There are three things sure to annoy a blogger or other information junkie: one is to know a resource exists (a report, a study, an event, a conference) but to be unable to find it posted anywhere on the web; another is to discover a valuable resource that has been sitting on-line for a long while, but that had been trapped in some backwater eddy where nobody could find it; and a third is to find a resource you want to share with a friend or with the world, only to be thwarted in that sharing by the way the resource was posted.
Nowadays, when I face any of the above, I often bug the information source with my ”four simple rules for posting important things on-line.” If you violate any of these rules when you publish your event schedule, your research reports, your whitepapers, or your other text materials on-line, you run the risk of annoying the people who are most eager and able to spread the word about your work…that is, if they ever find you.
Andrew’s Four Simple Rules for Posting Important Things On-Line
- Every individual resource deserves its own web page
Whether it’s an upcoming performing event, exhibit description, conference, research report, or PDF document, every individual resource should have a web page of its own. If it’s available only as part of a long list of other resources, it’s extraordinarily difficult to link to and reference, and search engines are less likely to pay it much attention. - Every individual resource deserves its own abstract
Internet search engines and other resource discovery software rely on specific and descriptive text to connect searchers with relevant content. Don’t just provide a title and a link, give some context around whatever it is you’re posting. If you’re posting a document in PDF format that has an abstract or short description within it, it’s worth repeating that text on the web page. - Every individual resource deserves thoughtful metatags
Metatags are keywords and content labels that generally aren’t visible to the visitor, but are essential to the search software that crawls the web. They lay hidden from sight at the top of every well-designed web page, and behind the scenes of any well-published electronic document. If every page of your web site doesn’t have both general and specific metatag data within its code, you are going to lose the search engine game, and lose potential visitors (for details on web-page metatags, visit this resource). If you’re posting Adobe Acrobat (aka, PDF) files, be sure to read the manual about how to add and edit metatags within Acrobat. - Every resource should be as "transparent" as possible
This rule is probably relevant only to power users and power posters, but I continue to be annoyed by those that violate it. When you post a PDF file to the web, you can choose how "transparent" the content of that document is to visitors, and to search engines — that is, whether individuals or search engines can scan and grab the text contained within the document. Those that restrict text scanning and grabbing are probably concerned about people copying and pasting their text for other purposes — in which case, they shouldn’t be posting it to the web anyway. But if I can’t see "inside" the document before I open it (or if I can’t ”copy and paste” to quote the document in my weblog after I open it), I’m less likely to pass it along to the world.
Sorry if this seems off topic, but in a massively cluttered information space, it’s essential to share your work in a way that makes it easy to find, easy to share, and easy to use. Please, oh please, follow the rules. And let me know if others among you have additional rules of your own.
Drew McManus says
I don’t think this post is off topic at all. I know that finding information within orchestra websites can be infinitely frustrating because they often violate one or all of the SRfPITO-L above.
For the most part, I’m willing to bet the alleged transgressions are a result of the fact that the posters are unaware that they are making the resource so difficult to find and use. A lack of qualified staff and time may be the foundation of the problem, however, that doesn’t indicate that smaller budget organizations are exempt from the rules.
Susan Reynolds says
And then of course there’s the unhappy fact that a good many people just don’t really care. I don’t disagree that some don’t know, don’t understand, etc – but beyond cluelessness there’s a haze of laziness floating about.
You see evidence of it all the time. Someone in a newsgroup or blog or whatever mentions something – anything – in my personal experience lately it has been:
1.) Flat Stanley
2.) SEO – and –
3.) Artistamps.
The next thing you know five people are asking what the term means instead of Googling it like any sensible person would.
Tommer Peterson says
I’d add to those rules that titles should be descriptive of the actual contents of the report or document, rather than poetic.
Take “Gifts of the Muse” for example. Even the subtitle “Reframing the debate about the benefits of the arts” doesn’t do it justice.