(Part 2 of 2) Shaking the Information Tree
Proposing a Content Force Strategy for the 21st Century

Another strategy may merit further examination and trials in a real world Web environment. Instead of managing content at a micro level, what if we organized content on a macro level?
In other words, not as chunks of structured data or as pieces of fruit dangling at the ends of branches of information trees – in other words, content as a physical mass with a geographic location – but as an energy force that moves through time and space.

Sound too esoteric? Consider this. What if I organized this article as a content force rather than a content object? I would describe it to the World Wide Web or to any other database in terms of what it does rather than what it is. Physically, it is just 2,000 words or so, with words that reference concepts such as information architecture, navigation schemes, metadata, etc. However, as a force, it has several facets:

• Written by G.A. Buchholz
• Posted to the Web in Nov/2004
• Read by 1,000 people
• Linked to 12 sites
• Some people respond to the writer
• Some people copy or quote sections of it

It may seem like this is still just a way to structure unstructured data, i.e. organizing it by author, date posted, information category, popularity, etc. However, the greater the volume of data, the less effective this micro approach.

Imagine if someone handed you the data for every blog entry ever written anywhere and said “Find a schema that will organize this data in such a way that I can scan the metadata and find whatever I'm looking for.” With Google's search engine, you could enter a specific word and get hundreds or thousands of results, or a phrase and get thousands of results. But you wouldn't be able to see each part relative to the whole – it's like being told you have been given the power to travel anywhere and explore the universe, but you have to see everything through a small cardboard tube. You'd spend a million lifetimes and see a million small things, or parts of things, but never the greater whole.

When the Internet exploded and people began to realize that the hierarchical system for organizing information, so evident in the search portals of the ‘90s when every search engine had a directory of links on its homepage with headings such as Arts, Business, Computers, etc (Yahoo led the way on this, but Google offers this option to those who are still fond of it), was like mining for gold with one of those little garden spades, they abandoned hierarchical searching in favor of simple key word searches.

At first, the meta-search sites were the best because they simultaneously queried several search engines and returned the results in an aggregated, ranked format. Then Google appeared in 1998 and blew away the competition. Now MSN is trying to out-Google Google.
Back to content as a force instead of an object. Here's where Google again was ahead of the curve because their PageRank ä system is a way of treating Web content as a force. It ranks sites not just by content (objects) but by how many other sites are interested in linking to it (force). So you might be looking for something about “search engines”, in which case your general query would (according to my experiment today) return over 15 million results. Not very helpful.

But Google ranks these by their PageRank ä system, so the first result is Mamma Metasearch (www.mamma.com) , not Google.com itself, curiously enough, which has a PageRank ä of 10/10. compared to Mamma.com's 8/10. Nevertheless, what Google's search results are saying is this: Here are all 15 million results, and it's up to you to decide whether to look at all of them or narrow your search parameters, but you'll probably just look at the first result, or the first few results. So in the end, what you're getting is not content as an object so much as content as a force.

How can this concept of content as a force help us find a model to replace our hierarchical way of organizing information? Here's an example. Let's say I'm organizing content on a medical site that has loads of content about various aspects of health, medicine, etc. I could try to put it all into hierarchical headings on the homepage or on navigation menus – Cardiology, Internal Medicine, Reproductive Systems, Infectious Diseases, etc – or I could skip the hierarchies, list a few popular headings and add a Google-like site search that quickly returns results by topic, date, etc.

If a user is looking for information about skin rashes, the Google-like site search might not help because it's returning 100,000 results. An interactive guide system might be able to help narrow the search by algorithmic process of elimination: Skin lesions? No. Sunburns? No. Chronic? Yes. Symptoms? Yes….etc, etc until the user finds an answer. This is just another form of hierarchical organization, though, with an automated system scanning down the branches of the tree on your behalf. They still can't see the big picture, the context of all the information, because the sheer volume of data is too much to comprehend.

What if the site designers decided to organize it this way instead? The most current, popular and relevant content in any topic is ranked the highest and is the most visible. This would cut across all topics, facets and keywords or concepts. You could still provide categories within this layer, thus allowing users to select a slice that interests them, but this layer would be constantly changing as the force of the content rises or falls. Content would dynamically (here content management technology is necessary because of the volume of data) and automatically move into position depending on the force of the ideas and the objects within it.

A living example of this is a newspaper's daily editorial lineup, which is done through a manual editorial selection process rather than an automated series of rules. Editors decide what stories have the most urgency, the most relevance to their readers, and the most timeliness. Readers still have the option to peruse the nether regions of the paper for more obscure information, or simply use the hierarchical approach provided and jump straight to the Sports section, but the power of the newspaper editorial staff is in what goes on the front page, what gets play and what doesn't, what gets ink and what doesn't.

In the case of a Web site with megabytes of data and new content added hourly, in some cases, this process has to be automated based on business rules set by the site owner. Like Google, which has its PageRank ä system that recommends which results we should consider first, every Web site should let the force of the content drive how the content is being organized and positioned for the user.

Yes, this means that some content gets more consideration and notice based on its “force”, and no, all content should not be treated equally in terms of how it's organized. A Content Force Strategy is a strategy that will differ with each site, and the World Wide Web is the levelling agent that by sheer volume of domains and content will average this out. A single Web site or Web portal can not, and should not, try to organize content by using the most generic and equitable methodology, i.e. the hierarchical tree, because the end user responds to the power or the force of content, not the simple presence of content.

This is a difficult thing, politically, for most corporate organizations to face because it means making ruthless decisions about which division is most prominent, or accepting that the x-widget has more force with consumers than the y-widget, even though a multimillion dollar marketing budget is trying to make the y-widget more forceful.

Aside from these and other behavioural/cultural challenges for organizations, the challenges for Content Force Strategy involve some technological changes or adaptations, too. We have the technology to do this, but we need ECM systems to be programmed to automate the organization of content as a force rather than as an object.

A strategy like this would, indeed, be shaking the tree because it is a brutally truthful admission that market, political, cultural and Internet forces really do shape the way we see our world. The ocean of information is gathering mass and, ultimately, we can either float in it or drown in it.