Nicollet.Net

Every single thing that has ever happened on the internet can be explained using two very simple rules.

Rule 1 : there is too much content available.
Rule 2: some of that content is too interesting to miss.

As a consequence, most people on the internet mostly spend their time looking for the content that they want to see. And any tools, tips, techniques or tactics they can use to find that content will be successful.

Suppose you’re looking for specific content, such as the name and location of a nearby restaurant.

You can ask an automated service for the information—here, automated means that your query is processed in real-time without human intervention, even if the data was originally typed in by a human being. Sometimes, you’re lucky enough to have a specialized service for your question (Qype for restaurants, Stack Overflow for computer programming…) Sometimes, you have to resort to a general-purpose system (Wikipedia, Google…)

A recent evolution : if you’re looking for a product or service, chances are that providers of that service will have optimized their web sites to appear at the top of the search results for that query, making Google a good way to find product or service providers. This might create an artificial monopoly, as Google provides the best results, thereby prompting most users to use Google, thereby prompting most companies to optimize their web sites for Google, thereby helping Google provide the best results.

You can ask your friends and acquaintances. Depending on how specific the question is, you might get a very good answer from a trusted friend, or a set of blank looks. If you know an expert in the field, he might at least be able to point you in the right direction (an expert could be someone who eats in restaurants a lot, and can therefore point you to an appropriate automated service). This could be done by mail, or through networking sites (LinkedIn, Facebook, Viadeo…)

A big Facebook early win was to move from “I can find someone who might know, and send them a private message” approach that originated with e-mails and was perpetuated by LinkedIn et al, to “I can just publish the question, and all of my friends will see it”. This ability to tell everyone you know without being perceived as an inbox spammer is one of the core communication advantages of the new social network generation.

You can ask random people who might know about it. This is the general idea behind discussion forums and bulletin boards: many people who share a common interest huddle together, other people come there to ask questions about that common interest, and the well-informed old-timers answer. This is usually the last (and best) recourse when looking for extremely specific information.

A classic problem for such communities is to leverage the answers once the asker has moved on. The crudest technique for doing so is the FAQ, and it’s generally the only one available in real-time mediums like IRC. Search engines may be able to find discussion threads in forums, but they are rarely in an easily readable form because they rely on context and reading through several pages of replies, or sometimes even trees of replies. A big advantage for Stack Overflow is to have participants write in an easy-to-search, easy-to-read-later format, even if it feels less natural than standard message boards.

You can ask people whose job is to know about it. This is the typical “customer support” situation where you pay for having access to someone who can answer your questions about a certain topic. Assuming that the system works as advertised, the results are of a higher quality: these people are trained to provide information, very familiar with the problem domain, and effectively act as an authority that can be trusted.

Lately, a lot of companies started using Twitter to handle customer support. There are no serious technical benefits to doing so, especially since they also have to handle standard by-mail or by-online-form support for those people who don’t use Twitter. The real benefit is to differentiate yourself from old-school firms who don’t give a damn about customer support: customers will notice that you made an effort to set up a Twitter account, and they can look at the history for that account to see how serious you are about it. Twitter is basically an embodiment of show, don’t tell for customer support.

The other side of the coin is receiving information that you’re not actively looking for. You’re glad that someone sent you that link to I Can Has Cheezburger even though you weren’t looking for cute cat pictures in the first place. It’s like randomly browsing through the comic book section of your book store to find new comics worth reading, except that you want to spend as little time as possible looking for good comics, and you want to read only those comics that you like.

You can find a large website with interesting content. If the website is large enough, chances are that you’ll spend a while there before you run out of content. The only requirement is that the content should be consistent. Not having a specific editorial line can hurt a lot because readers don’t know what to expect (yes, I should be showing instead of telling). Examples include the entire I Can Has Cheezburger network, Cracked, Snopes and even Wikipedia. Obligatory XKCD reference:

People like “Best Of” lists for a reason: they’re afraid of ending up reading mediocre content. And even if a blog or website does happen to have quality content everywhere, you will run out of content sooner or later because you consume content faster than they can produce it.

Another possibility is to find an average website with quality outgoing links that you can follow. It’s the main reason why many “echo chamber” blogs are so successful despite contributing no quality content of their own: the mere aggregation of quality content from other sources is, in itself, an added value that readers will be grateful for. How often does one see original content on, say, Ajaxian? The same goes for Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us and similar bookmarking, link-rating and link-sharing applications.

The trouble is that link-sharing sites can be perverted. Loopholes exist, and as advertiser awareness about social media grew, they managed to kill it. The main reason is that these sites aggregate anyone’s opinion, which includes the opinion of people who really want you to see their own content.

The natural solution is to only listen to people that you believe have an interesting opinion. Could be your Facebook friends. Could be Twitter accounts that you are following. The key element here is not “I know these people and trust their judgment” as much as it is opt-in. You actively choose who you start listening to.

Penetrating this kind of social bookmarking is harder for advertisers, because they can only be heard by those people who are listening to them. Penetrating e-mail was easy (hence, spam), penetrating anonymous link-sharing was easy, but as soon as you have to convince people to listen to you before telling them anything, you need to start being remarkable.

Last but not least, you can subscribe to web sites you like. The reasoning is that if a web site has interesting content, and if it’s frequently updated, then there’s a fair chance that it will have good content in the future. And you want to be notified when this happens.

The issue is that there’s no standard way of being notified. Not in the technical RSS-vs-Atom sense, but rather because person X likes being notified through RSS because he loves his feed aggregator, while person Y likes Twitter more because everyone will attempt to describe their new post in a clear 140-character title, and person Z would rather get updates by e-mail because they don’t want to learn any more software, and so on. It’s almost mandatory for blogs to deliver content updates through several channels, because plain old RSS just doesn’t cut it anymore.

In the end, it’s a constant fight between people who want to find interesting content, and people who create uninteresting content and want others to read it. The internet is slowly evolving through natural selection, as people use solutions that eliminate the noise and keep the signal. Looking for the next big trend on the internet is as silly as wondering what new species are going to emerge: it’s all about mutations, and mutations are random.