I wondered out loud last week (on Twitter, anyway) about our increasing efforts in arts organizations to add more and more internal functions to our web sites. Calendars, blogs, news banners, rotating content, special interactive features all have their lure for our visitors and potential visitors, but they also create an increasing drag on our organizations and our staff.<\/p>\n
Further, the odds that your web site will actually be a frequent and essential destination for any number of people goes against the power law<\/a>. If you’re not hugely popular, your only minimally popular, and your increasing energy sustaining a complex web site will yield diminishing returns.<\/p>\n I’m not saying dynamic and continually relevant content isn’t essential to a web presence. I’m just wondering if we really need to build such systems internally, when another alternative is spinning all around us. A ‘web presence’ and a ‘web site’ are no longer the same thing.<\/p>\n Consider a web site that only managed the most essential, logistical, perhaps even static information as an internal function of the web system. Everything dynamic would be posted and managed in the various free systems around the web that already get high traffic. Event announcements would be posted on Twitter, Facebook, and Blogger (or similar). Event schedules would be posted to Google Calendar or similar. Photo galleries on Flickr. Video interviews and event previews on YouTube. And on and on.<\/p>\n Your goal on such a site would be to locally host as little<\/i> as you possibly could, so that your communications and related staff spent the bulk<\/i> of their time out and about in the on-line world. Any communications you post out there, of course, would be included on your site as dynamic feeds. But you wouldn’t have your own internal software or systems to manage them.<\/p>\n Essentially, your arts organization’s web site would be an aggregation of your communications elsewhere. It would recognize that a ‘destination’ web site is a false hope, and perhaps a dysfunctional goal. Certainly, you’d want basic information about who you are, where you’re located, and where to park (although Google maps and streetview could manage much of this, too). But really, what more do you need to host internally anymore? <\/p>\n In the personal on-line world, such an aggregation of multiple streams is becoming known as a ‘lifestream<\/a>‘. And there are some really compelling examples of what this approach looks like (check out the lifestream site of web developer Shimone Samuel<\/a>, for example. Or the slightly more chaotic Tom Beardshaw<\/a>).<\/p>\n