Information nobodies: July 19, 1999 issue of New Thinking

July 19, 1999 New Thinking:
Information nobodies

Website content management

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July 19, 1999

Information nobodies

By Gerry McGovern

The most comprehensive search engine on the Internet covers no more than 16 percent of the available Internet, according to a recently released study by NEC Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey. Last year, a similar study from NEC had the most comprehensive search engine at 34 percent.

I remember reading up on that 1998 study, where it stated that there were some 320 million pages of information on the Internet, predicting that by 2000, there would be 800 million. In fact, this year’s study has found that the Internet has already passed the 800 million mark.

I have for a long time been of the view that information overload is a critical issue facing the information society, and that both commercial and governmental responses to dealing with information are woefully inadequate.

The very foundations of the information society that we live in are based on quality of information. However, a very large section of society and business has little or no understanding of the dynamics of information and has done little or nothing to plan for a professional information environment. People the world over simply don’t understand that there’s more to information than slapping down a few thousand words of text.

I’ll give you an example. I was involved in the last year with an Irish Government agency that wanted to bring out a report on a particular area. A lot of work was done preparing the ideas and recommendations. The visual presentation, however, was sorely neglected and the promotion of the final report was terrible. Consequently, the report pretty much sank without a trace. This sort of thing happens all the time.

Perhaps it is a legacy of a time when books and information were rare, but it is amazing how little effort is spent in publicizing and promoting work that took so much effort to put together in the first place. If nobody can find you, if nobody reads your information, then you become an information nobody in the information society.

How do you become an information somebody in the information society? As I have written in my book, The Caring Economy, there are three properties to information.

The first is content and we have loads of that. The second is structure, which relates to how well the content is presented. Most websites have poor structure; the navigation isn’t well thought through, the website search engines don’t work efficiently.

The final property is publication. This is all about getting your well-structured content to your target market, and with the way the Web is going that is becoming an increasingly difficult task.

Structure and publication are huge tasks. As a basic first step, every major website requires an information infrastructure. Such an infrastructure creates a logical place for all the types of information that a website will be required to present.

I must stress the word ‘all.’ Too many web designs are for the current set of information they have before them, not thinking ahead to what other information the organization might have or wish to present in the future.

What so often happens is that when new information is presented the website cannot cope with it. It is forced into a wrong category, or a category is stuck onto the information infrastructure in a haphazard manner.

In 1999, putting up a website without proper structure and publication strategies is like jumping into a dingy in Galway Bay and thinking that you can paddle across the Atlantic to America.

Gerry McGovern

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If nobody can find you, if nobody reads your information, then you become an information nobody in the information society.