diglib Archive
Date: Thu Mar 03 10:34:15 2005
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diglib: Throwing another wrench in the [web] works
From Colleen Bell
Date: Wed, 02 Mar 2005 14:22:42 -0800
From: Colleen Bell <cbell@darkwing.uoregon.edu>
Reply-To: cbell@uoregon.edu
Organization: University of Oregon Libraries
To: lib-isdheads@lists.uoregon.edu, librarywag@lists.uoregon.edu,
lib-webpubinst@lists.uoregon.edu, diglib@lists.uoregon.edu
Subject: Throwing another wrench in the [web] works
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Thought this article was very interesting. The concept of federated (or
meta) searching is one way that we can aggregate content for our users,
and there are many other ways in which we accomplish this. But we still
put a lot of faith in our home page, and this offers some interesting
food for thought about that particular issue. Our home page is important
because we make it important - it's not exactly easy to navigate to our
databases without going through the home page. But how about an
alternative concept - that of the subject guide as the entrée into our
databases and other electronic and print resources? It's much more
focused from the beginning, and brings together a wide range of
resources for the consideration of our users - both novice users, who
may not be aware of the array of resources available to help them with
their research, and experienced users, who may have developed "tunnel
vision" over time, or who may not be aware of new products or services.
And what about the implications for making our digital collections, and
even Scholar's Bank, more visible?
Are there other ways we could/should be providing access to our web content?
This article is also available on the UIE web site at
http://uie.com/articles/content_aggregators/
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: UIEtips: How Content Aggregators Change Navigation
Date: Tue, 01 Mar 2005 16:48:21 -0500
From: Jared M. Spool <jared.m.spool@uie.com>
Reply-To: jared.m.spool@uie.com
To: cbell@DARKWING.UOREGON.EDU <cbell@DARKWING.UOREGON.EDU>
UIEtips: Home Alone? How Content Aggregators Change Navigation and
Control of Content
3/1/05
[snip]
--> Feature Article: Home Alone? How Content Aggregators Change
Navigation and Control of Content
By Joshua Porter
Jason Kottke is fantastic at aggregating content. Every time I read his
latest list of links on Kottke.org, I find some tidbit of
information that interests me, one I probably wouldn't have read
otherwise. How does he choose content, I wonder? Recently, his ideas
and links about what Google is doing have been particularly interesting.
( See: http://www.kottke.org/04/08/the-google-browser ) Some of Kottke's
links don't interest me at all. But it's not hard to weed those out. I
scan over them quickly, and forget I ever saw them.
Every time someone makes a list, be it on a blog like Kottke's or a list
of groceries, content is aggregated. The act of aggregating
content (usually content that is alike in some way) makes it more
understandable. Instead of looking at a whole field of information,
you choose smaller, more logical subsets of it in the hopes of
understanding it. After you've done that, you can apply what you've
learned to the whole, or even just a larger subset.
Should we be concerned that aggregators are increasingly allowing users
to find their own ways to use *our* content how *they* see fit?
Aggregation lies at the heart of the Web. It has to, given the amount of
information that the Web contains. Were it not for aggregation, all the
world's information would be on a single Web page in a single domain.
Wouldn't that be exciting? (And painful!) Aggregated content can be
viewed on a spectrum, with human-aggregated content on one end and
machine-aggregated content on the other end. The difference is in the
way the content is chosen, and can range from a very strict machine
algorithm to the whim of a human who simply "felt like it."
Search engines are the most common type of machine aggregators. They
send out spiders to crawl the Web and index pages, and allow users to
submit queries to them. Big search engines such as Yahoo! and Google
attempt to aggregate the entire Web, while more specialized services
such as Blogdex aggregate only a certain subset of the Web--those
containing blogs.
Blogs themselves, however, are examples of human-aggregated content
because a human makes an explicit choice about what content to include.
Other examples of human-aggregated content include news sites that
aggregate stories from the Associated Press or blog feeds in RSS/Atom
readers like Shrook, NetNewsWire, or FeedDemon. And there are other
examples of human-aggregated content, like browser bookmarks, the
"links" section of your Web site, and even political sites that link to
stories undermining opponents.
Aggregation hinges on gathering content from other domains. This
dramatically affects the search for content. Users no longer need to
start their search in the domain where the content lies. In fact, they
almost never do.
> What about starting from the home page?
With all these aggregators providing new places to start our searches
for content, what will become of the home page? The hallowed ground of
the home page is the most contested space in the history of the Web, and
millions of valuable hours have been spent discussing its design and
refining its content.
