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'If there was one thing you could change about Taxation magazine, what would it be?' We’ve been asking readers for their suggestions for improving our product; most responses have focussed on the paper version. We’ve had very few comments about this website – so I ask explicitly: how would you alter Taxation.co.uk for the better? Let us know.
For your consideration, here are some developments that might – just might – be in our site’s future. I commit to making no promises because correctly predicting the evolution of digital is as about as easy as accurately forecasting the outcome of an employment-status case (CTAs: chuckle dryly here). You’ll get it right approximately half of the time. Make a claim now about how web offerings will mature; in a year or three you’ll appear to be either a prescient mastermind or a clueless berk.
Take for example 10 Future Web Trends, a piece written in 2007 by Richard MacManus, the editor-in-chief of ReadWriteWeb.com, who posits mobile and internet TV as next big things. The man’s a genius! He also states that virtual worlds like Second Life will be a sensation. The guy’s a fool!
Interestingly, Mr MacManus’s first prediction is the rise of the semantic web: a development that is still being touted as major part of the next iteration of the internet.
Put very, very simply, a semantic web is one that can be read, understood and put into context by machines as well as people, who would have the mundane tasks involved in browsing, such as searching, done for them by their computers. Also, data could be found, combined and shared with greater ease, and in real time.
Were it to become a widespread reality, the semantic web – many of the technologies for which exist – would be either the gateway to a digital Eden of information or the beginning of a process that ends with machines achieving sentience and overthrowing their human masters.
Assuming the former scenario occurs, it could be a boon for Taxation.co.uk, which would be able to suggest further reading to visitors based on their journey around the website, and each article would pull in pertinent and contemporary related material from other sites.
Less revolutionary but no less important features that could (note: could) find there way here, and sooner, include a mobile version. Smartphones are becoming ubiquitous in business, are they not? (How do you know your colleague owns an iPhone? He/she tells you.)
And that means the web is more accessible than ever. We don’t expect users to make an exception for Taxation.co.uk by visiting only from laptop or desktop machines. A phone-suitable iteration would have its attractions.
Then there’s the rise and rise of tablet computers like the iPad, version 2 of which is scheduled to arrive in the UK on Friday (25 March), and Motorola XOOM, which is expected next week. They and their smartphone cousins enforce the arguments for Taxation apps, more cloud-based services, horizontal scrolling (so that more content appears in small, landscape viewing space, removing the need for so much downward rolling) and cleaner, less cluttered design to better suit little screens.
And let’s not forget the prevalence of social plugins: those little buttons that allow the reader of an article to share it on Facebook and Twitter. In fact, social commerce might reach a level that visitors to Taxation’s page on Facebook will be able to buy subscriptions, book tables at our awards ceremony and purchase single articles (pay-per-read: that’s another futuristic-y thing) without going elsewhere – although our LinkedIn group would probably be a more realistic place for our social commerce activities – and then they could share their activities with their connections.
I’m barely touching the huge mountain of digital potential that could soon be commonplace on this site. But would you, reader, want or need some or any of it? Will business models and web trends demand it? Will the internet best allow the technology we might wish to use?
After all, we could be moving from a neutral net to a non-neutral one with bandwidth prioritised for some services and denied others. Or, you know, that uprising of ultra-intelligent toasters might actually take place.
