In a recent post on Jon Udell’s blog, Jon introduced a new browser-based navigation application that he calls the Infoworld Metadata Explorer.

Jon has been thinking and writing a lot on information discovery via navigation with posts/projects like his Flickr advanced tag search Greasemonkey script, so if this kind of stuff interests you keep an eye on his blog.

Navigational discovery has some important advantages over the more common search paradigm. Navigation can easily revel relationships between data, enables quick filtering of datasets and is, well, visual. Since humans are very visual creatures (hence our color vision and relatively lousy sense of smell) navigational discovery can highlight information patterns that could never be discovered using search. The Metadata Explorer is proof of that. The kewl Flickr Related Tag Browser is another.

I’ve been using del.icio.us to categorize my posts on Zoinger under the ZoingerPosts user name, but I have been tardy in updating it recently, since I don’t get a lot of value from it. However, if I could easily create an application like Metadata Explorer for Zoinger, I’d be way more prone to keep ZoingerPosts up to date since it would make tags much more useful.

Search is great but it sure feels like navigational discovery is where search was in the mid ’90s.

Zoinger says, opportunity knocks.

The WSJ reported on 2006/01/05 that the Nokia 770 is a “hit” in an article entitled Nokia to Churn Out 770 WiFi Device, A Clear Hit. The article does not get quantitative, but says there is a two-week wait for the $359 dollar device. It’s got WiFi, a 4.1”, 800×480 screen, Bluetooth, some sort of tablet OS and no phone.

I’d like to try one, especially to see how the browser handles different sites. The browser on my Dell Axim (Windows Mobile 2003 OS) pretty much sucks. Great for text sites or sites like Bloglines that have a special mobile version, but no Flash support, DHTML is a no go, lots of sites crash the browser, etc. etc.

Anyway, I think there is a big market for all sorts of internet devices… not just laptops, desktops and phones. Some are going to be general browsing devices, like the 770, or application specific, like some of the stuff I’ve been reading about internet-aware universal remotes.

Zoinger says, bring ‘em on!

P.S. I wrote this a while ago, but forgot to publish it. Doh!

Anyway, here’s a good article over at InfoWorld on the 770. The article makes the point that although the 770 is not really a great consumer product, it’s a great way for Nokia to use open-source software to obtain a first-mover advantage and free product marketing (eg, having the open-source community guide product development through the projects they are working on).

P.S.S. Just the other day I discovered that my PDA’s browser has the option to display in “one column”. This improves the rendering of most sites and gets seems to get rid of the horizontal scrolling to view content on wide sites. Horizontal scrolling is painful if you have to do it on every sentence.