[Sigia-l] RE: Information-centered Design

[Jeff Lash]

I think we're a lot closer to this idea that Matthew mentioned in his "crazy
radical soapbox speech"
(http://www.info-arch.org/lists/sigia-l/0304/0046.html in case anyone missed
it) than people think.

RSS is already allowing people to aggregate news headlines from across
multiple sites in their own interface, either on the web or in a software
program. The business model -- advertising impressions -- is being usurped
by a standardized format that gets around it.

XFML could make it possible for sites to not only share but classify their
content and let a third party aggregate it. I wrote about a possible use for
something like this several months ago...
http://www.digital-web.com/columns/ianythinggoes/ianythinggoes_2002-09.shtml

Web services are picking up steam as well. You can tap into Google or
Amazon; there's no reason why you couldn't find a bunch of sites that let
you tap into their content/service and aggregate it.

Bloggers are another example, though manual, of how related content from
multiple sites can be combined in one area. Rather than reading every IA
site, I read sites like IAslash and IAwiki. True, these require people to
manually aggregate and select information, but the idea is the same.

The evolution has been from web pages to web sites to portals to web
services.

I think web services (a general label I'll use for RSS, XFML, SOAP, XML/RPC,
etc.) are the future, and I think that's good for IA for two reasons:

1) When you have data from lots of different places that has to go together,
that's a serious issue of information organization. How is that content
tagged by the producer, how is it classified and categorized, how is it
displayed? That's what (little) IA is all about.

2) When these web services have all this data that is available to anyone
who wants to aggregate it, the competitive advantage is no longer about
content. Everyone has the same amount of information and the same quality of
information. The competitive advantage will go to the site that has the best
user experience -- usability, branding, design, copywriting, customer
support (plus obviously advertising and pricing will be important too).
That's what (big) IA is all about.

With Matthew's example of a furniture site, he could start one up that
aggregated all this information, and I could too, but if his is easier to
use than mine, even though mine has the same content, his would be more
likely to win out.

So why would a business choose to open up their content? Why would a
business owner let another site publish my content, or have access to my
products?

You could sell the content -- $X/month to get my content feed. Lots of big
content sites do this -- a lot of Yahoo's content (I'm thinking specifically
in Yahoo! Finance) comes to them courtesy of other producers. Or, you could
provide the content for free but intersperse ads for your own site/product
within your content, driving traffic to your own site.

For products, well, if I make replacement seat cushions, I can either sell
them just on my own site, or I can have a data stream that is available to
anyone (i.e. Matthew) who wants to aggregate it. Maybe I give them a 10%
commission if I sell a seat cushion through their site (as opposed to the 0%
if I sell it on my own site). So it costs me that commission, and it's
likely that there will be other seat cushion manufacturers who are displayed
on Matthew's furniture site, but it gets my product out to a wider audience,
and sales will increase, and revenue will increase (even with that
commission).

Are we there yet? No.

Are we getting closer? Yes.

Will all businesses be able to think this way? No.

Will businesses need to be able to think this way in order to compete in the
future? I think so.

.jeff.
--
http://jefflash.com