[Sigia-l] Classifying the internet

[Frank Shepard]

The internet has much more "functionality" than what we encounter on
individual web-pages. It seems to me that an accurate functional definition
of websites will have to take account of a lot more than the user-directed
behavior. In other words, I'm not sure that there is a neat 1:1 mapping from
functionality to type. Websites are informational relays. Every visit to a
site results in multiple transactions, some of which are monetary, and these
are distributed among numerous parties. A list limited to items such as
"selling something", "branding something", etc. doesn't begin to describe or
define the full functionality. And these aren't simply technical issues.
Each of these transactions figures into someone's business plan. And many of
these probably have almost nothing *directly* to do with the stuff the user
sees (i.e., the people who manage these transactions probably don't deal
much with the actual pages -- they deal in statistics, etc.). And these
aren't separate domains -- they put constraints on one another.

Best,
Frank

On 10/12/07, Christina Wodtke <cwodtke at eleganthack.com> wrote:
>
> I'd recommend the word "brand website", i.e. the point of the site is to
> support and extend the brand. Many soda and junk food sites fill this
> role.  http://www.doritos.com/
>
> Still, I'm kinda of amazed that there hasn't been a formal effort to
> classify website types (unlike say, dmoz, which are more topic based). I
> was hoping to do a mapping for functionality to type, and didn't think
> I'd have to do the work of defining the internet. hmmmm....
>
>
>
>
> --
> Christina Wodtke
> Principal Instigator
> 415-577-2550
>
>
> Business :: http://www.cucinamedia.com
> Magazine :: http://www.boxesandarrows.com
> Product :: http://www.publicsquarehq.com
> Personal :: http://www.eleganthack.com
> Book :: http://www.blueprintsfortheweb.com
>
> cwodtke at eleganthack.com
>
> ------------
> IA Summit 2008: "Experiencing Information"
> April 10-14, 2008, Miami, Florida
>
> -----
> When replying, please *trim your post* as much as possible.
> *Plain text, please; NO Attachments
>
> Searchable Archive at http://www.info-arch.org/lists/sigia-l/
> ________________________________________
> Sigia-l mailing list -- post to: Sigia-l at asis.org
> Changes to subscription: http://mail.asis.org/mailman/listinfo/sigia-l
>