Whether or not it is important to users, the home page holds such a
place in the minds of designers that it usually gets the top spot in
the hierarchy of information. The reason for doing this is not entirely
clear. It may be because home pages are the first pages to be indexed by
search engines. Or perhaps everybody knows that the home page is (or
should be) an index of what can be found on the site, so it becomes as
good a place as any to start designing.
Whatever the reason, it is the state of the art that home pages get
highest priority. For example, the recent redesign effort of the
Boxes and Arrows site places the home page on its own in the highest
level of the hierarchy, as shown by this PDF of an early draft of
its IA: http://tinyurl.com/6qo6l
In this "home page as the starting point" paradigm, the possible routes
to a hypothetical Web page holding a user's target content will
look something like the following: http://tinyurl.com/3jgnm
> Content aggregators change navigation
Despite our long hours and good intentions, content aggregators throw
this site-centric idea out the window. They allow users to
bypass a large portion of the design, whose sole purpose is to get them
to target content. In this way the information architecture the
designer envisioned may go unused, with users never clicking on the
carefully crafted navigation links, never using the location-specific
breadcrumbs, and in some cases never even seeing the much-fretted-over
home page.
In these cases, users navigate completely outside the site containing
the target content. The only page they see is the one that the
aggregator links to. So the IA that ends up getting users to the target
content page isn't the one on the site they end up on, it's the
aggregator's site's IA. (See the diagram at http://tinyurl.com/45lky )
This "distributed navigation" idea is not new. In fact, linking at the
page level between sites is the essence of the Web and always has
been. Why, then, is so much of our design focus spent on figuring out
how certain pages fit within our own biased and limited store of
information when those pages are very often used in a completely
different, distributed context? Put another way, why do we assume that
our site is enough for our users' domain-ignorant needs, rarely
considering how our content fits into the larger, aggregated
architecture of the Web?
What does it mean that our content is increasingly becoming part of an
IA that is not of our own making? Should we be concerned that
aggregators are increasingly allowing users to find their own ways to
use *our* content how *they* see fit?
In a word, no, because this is what users always do. They make content
work for them. Or, in some cases, content providers change to
accommodate users. For example, Microsoft very recently decided to stop
showing complete articles in its developer network blog feed.
Apparently, the update requests from the aggregator programs took up too
much bandwidth (programs often update every few minutes in the hopes of
discovering new content). So Microsoft decided to show only the first
500 characters of articles instead of the full-length texts. They
quickly reversed this decision, however, when users complained bitterly
that they didn't want to have to leave their aggregator program to read
the rest of the content.
> A shift in control
Aggregators are promoting a shift in the control of content. They're
challenging the idea that we as designers control public access to
information in our domains, that users must view things in the way we
prescribe, and that our hierarchy is best to present our content. This
change is also suggesting that we need the help of others to market our
own ideas. It is plausible that another's approach to our information
may be working better than our own.
More concretely, it means that the skill set of designers and
information architects will have to be augmented. In addition to the
skill set that we have now and the current ways of producing IA, we'll
need to add whatever skills are necessary to get our content on rapidly
changing aggregators that our audiences prefer. This includes an element
of the unknown--a discovery of how we can create and organize content
optimized for aggregation systems that don't yet exist.
While strategizing for the unknown can be a fool's errand, here are a
few basic things I think can help us design for the coming of
aggregators.
> Embrace Web standards
One easy way to get started is by learning Web standards, built from the
ground up to allow documents to exist, have unique meaning, and be found
in a distributed network. One example of how Web standards help support
contexts created by aggregators is the use of the id attribute as a
linking mechanism. (See
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/links.html#h-12.2.3 for a
description of the id attribute.)
id attributes allow anyone to link to any element within your page, and
not just the page itself. This allows content aggregators to
choose the level of depth necessary for the context they're supporting.
> Focus on the page level
Content-rich pages, not navigation pages, are the focus of aggregators.
Because of this, any useful context created by a user starting on a home
page and moving through the navigation pages is nonexistent. This
reinforces the basic idea that each Web page has a unique URL for a
reason: It contains a unique set of content declared by its title,
described by its headers, and discussed in its paragraphs. Because our
IA may not be used, we will have to put more trust in the aggregators
(both human and machine) to create the supporting IA. In a sense, our
pages will live on their own.
