Building on yesterday’s post about embedded content (bits of code that allow anyone to add dynamic content from other web sites onto their own — photos, videos, text, audio, etc.), I started to wonder about what the extreme strategy in such a world might look like. What if, instead of striving to make your organization’s web site a destination, you built it as an engine to inform other web sites? Instead of resident content, features, photos, videos, and a self-contained web experience, you’d provide scripts, codes, widgets, and dynamic content for your users to post themselves — on their Facebook pages, Google home pages, blogs, business sites, and the like.
If you were tracking web traffic on such a system, you’d want the feeds to other web sites to far outweigh the hits on your own site. Too much local traffic would be a failure.
It might sound a bit nuts, but ponder it for a moment. In an on-line world, authority and curatorial insight is in the hands of friends, family, and trusted mavens, not in centralized organizations. Google rankings don’t favor the sites with the most traffic, but the sites with the most inbound links from elsewhere.
Now, consider a real-world arts organization with the very same strategy. Instead of continually trying to lure people onto its turf, it would be out where the people are, distributing its resources and content to make other locations and connections successful.
You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one (okay, in this case, I might be the only one).
You are not the only one! I wrote about a similar idea for museum websites recently, focusing on the concept of the website as a “free store” for museum content. Too many institutions are trying to lock their content into their own sites–both in terms of IP and available interactions. The Web should be the place where we do what we can’t do in real museums–that is, let people walk out the door with the art and make copies to share with everyone they encounter.