Software Engineering for Internet Applications - Student Community

8.4 One Forum or Many?How many forums should a site have? Let'sconsider a site for music lovers. Would one forumbe enough? Maybe not. Will the classical musiclovers be interested in a discussion of Pat Boone'scover of AC-DC's "It's a Long Way to the Top (IfYou Wanna Rock 'N Roll)"? So it will be a goodidea to split the discussion into at least two forums:Classical and Pop. Let's say that a Pat Boone fancomes into the Pop forum one day and encountersa discussion of the lyrics from Ice Cube's DeathCertificate or an MP3 from Prodigy's Fat of theLand? We'll clearly need to split up the Pop foruminto Christian Pop, Techno, and Rap. We'reexpecting a lot of Beatles fans as well. Which ofthese forums would they gravitate toward? Maybewe need a 60s Rock forum. On the classical sidethere are a lot of grand opera nuts who won't want to be distracted bydiscussions about authentic instrument performances of Baroquemusic. Sophisticated modern music fans discussing John Cage's"Four Minutes, Thirty-three Seconds" won't want to waste timediscussing the fossils of the 18th and 19th Centuries. And if we turnour attention to the many styles of Jazz ...It would be easy to justify the creation of 100separate forums on our music site. And indeedUSENET contains more than 50 rec.music.*groups, including rec.music.beatles.moderated, forexample. That turns out to be the tip of the iceberg,for the alternative hierarchy sports more than 700alt.music.* groups , including alt.music.celine-dionand alt.music.j-s-bach. If USENET can supportnearly 1000 discussion forums, surely a popularcomprehensive music site ought to have at least100.Maybe not.When discussion is fragmented it is hard for acommunity to get off the ground. If there are 50users and 100 forums, how will those users findeach other? The average visit will result in a userconcluding that the community isn't active. Such auser is unlikely to return or refer a friend to the site.Even when a community is large enough to supportnumerous forums, presenting discussion in a158I certainly hadno feeling forharmony, andSchoenbergthought that thatwould make itimpossible forme to writemusic. He said,'You'll come to awall you won'tbe able to getthrough.' So Isaid, 'I'll beat myhead againstthat wall.'--John CageIf something isboring after twominutes, try itfor four. If stillboring, theneight. Thensixteen. Thenthirty-two.Eventually onediscovers that itis not boring atall.--John CageShe had a voicelike the NewJersey StateAnthem playedon an electricrazor.-- Bright Lights,Big City. by JayMcInerney10.5 Exercise 2Come up with a list of two or three services from your learningcommunity that will be valuable to telephone users. You may find thefollowing guidelines useful:• It is difficult for users to logon. With voice applications,entering a username is evenmore tedious and errorpronethan with mobileapplications. You may wantto restrict your voice servicesto ones that can beaccessed by the entirecommunity and not justregistered users. Analternative to the standardusername/passwordauthentication is to assign anumeric user_id and pin toeach registered user, but that makes it more cumbersome todo Web/mobile/phone services all in one.• It is easy to give information to the user, but it is hard forthem to give information back to your service. It is typicallypractical for them to pick options from a menu butimpractical for them to provide any meaningful unstructureddata.10.6 VoiceXML BasicsThe format of a VoiceXML document is simple. Here's how to say"Hello, World" to your visitors:Hello, WorldA positivedevelopment in thisarea is that a numberof voice gateways(e.g., VoiceGenie,www.voicegenie.com)are now partneringwith providers ofbiometric voiceauthenticationsoftware such asVoiceTrust(www.voicetrust.com/)andVocent(www.vocent.com).The first tag, , specifies that thedocument to follow conforms to the XML 1.0 standard. All VoiceXMLdocuments follow this standard.191