SILBERBAUER SAYS:

Answer for Mr. van der Krogt  

Klaus Silberbauer / Sunday, October 08, 2006

EUROIA2006

Almar van der Krogt kindly responded to my not so nice comments on his presentation at EUROIA 2006 in Berlin, and I'd like to answer him with this post instead of adding another more or less hidden comment. I feel that van der Krogts decent comment deserves an answer in a more agreeable tone of voice than was my first post about his presentation.

So, Mr. van der Krogt, thank you for commenting on my post. I'm sorry that I missed your points regarding Digg, del.icio.us and so on. My bad. These services truly are outstanding - I guess we agree on that.

Please allow me to explain in more detail why I wasn't that fond of your presentation and why I felt provoked (if not offended). First of all: To challenge a whole community is a provoking thing to do and some kind of reaction should be expected. One would like to pick up the challenge, but in this case that would be wrong as the challenge is built on false premises. It's just a matter of words - you could have put out a suggestion instead and I could have said, "nah, I think you're wrong - let me tell you why". But you chose to challenge us, and that kind of ups the ante, doesn't it?

To challenge the IA community you insisted on comparing IA to real, physical architecture in almost every aspect. The problem is, though, that despite the term architecture these fields have almost nothing in common. It's ok to use metaphores as "land marks" when describing IA but only as metaphores - you tried to do analogies. Furthermore you chose to put this out as a challenge - to provoke, I guess (and I must say that you succeeded in my case). But what excactly was that challenge about?

"Webmarks" cannot and should not try to be what landmarks are. The differences between the real world and the infinite space of the web are too great. A landmark (e.g. a sky scraber) is deliberately placed somewhere crowded to be seen by a lot of people. It may not have a function besides containing a lot of offices, it may be beautiful to some people and extremely ugly to others, but it's there: You simply have to live with it no matter what. It is built in a physical space and cannot be avoided, and by its mere presence it's a landmark. Take the Eiffel Tower - in the beginning most people hated it but it was there and the Parisians had to live with it. Slowly it became a landmark. It's completely useless, but it's there.

On the web, something that people dislike or something that isn't useful will not be seen, as we may simply avoid going to it. On the web we are not confined to a finite space and thus we are not forced to pass the "webmark" again and again. If we choose not to go to it, we'll never see it. Beauty on its own may attract some traffic but only for a short while, as beauty on the web is short lived. In that way, what works for buildings and statues does not work for websites - and hence, IMHO, the analogy fails.

So, what I disliked was that you insisted on doing an analogy between physical architecture and the web and in that process got too eager to find similarities which are not there. By looking at digg, del.icio.us, Amazon, eBay, LinkedIn, Youtube, Google, etc. I think it should be clear to us by now that "webmarks" are defined almost solely by their usefulness and by the degree of which they merge into the nature of the web.

Thus the greatest "webmarks" are the complete opposite of landmarks: Where landmarks stand out, webmarks merge in; where landmarks are forced upon us, webmarks can be avoided; where landmarks may be less than useful, webmarks must be useful to attract traffic and thus to qualify as webmarks at all. Webmarks cannot exist without interacting with the rest of the web and are - due to the nature of the web - everywhere at the same time (as is del.icio.us in the form of two buttons in my Firefox browser). Landmarks are defined by standing out and having a fixed location. In that way, I feel that your analogy is too flawed to support a challenge.

Best regards,
Klaus.