Lab website

A lab(s) website is a specific type of website most commonly dedicated to research and development programmes.

Relating to the classic scientific research environment, the laboratory, existing lab websites predominantly fall into two categories, the real-world and the virtual.

Real-world laboratory websites

Real-world lab sites relate to the activities and research being conducted by Laboratories that exist outside the Internet. In general these sites have a tendency to offer uses chance to see what the lab's previous research has yielded, rather than offering a detailed view of what research is currently being carried out.

Examples of these from the aviation world include Boeing’s Phantom Works which covers the research arm of the Boeing corporation and Lockheed Martin Advanced Development programme, aka Skunkworks.

Virtual laboratory websites

A number of companies and institutions have created virtual lab sites specifically for research into Internet-based products.

These types of research environments have been seen as both podium and playpen for the generation of companies born of the Internet. In many cases the lab offers not only a chance to tell visitors more about the products being worked on, but in a growing number of cases, to actually trial the work in progress.

One of the best examples of this type of lab is Google Labs. Since its inception Google Labs have been responsible for trialling and launching live products such as Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Video.

Similar examples from large web based companies can be seen through, Yahoo! Next, Microsoft Live Labs and [http://greenhouse.aol.com/ AOL Greenhouse] .

A recent addition addition of note is [http://labs.digg.com/ Digg Labs] . Illustrating the activity of the Digg social bookmarking community in near-realtime. The labs comprise of the [http://labs.digg.com/swarm/ swarm] and the [http://labs.digg.com/stack/ stack] activity displays.

Mozilla have added a [http://labs.mozilla.com/ lab] area to their product offering. Currently (April 2007) the lab contains [http://labs.mozilla.com/featured-projects/ four experiments] , including [https://joey.labs.mozilla.com/ Joey] and The Coop (a system that allows uses to share websites, by dragging the URL into a Facebook powered buddy list - not yet launched)

Media labs

Traditional print and broadcast media companies have also begun to experiment with the idea of areas on their sites dedicated to advanced projects. One of the first companies credited with creating their own lab area was Reuters. When founded the Reuters lab offered a limited of products for visitors to experiment with, including the [http://today.reuters.com/sponsoredby/reuterstogo/widgets.aspx news and quotes widget] and their mobile service.

The BBC has created a derivation on the lab idea with their BBC Backstage site. Backstage's slogan "Use our stuff to build your stuff" openly invites developers to use the [http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/data/Data BBC's various feeds and API's] to power a new range of non-commercial products and services. The backstage site has allowed the BBC to create a developer network, a location for all those working with the BBC's content to come together and share their [http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/ideas/ ideas] and [http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/prototypes/ prototypes] amongst their peers. The site also contain a [http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/news/ blog]

"The Guardian" newspaper in the UK has taken the idea of a lab to the next level with the creation of their Comment is free product. Created by Ben Hammersley, Comment is Free was made as a fully interactive extension to the Guardian Unlimited’s blogging system.

The site contains the political and opinion material from both "The Guardian" and its sister paper "The Observer" as well as work from over 600 separate subject-based experts, selected to write on their topic of knowledge. Users are encouraged to comment on what they read and all posts are automatically linked to Technorati to return contextual blogosphere results.

In November 2006 NEWS.com.au, the breaking news section of News Digital Media launched News Lab, the first media driven R&D website within News Corporation (N.B. News Corp also operates FIM Lab but this is currently without a website). The sites aims to collect users feedback on new products and amend them accordingly.

Monitoring experimentation

While some media companies have gone down the route to creating their own experimental areas, others have created dedicated areas to document the efforts of others. "The Washington Post"'s blog section, referred to as the [http://blog.washingtonpost.com/postremix/ Mashington Post] records the efforts of Internet users experimentation with combinations of pre-existing data, referred to as mashups.

ee also

* Windows Live Ideas
* Website

External links

* [http://labs.adobe.com/ Adobe Labs]
* [http://greenhouse.aol.com/ AOL Greenhouse]
* [http://www.research.att.com/ AT&T Labs]
* [http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/ BBC Backstage]
* [http://www.boeing.com/phantom/ Boeing’s Phantom Works]
* [http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/index.html Comment is Free]
* [http://www.darpa.mil/dso/programs.htm Defence Sciences Office Research Programme]
* [http://labs.digg.com/ Digg Labs]
* [http://www.laboratories.telekom.com/ipws/Deutsch/Pages/Willkommen.aspx/ Deutsche Telekom Labs]
* [http://labs.google.com/ Google Labs]
* [http://labs.hakia.com/hakia-lab.html Hakia Labs]
* [http://www.lockheedmartin.com/wms/findPage.do?dsp=fec&ci=13150&sc=400 Lockheed Martin Advanced Development Programme]
* [http://labs.metacarta.com/ MetaCarta Labs]
* [http://labs.live.com/ Microsoft Live Labs]
* [http://www.media.mit.edu/ MIT Media Labs]
* [http://labs.mozilla.com/ Mozilla Labs]
* [http://lab.news.com.au News Lab]
* [http://labs.oreilly.com/ O'Reilly Labs]
* [http://blog.washingtonpost.com/postremix/ Post Remix (Mashington Post)]
* [http://labs.realestate.com.au/ Realestate.com.au Labs]
* [http://www.internetlab.org/ Internet Lab]
* [http://lab.reuters.com.au/ Reuters Labs]
* [http://workshop.whereis.com/index.thtml?nref=WIsiteHomepage Whereis Workshop]
* [http://next.yahoo.com/ Yahoo! Next]