> Design for different aggregator types
Different aggregator types will affect our design as well. The field of
search engine optimization is growing fast. However, the way humans
aggregate content is hardly discoverable like it is in machine
aggregators. This means we'll have to come up with new strategies to get
our content aggregated by the people who can help drive visitors to our
sites. For bloggers this is already becoming a part of daily routine,
often characterized (unfortunately) by superficial comments on someone
else's blog written primarily to garner click-throughs.
This makes the social aspect of design more obvious. Perhaps leveraging
the social aspect is as simple as getting an RSS feed up on your site,
because you know that many of the people who read your type of content
are finding more of their content that way. Or, perhaps it's a little
more involved, like cultivating a relationship with the person whose
blog you would really like a link from.
Or perhaps you can leverage it by simply asking people. Anil Dash, of
Movable Type fame, recently won a contest against supposed "search
engine optimization companies" by leveraging the popularity of his blog.
He simply asked people to help him out and link to his site using the
words "negritude ultramarine."
> Move toward user-driven aggregation systems
More generally, site designs will move toward more flexible aggregation
systems. Instead of a rigid navigation system that gives users a
pre-defined hierarchy of choices, we'll see many more user-driven
systems. Faceted classification systems like the articles section on
Digital Web Magazine's site are an example of this. (
http://www.digital-web.com/topics )
These are essentially a special kind of aggregation system that lets
users aggregate content according to the facets inherent in it. In
contrast to a one-hierarchy-fits-all approach, faceted systems let the
users choose the navigation scheme that fits them best. The overall
effect of "distributed navigation" brought upon by content aggregators
is that we're witnessing the control of content shift from designers to
users. Users are finding new, highly effective aggregators much to their
liking, and in doing so are bypassing much of what we've built for them.
In one sense it's scary, because we won't be able to control the user
experience as much. In another sense it's rather exciting. We're
becoming caretakers of content, creating quality Web pages to be judged
on their own merit in an ever-aggregating world.
[snip]
--
Colleen Bell, Associate Professor and Library Instruction Coordinator
Subject Specialist for Theatre Arts, Library Science
Knight Library, 1299 University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403-1299
541.346.1817 * fax 541.346.3485 * web http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~cbell/
Bona-fide Canada Goose (flew south but will return...someday)
http://www.transplantedgoose.net/
--------------000808060902030507080601
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
Thought this article was very interesting. The concept of federated (or
meta) searching is one way that we can aggregate content for our users,
and there are many other ways in which we accomplish this. But we still
put a lot of faith in our home page, and this offers some interesting food
for thought about that particular issue. Our home page is important
because we make it important - it's not exactly easy to navigate to our
databases without going through the home page. But how about an
alternative concept - that of the subject guide as the entrée into our
databases and other electronic and print resources? It's much more focused
from the beginning, and brings together a wide range of resources for the
consideration of our users - both novice users, who may not be aware of
the array of resources available to help them with their research, and
experienced users, who may have developed "tunnel vision" over time, or
who may not be aware of new products or services. And what about the
implications for making our digital collections, and even Scholar's Bank,
more visible?
Are there other ways we could/should be providing access to our web content?
This article is also available on the UIE web site at
<http://uie.com/articles/content_aggregators/>http://uie.com/articles/content_aggregators/
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: UIEtips: How Content Aggregators Change Navigation
Date: Tue, 01 Mar 2005 16:48:21 -0500
From: Jared M. Spool <mailto:jared.m.spool@uie.com><jared.m.spool@uie.com>
Reply-To: <mailto:jared.m.spool@uie.com>jared.m.spool@uie.com
To: <mailto:cbell@DARKWING.UOREGON.EDU>cbell@DARKWING.UOREGON.EDU
<mailto:cbell@DARKWING.UOREGON.EDU><cbell@DARKWING.UOREGON.EDU>
UIEtips: Home Alone? How Content Aggregators Change Navigation and Control
of Content
3/1/05
[snip]
--> Feature Article: Home Alone? How Content Aggregators Change Navigation
and Control of Content
By Joshua Porter
Jason Kottke is fantastic at aggregating content. Every time I read his
latest list of links on Kottke.org, I find some tidbit of
information that interests me, one I probably wouldn't have read
otherwise. How does he choose content, I wonder? Recently, his ideas
and links about what Google is doing have been particularly interesting. (
See:
<http://www.kottke.org/04/08/the-google-browser>http://www.kottke.org/04/08/the-google-browser
) Some of Kottke's links don't interest me at all. But it's not hard to
weed those out. I scan over them quickly, and forget I ever saw them.
