Sites, Meta-sites and Parasites
You may -- particularly if you are new to the Net -- fancy yourself a fearless adventurer on the electronic frontier. But to the proprietors of commercial Web sites, you are something else: you are traffic.
Like TV promoters before them, Web entrepreneurs are in the business of delivering eyeballs to advertisers. And traffic across the Web, by most honest reports, is a lot lighter than wished for in most "content providers'" business plans. You can only charge what the traffic will bear, and right now the traffic doesn't seem to carry much of a load.
The salient exceptions to this rule are the search-engine sites and Net directories we use to find stuff in the Web's vast informational soup -- Lycos, Yahoo, Infoseek and the rest. They've got traffic, and they're where you'll find Web advertising's center of gravity, too. Ads on search engines are like billboards by highway interchanges: they're signs hung in busy public places to waylay the attention of people who are moving very quickly from one place to another.
If you want to hand out leaflets at the mall, you'll do better standing right by the main gate than hovering at the door of a single shop, right? So think how much more traffic you could reach if you could build a new gate that led to all the other malls' gates.
That's the thinking behind a recent Web trend: the creation of well-funded, heavily promoted meta-sites -- Web sites that provide one-stop shopping for a particular service. The rub is that these sites don't actually perform any service themselves; they just piggyback on the work of existing sites by providing multiple links to them. Call them meta-sites. Or call them parasites.
The prototypical meta-site, Glenn Davis's original Cool Site of the Day site, quickly spawned a thousand imitators (including one by Davis himself, Project Cool). So it was only a matter of time before we'd see something like CRAYON's Cool Cool Site of the Day of the Day. Every day, another pick of another site that... gives you another pick of another site, every day.
If the prospect of such an infinite regression of coolness gives you vertigo, you could take consolation in the patently satirical nature of CRAYON's hypertrophied April Fool's Day prank. But other meta-sites are deadly serious commercial ventures.
Consider search.com, the new meta-site directory-of-directory services from C|Net: eight different search-engine interfaces gathered on a single Web page, well-suited for bookmarking and ad-banner displays.
Viewed with charity, search.com is a user convenience -- and convenient it is, though you may find the one-query-submitted-to-all approach of MetaCrawler even more of a labor-saver. Viewed more cynically, search.com is a crude but effective pre-emptive maneuver in the Web-traffic wars -- it's a vast driftnet cast to catch valuable search-engine hits early in their lifecycle. And search.com doesn't even have to do the dirty work of devising a complex mathematical search algorithm of its own. Why think when you can link?
A similar logic is prevailing over at the AT&T Business Network, whose first Web service, Lead Story, is a news meta-site. Each day the linkheads at Lead Story pick one news event and provide indexes of dozens of articles, analyses and op-ed commentaries relating to the theme o' the day.
Viewed with charity, Lead Story is a well-meaning effort to take the Web's disjointed info-flow and impose a little context. Viewed more cynically, it's a personality-less clipping service that's crippled by its own on-the-one-hand-and-on-the-other "objectivity."
Lead Story touts its "team of producers' wealth of journalism experience," but the site produces no original coverage of its own. And sometimes even its links seem to produce results nearly as context-free as your typical Lycos search. For instance, the 4/23 Lead Story package on "Health Care: What's the right dose of reform?" links to a CNN report on antitrust issues in Rite-aid's merger with Revco. If you want a contextual explanation of how this development relates to the broader debate over health care reform, be prepared to supply it yourself.
And when Lead Story visitors yesterday read the headline "Downsizing: How Much Gain? How Much Pain?", they'd have to hunt pretty hard to find one key context-providing fact -- that the recent wave of concern about corporate layoffs began with AT&T's own announcement of a whopping 40,000 job cuts. (Well down in the site, under "Background," you could find a CNN news story from March 15 reporting that AT&T was downsizing its own downsizing.)
Meta-sites typically position themselves as the Web user's handy helpers, but they are crassly calculated commercial ventures -- they wouldn't exist at all but for the urge to build hit counts without spending too much money. The trouble is, sites like search.com and Lead Story are adding precious little value to the common network. And if they succeed in snagging a chunk of the very limited ad revenue available on today's Web, they'll be taking it from the sites to which they serve as portals.
You can see where this is heading: a Web full of meta-sites with nowhere to point to -- a Web that's gone so meta it disappears into its own self-referential void.
Sweet, juicy adverbs, 99¢ a bunch We note that @home, the new TCI-backed company that's promising to deliver super-high-speed Net access over cable TV lines, has devised a new title for its front-line editorial staff: At the @Home Network, you can now land a job as an "Editor/Harvester." Job description: "Editor and web-surfer extraordinaire. Will gather content for the @Home pages and decide how links to that content will be presented."
And you thought being called a "content provider" was insulting. Now "content" can be understood in strictly agricultural terms. Read it and reap.
This space for rent We know times are hard over at Pathfinder, Time/Warner's vast wasteland of a Website. But there are ways to hide your desperation and ways to flaunt it. It sure looked like the latter when The Netly News decided to pay a visit to the New York Auto Show. You might have wondered what Pathfinder's chatty daily Net-gossip column was doing at a car show, but not for too long -- the ad banner for the event ran right atop the column. If this was as blatant a quid pro quo as it appeared, it must have worked; the ad has reappeared in every edition of Netly News we've seen since.