An ocean is never the same body of water because it’s always moving changing, evaporating and being replenished by new rainwater and runoff. Likewise, Internet content is an ocean of information that with content that is evaporating almost as quickly as new content flows into it.

We’ve heard of the deep Web and the invisible Web, private or subscriber-based databases that are not accessible to indexing by public search engines (intentionally or unintentionally), but what about millions of links that are broken when content types or entire Web sites are removed from production? Or domain names that expire?

While we might not miss “Kyle’s Frat Party” site, what about information of value to journalists, researchers and academics? For online journal publishers and academic researchers who cite Internet content in the form of URLs, this is an especially troublesome issue. In 2003, the San Francisco Chronicle reports:

…a growing number of scientists and scholars who are nervous about their increasing reliance on a medium that is proving far more ephemeral than archival. In one recent study, one-fifth of the Internet addresses used in a Web-based high school science curriculum disappeared over 12 months. Another study, published in January, found that 40 percent to 50 percent of the URLs referenced in articles in two computing journals were inaccessible within four years.

ArchiveIt 2.0

One solution offered recently in a July 26, 2006 news release from The Internet Archive, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving the Web and other digital archives, is the Archive-It 2.0 service, which allows the permanent capture of Web-based information for reference and archival purposes. Existing partners in this effort include the featured collections of the University of Toronto, Indiana University and North Carolina State Archives.

Archive-It 2.0 enables digital archivists, library and museum professionals to create more tailored, relevant and search-friendly collections of up to 10 million URLs based on regular Web crawls across selected websites. