No, we’re not going to sing “Kumbaya” (but if that’s your thing, by all means, please don’t let me stop you).
Since the early days of the web, web writers and programmers have sought to create “connections” between content. Hyperlinks in html were made so that users could find out more on a keyword or idea, just by clicking on it. Online Encyclopedias such as Wikipedia and Everything2 have taken this to the extreme, linking any important keyword in a story to an article on that keyword; users can spend hours drifting from word to word in a web of knowledge. (This is why I avoid looking things up on Wikipedia when I have important things to be done)
Hyperlinks are great when connections are obvious, but what happens when a connection is not so obvious? More relevant to campus, how is a user adding an event to the campus events calendar to know that a news release about that event’s speaker was posted last week? Or there’s a podcast of last year’s successful event? Or there’s an article in The Daily, Insider, or Bulletin?
There’s so much content in a campus the size of Buffalo State’s. The key isn’t to have every user who submits an article to read every single thing on the site (though again, please don’t let me stop you if that’s your cup of tea) We need to make the content smarter- and help the content find similar content and link to it on it’s own. So instead of searching for President Howard’s State of the College Address, you can find the podcast, event listing, bulletin article, and information on last year’s address all on a single page.
In addition to making the content smarter, we need to add new ways of sorting data. An increasing trend in web content is taking into account the users’ feelings or thoughts. The article may be about “Rock Salt,” but a certain reader may have an emotional reaction when they’re reminded about how the salt ruined the paint on their new car last winter (me? A bit bitter? Can’t be). That way of classifying a story is no less relevant than placing it under the header of “Geology.”
Many sites have taken user tagging into account. One of my personal favorites is Last.fm, allows listeners to tag music that they listen to. If you look at their Top Tags page you see absolutes like rock and folk, but you also see relative tags such as “albums I own” or “seen live.” By allowing users to make their own tags, we begin to see unexpected patterns. We now can see what bands users of our website have seen perform live most often. Early on, sites have learned how to use this information to market to their audiences; however, here at Buffalo State we use this sort of information to help make news easier to find on the website, keep students, faculty, and alumni informed of events on campus they’re interested in, and help prospective students get a better sense of what life on campus is like- all by presenting and grouping content to in different ways.
Lofty goals? Perhaps, but hopefully it doesn’t seem so daunting if you just look at your content in a different way.
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