Anderson on the Evolving Web

Chris Anderson has a great two part series on the future of the Wired website. I thought this snapshot of the evolving conventional wisdom with regards to website design was particularly interesting:

THEN: Bookmarks and habit drive traffic to the home page; site architecture and editorial hierarchy determines where readers goes next. Portals rule.

NOW: Search and blog links drive readers to individual stories; they leave as quickly as they come. “De-portalization” rules.

THEN: Media as Lecture: we create content, you read it.

NOW: Media as Conversation: a total blur between traditional journalism, blogging and user comment/contributions.

THEN: Readers read HTML in a standard web browser window. If you want to be really fancy, design a whole new Flash interface that people will have to learn to get to your content. Charge for “premium content”? Sure!

NOW: More and more people read via RSS, where content is divorced from context. Media is atomized and microchunked. Even if readers do come to your site, the expectation is that the presentation will be a mix of HTML, AJAX, Flash multimedia and embedded third-party apps. Screens range from high-resolution wide displays to handhelds. Whatever you do, don’t let your design interfere with web conventions–everything must be Google-crawlable and blogger permalinkable. Oh, and everything must be open and free.

I think there might be a bit of breathless enthusiasm here; the front pages of nytimes.com and cnn.com still matter a lot. But he’s clearly describing a real trend–one that will only accelerate in the next few years.

Looking at the “THEN” rules, it occurs to me that this is a straightforward description of how the old mainstream media worked. A newspaper is a kind of dead-tree portal, with news, sports, opinion, classified, and the rest all bundled together in one package. In the 20th century, the water cooler talk was driven by what your local paper and the Big Three TV networks had to say. And 20th century media outlets spent gobs of money on making their presentation flashy and unique. So it’s not surprising that companies first stab at migrating their content to the web basically tried to ape the rules of the old medium.

Last year, Paul Graham wrote a great essay arguing that Web 2.0 meant simply “using the web as it was meant to be used.” We’re still learning what, exactly, that means. But the broad outlines are gradually becoming apparent, and it’s nice to see Wired experimenting so aggressively with the changes.

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