The landscape of visibility has evolved (paradigm shift #1)

In a recent past post, we explained that we had identified 5 paradigm shifts occuring in the Web today, through the prism of institutional communication. This was the outcome of a strategic consulting mission we run for the European Commission about the future and stakes of the Europa.eu portal.

The 5 paradigms are:

1. The landscape of visibility has evolved
2. Individuals act as human neurons
3. Enabling plasticity enhances the information ecosystem
4. Communication takes more than a web page
5. Time has become a key dimension of content dynamics

Today we’ll discuss about the first paradigm: The landscape of visibility has evolved.

The flow of information on the Internet follows many paths and patterns, some well known, and some that have evolved (or even appeared) in the past couple of years. It is well known that a limited share of visitors come directly to the website; most of them arrive by indirect ways. For the last decade, the major pathway was known to be search engine. This is changing, in the following ways.

“Push” has evolved into various ways to subscribe to content

“Push” remains a favorite pattern of information access, especially from the publisher’s (dream) point of view: a page or document is produced, made available, and its intended public receives it, and reads it. In practice, various means of implementing this basic mechanism of “push” can be found, among them e-mail (still the winner of our ranking, all around). However, new patterns are unfolding:

• RSS allows to subscribe to receive information when it is published, in RSS readers or on personalized webpages;
• Sharing by “retweeting” can be considered as ways of “pushing” information by a user to her network (see paradigm #3);
• Widgets are also windows open on other pages, that allow content to be pushed.

“Pull” has evolved beyond classic search

“Pull” refers to the action where a user is actually active in fetching the information, based on a few criteria. The dynamic is quite different, because the user is actually looking for information. This can be:

• internal (on site): a user entering keyword in a (simple or advanced) search box on the website;
• external (from the internet).

New ways of pulling information include: tag clouds, foklsonomies (taxonomies based on user input).

Visitors follow a multitude of capillary links to land on a page

With those push and pull channels, it is a new landscape of “capillary links” spread out across the web that brings visitors into the “mainstream” of the website. Tools that enhance the visibility along those capillaries include microblogging, social networks like Facebook and content sharing features.

The topology of links has become more diverse (and widespread)

In the aforementioned ways to come across a new piece of information, an almost invisible agent is extremely important : the link. A link is the basic element that is shared on Facebook or Addtoany, submitted to Digg, or “retweeted” on a micro-blogging service.
The link is not just anymore an underlined blue word on a web page, it is the basic “impulse” that is carried upon the “neural network” of individuals (see paradigms #2 and #3), and can be found in various guises (Digg link, short url on Twitter, etc.)

Some services called “memetrackers”  (such as TechMeme.com and TweetMeme.com ) automatically track and follow links that spread quickly, and become popular (thereby increasing even more their popularity, and contributing to traffic and visibility).

Ubiquity enhances serendipity

Beyond “push (publisher-driven) and “pull” (user-initiated), appears more and more often and clearly a pattern of serendipity : information that people “stumble upon”, that they (thought they) were not initially looking for.
Oftentimes, people say “I stumbled upon this piece of information”, and quickly forget (or don’t pay attention to) the way they came across the information in the first place. “Enhancing Serendipity” may at first sound like an oxymoron (improving something spontaneous), but it can nevertheless be true, by making sure that multiplying the chances that a user stumbles upon a content linking back to the main site.

Next week: Paradigm Shift #2 - Individuals act as human neurons.