Every time someone makes a list, be it on a blog like Kottke's or a list
of groceries, content is aggregated. The act of aggregating
content (usually content that is alike in some way) makes it more
understandable. Instead of looking at a whole field of information,
you choose smaller, more logical subsets of it in the hopes of
understanding it. After you've done that, you can apply what you've
learned to the whole, or even just a larger subset.
Should we be concerned that aggregators are increasingly allowing users to
find their own ways to use *our* content how *they* see fit?
Aggregation lies at the heart of the Web. It has to, given the amount of
information that the Web contains. Were it not for aggregation, all the
world's information would be on a single Web page in a single domain.
Wouldn't that be exciting? (And painful!) Aggregated content can be viewed
on a spectrum, with human-aggregated content on one end and
machine-aggregated content on the other end. The difference is in the way
the content is chosen, and can range from a very strict machine algorithm
to the whim of a human who simply "felt like it."
Search engines are the most common type of machine aggregators. They send
out spiders to crawl the Web and index pages, and allow users to submit
queries to them. Big search engines such as Yahoo! and Google attempt to
aggregate the entire Web, while more specialized services such as Blogdex
aggregate only a certain subset of the Web--those containing blogs.
Blogs themselves, however, are examples of human-aggregated content
because a human makes an explicit choice about what content to include.
Other examples of human-aggregated content include news sites that
aggregate stories from the Associated Press or blog feeds in RSS/Atom
readers like Shrook, NetNewsWire, or FeedDemon. And there are other
examples of human-aggregated content, like browser bookmarks, the "links"
section of your Web site, and even political sites that link to stories
undermining opponents.
Aggregation hinges on gathering content from other domains. This
dramatically affects the search for content. Users no longer need to
start their search in the domain where the content lies. In fact, they
almost never do.
> What about starting from the home page?
With all these aggregators providing new places to start our searches for
content, what will become of the home page? The hallowed ground of the
home page is the most contested space in the history of the Web, and
millions of valuable hours have been spent discussing its design and
refining its content.
Whether or not it is important to users, the home page holds such a place
in the minds of designers that it usually gets the top spot in
the hierarchy of information. The reason for doing this is not entirely
clear. It may be because home pages are the first pages to be indexed by
search engines. Or perhaps everybody knows that the home page is (or
should be) an index of what can be found on the site, so it becomes as
good a place as any to start designing.
Whatever the reason, it is the state of the art that home pages get
highest priority. For example, the recent redesign effort of the
Boxes and Arrows site places the home page on its own in the highest level
of the hierarchy, as shown by this PDF of an early draft of
its IA: <http://tinyurl.com/6qo6l>http://tinyurl.com/6qo6l
In this "home page as the starting point" paradigm, the possible routes to
a hypothetical Web page holding a user's target content will
look something like the following:
<http://tinyurl.com/3jgnm>http://tinyurl.com/3jgnm
> Content aggregators change navigation
Despite our long hours and good intentions, content aggregators throw this
site-centric idea out the window. They allow users to
bypass a large portion of the design, whose sole purpose is to get them to
target content. In this way the information architecture the
designer envisioned may go unused, with users never clicking on the
carefully crafted navigation links, never using the location-specific
breadcrumbs, and in some cases never even seeing the much-fretted-over
home page.
In these cases, users navigate completely outside the site containing the
target content. The only page they see is the one that the
aggregator links to. So the IA that ends up getting users to the target
content page isn't the one on the site they end up on, it's the
aggregator's site's IA. (See the diagram at
<http://tinyurl.com/45lky>http://tinyurl.com/45lky )
This "distributed navigation" idea is not new. In fact, linking at the
page level between sites is the essence of the Web and always has
been. Why, then, is so much of our design focus spent on figuring out how
certain pages fit within our own biased and limited store of
information when those pages are very often used in a completely
different, distributed context? Put another way, why do we assume that our
site is enough for our users' domain-ignorant needs, rarely considering
how our content fits into the larger, aggregated architecture of the Web?
What does it mean that our content is increasingly becoming part of an IA
that is not of our own making? Should we be concerned that
aggregators are increasingly allowing users to find their own ways to use
*our* content how *they* see fit?
In a word, no, because this is what users always do. They make content
work for them. Or, in some cases, content providers change to
accommodate users. For example, Microsoft very recently decided to stop
showing complete articles in its developer network blog feed.
