That would indeed be very useful but I'm not aware of anyone doing anything serious to make it happen. The Web is increasingly evolving towards Ted Nelson's original concept of Xanadu and the more recent but apparently moribund transliterary standard (http://transliterature.org) that would easily handle such things, but there is always a tension between the simplicity, flexibility and forgiveness of HTML (which is why it took off in the first place) and the richness and complexity we really need.

There are quite a number of interesting initiatives. I mean innovation in annotation. (DAV ... does anybody even use that accro anymore?) But none have the mass/gravity that would actually reduce fragmentation. (I'm particularly fond of the system used for feedback on gplv3-draft-4, but it was orphaned from the day it was born.)

What I see as intermediate / work-around ... and I think this would run into copyright and fair-use problems ... is something like Scribd that would host substantial extracts, so the anchor point could be seen in context, allowing the reader to then access the full document.

BTW while TimBL was creating WWW I'd come up with a system of hyper-docs for avionics R&D, using WordPerfect 4.2 (I say I was ham-strung by not being on the net. Of course there's more to it, like him being genius. <G>)

I look to folk like PKP and PLoS to push this forward, while I work on what I call "the pivot point".

p.s. wanted to quote Steven Harnard; found the right paper and was going to use it as example of how we can't link to a specific section. Alas, alas ... openscholarship.org EnablingOpenScholarship (EOS) "an organisation for universities and research institutions worldwide. The organisation is both an information service and ..." is offline. Sad. #BitRot in spades!

- Ben Tremblay

Addendum: Harnad's Open Access is still online.

- Ben Tremblay

Flash's strength has always been it's greatest weakness: it's really easy to start developing Flash applications. Unfortunately this means a lot of people are building Flash applications that are programmed poorly with the results that Jon lists here. For example, the app running in the background that continues to drain the batteries is a notorious problem. If the programmer put the app in a dormant state when it goes to the background then it wouldn't continue to use CPU resources. It's a simple thing to do but not something that a lot of Flash "developers" bother with.

Flash now supports H.264 video using the GPU so it is as efficient as HTML5 video (no more battery draining). In fact it's possible to play the same H.264 video file through the Flash player or the HTML5 web browser with the same performance. What isn't possible with HTML5 video is to poll the network connection and play a version of the video that's maximised for the available network throughput (which Flash can do). You can have multiple versions of the same video on a server and send high resolution to a fast desktop machine or low resolution to a mobile device with the end user completely unaware. In the case of a computer on a shared network, if the network speed degrades then the Flash player can switch to the lower resolution version without interruption and switch back to high res when the network improves. This is not possible with HTML5 video. In addition, HTML5 video is restricted to progressive downloading rather than true streaming. If you have a 30 minute video running through HTML5 you need to receive all the data between the start of the file and any point you wish to jump to later in the file. For a high definition HTML5 video it might take 10 minutes to jump forward 20 minutes in the video. With Flash streaming you can jump anywhere in the video with a maximum 1 or 2 second delay.

Flash video offers a number of other advantages over HTML5: the video can have close captioning. Cuepoints can be assigned to times in the video allowing the programmer to develop an interface with chapters and buttons to jump to those chapters. Invisible buttons can be overlayed on the video allowing the viewer to click on a person in a video scene and receive a complete biography of that person.

Just a few other points: The Flash development environment deploys to Windows, Mac, Blackberry Playbook, iPad/iPhone, and Android. (I've just completed porting a Biology learning activity to the iPad.)

The current beta of the Flash Player adds:

- GPU-accelerated 3D graphics (XBOX and Playstation quality).

- reatime video capture, H.264 compression and server upload (video/podcasts directly from the browser)

Also, Adobe Connect, the University's designated video conferencing environment runs on top of the Flash Player. Flash has its faults but it is still the most feature rich web delivered development environment available. 

- Chris Manuel

My impression was that persona for a group is implied as when we characterize a gang, congregation or partnership it has certain characteristics. Crowds or groups that can not have a persona attributed to them are unknowns and have increased likelihood of fragmentation into smaller groups that can be identified by persona.

In context of social networking, I believe using persona and empathy mapping for key "groups" is very appropriate, but analyzing all groups to this extent would be restrictive. Some key groups used as pillars of the site, and the evolution of other groups based on some value measurement shown through analytics is what I am leaning towards.

A good point: creating group personas for all potential groups would, in most contexts, be as tricky and unworkable as inventing personas to match all the individuals who might visit a site. It's about empathy for a suitable range of the people who will use it, not a thorough analysis of every user or group. That's a different kind of process for a different reason altogether.