2. Search Is Everything; Presentation Nothing

It's been a long time since that dissertation was written and, surprisingly, it's still a pretty good instruction manual for the internet today. Put in other words, the internet has never gotten much beyond the search. Put in still other words: Search is everything. Presentation is nothing.

Whether we get to information through a search engine or by clicking on some icon linked to some URL, we get a bland collection of words and small, grainy lifeless still images in a fixed format all of which is put to shame by the pages in the current crop of news magazines. What about comparing web presentation to that of life-style magazines? Let's not go there. Here's a simple, simple example: When's the last time you saw a real sidebar in a web article? If you're thinking the web is different. Who needs sidebars? I'll answer that one a bit later.

Most home pages are boring automated compilations of fixed segments all of which seem to have been put together by a committee of people with better or other more important things to do. Also, very few seem to understand that a website's home page is more than a table of contents. It's also the site's equivalent of a magazine's cover. When's the last time you saw the equivalent of this Popular Mechanics Magazine cover on a website home page?

If you've got the bandwidth, click on the image for a larger even more spectacular version (1 MB).

Sure magazines are trying to compete with the web by making their covers and pages more interesting than they ever were in the past. But that doesn't mean the web can survive and more importantly grow without an understanding of print media and what they have done to stay alive in a heavily competitive battle for readers and advertising revenue. We on the web like to believe that our medium will inevitably triumph over horse and buggy media such as newspapers, magazines, radio and TV. We shouldn't get too comfortable with that idea and we should learn from the past, present and future failures and successes of those media.

Imagine what that Popular Mechanics Magazine cover could look like on a web page. I'm not talking a dinky, grainy, choppy video image. I mean an animation with that rocket nearly as tall as your monitor screen taking off in a blaze of sound, fury and smoke, leaving an irregular oval shaped opening behind in which resides the story itself, perhaps as an engaging video, perhaps in a super size Adobe Flash presentation, perhaps in something none of us has even thought about yet. For you crass commercialists, the rising rocket could reveal an exciting animated advertisement.

Think that's overkill. The chart below from eMarketer.com shows that teens and young adults continue to turn to other media for something they can't get on the internet. The near equal attention to the Internet and TV is a sign that these folks need other media to get their daily fix of all the things the internet isn't providing, including interesting presentation of content. Notice also that the use of magazines has remained relatively constant though relatively low over time. Take a look at some of the magazines people in the 15 to 24 age group read and you'll find print publications that are masters of presentation; think celebrity magazines, Seventeen and other lifestyle publications.

Everyone seems to be talking about Web 2.0. Is that the answer? I don't think so. The best I can understand it Web 2.0 is supposed to be a better way to get people to your website. It's RSS feeds and such. It has nothing to do with making websites more interesting and compelling places to go and to be.