Apparently, the update requests from the aggregator programs took up too
much bandwidth (programs often update every few minutes in the hopes of
discovering new content). So Microsoft decided to show only the first 500
characters of articles instead of the full-length texts. They quickly
reversed this decision, however, when users complained bitterly that they
didn't want to have to leave their aggregator program to read the rest of
the content.
> A shift in control
Aggregators are promoting a shift in the control of content. They're
challenging the idea that we as designers control public access to
information in our domains, that users must view things in the way we
prescribe, and that our hierarchy is best to present our content. This
change is also suggesting that we need the help of others to market our
own ideas. It is plausible that another's approach to our information may
be working better than our own.
More concretely, it means that the skill set of designers and information
architects will have to be augmented. In addition to the skill set that we
have now and the current ways of producing IA, we'll need to add whatever
skills are necessary to get our content on rapidly changing aggregators
that our audiences prefer. This includes an element of the unknown--a
discovery of how we can create and organize content optimized for
aggregation systems that don't yet exist.
While strategizing for the unknown can be a fool's errand, here are a few
basic things I think can help us design for the coming of
aggregators.
> Embrace Web standards
One easy way to get started is by learning Web standards, built from the
ground up to allow documents to exist, have unique meaning, and be found
in a distributed network. One example of how Web standards help support
contexts created by aggregators is the use of the id attribute as a
linking mechanism. (See
<http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/links.html#h-12.2.3>http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/links.html#h-12.2.3
for a description of the id attribute.)
id attributes allow anyone to link to any element within your page, and
not just the page itself. This allows content aggregators to
choose the level of depth necessary for the context they're supporting.
> Focus on the page level
Content-rich pages, not navigation pages, are the focus of aggregators.
Because of this, any useful context created by a user starting on a home
page and moving through the navigation pages is nonexistent. This
reinforces the basic idea that each Web page has a unique URL for a
reason: It contains a unique set of content declared by its title,
described by its headers, and discussed in its paragraphs. Because our IA
may not be used, we will have to put more trust in the aggregators (both
human and machine) to create the supporting IA. In a sense, our pages will
live on their own.
> Design for different aggregator types
Different aggregator types will affect our design as well. The field of
search engine optimization is growing fast. However, the way humans
aggregate content is hardly discoverable like it is in machine
aggregators. This means we'll have to come up with new strategies to get
our content aggregated by the people who can help drive visitors to our
sites. For bloggers this is already becoming a part of daily routine,
often characterized (unfortunately) by superficial comments on someone
else's blog written primarily to garner click-throughs.
This makes the social aspect of design more obvious. Perhaps leveraging
the social aspect is as simple as getting an RSS feed up on your site,
because you know that many of the people who read your type of content are
finding more of their content that way. Or, perhaps it's a little more
involved, like cultivating a relationship with the person whose blog you
would really like a link from.
Or perhaps you can leverage it by simply asking people. Anil Dash, of
Movable Type fame, recently won a contest against supposed "search engine
optimization companies" by leveraging the popularity of his blog. He
simply asked people to help him out and link to his site using the words
"negritude ultramarine."
> Move toward user-driven aggregation systems
More generally, site designs will move toward more flexible aggregation
systems. Instead of a rigid navigation system that gives users a
pre-defined hierarchy of choices, we'll see many more user-driven systems.
Faceted classification systems like the articles section on Digital Web
Magazine's site are an example of this. (
<http://www.digital-web.com/topics>http://www.digital-web.com/topics )
These are essentially a special kind of aggregation system that lets users
aggregate content according to the facets inherent in it. In
contrast to a one-hierarchy-fits-all approach, faceted systems let the
users choose the navigation scheme that fits them best. The overall effect
of "distributed navigation" brought upon by content aggregators is that
we're witnessing the control of content shift from designers to users.
Users are finding new, highly effective aggregators much to their liking,
and in doing so are bypassing much of what we've built for them. In one
sense it's scary, because we won't be able to control the user experience
as much. In another sense it's rather exciting. We're becoming caretakers
of content, creating quality Web pages to be judged on their own merit in
an ever-aggregating world.
[snip]
--
Colleen Bell, Associate Professor and Library Instruction Coordinator
Subject Specialist for Theatre Arts, Library Science
Knight Library, 1299 University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403-1299
541.346.1817 * fax 541.346.3485 * web
<http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~cbell/>http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~cbell/
Bona-fide Canada Goose (flew south but will return...someday)
<http://www.transplantedgoose.net/>http://www.transplantedgoose.net/
--------------000808060902030507080601--