been identified. For each layer a demonstration has, or will be, set up to trial concepts of how we can achieve the proposed system.
• What technologies is it using
  • Evaluation is currently underway of a limited set of Semantic Web functions.
• how is it using them?
  • Building a prototype of a semantic information publishing and querying system. Enabling distributed content catalogues written in different languages and using different terminology to be browsed and queried as if they were one global catalogue.
• What are the problems it currently faces in trying to achieve its goals?
  • Lack of funding. Lack of people to develop software, fundraise, evangelize, etc. This is not a show stopper in so much as a show slower. Kendra carries on regardless.
• How does Kendra relate to the present online music landscape of commercial music services,
  • When a user finds a track that they want to purchase there are links to the online shop of a commercial music services.
• artist websites
  • Also there are links to the artist website.
• and online filesharing services,
  • If these systems are selling music/films in a legal way then Kendra could be used to point people to the shops too.
• how can it fit into and facilitate the emerging online market for film shorts?
  • That's just a specific case of the general solution we have been talking about. But, essentially, you will have, what appears to be, a single global content catalogue containing all films and all music. You will be able to search for "All movies of less that 15 minutes that have been released in the last year in Germany." Metadata is key here...

Simon's comments preserved:

I don't think Kendra needs a good-looking, enticing ('sexy') interface so much as one that conveys as succinctly as possible the essence of what Kendra is all about.

What Kendra needs is an interface that can answer these questions in an Internet minute. If a visually seductive design helps to achieve that goal, all well and good, but if it obscures or distracts from that goal then it's just wasted effort.

What the interface needs to do at present is provide a practical (albeit mocked up) demonstration of Kendra by embodying through practical example(s) just what it is that Kendra will allow people to do if it all comes together as envisaged. With regard to design, I think a good approach would be to use HTML + CSS and separate out content and presentation along the lines of http://www.csszengarden.com/.

But before there can be such an interface, I think there really needs to be a clean, clear, concise, well thought through explanation of: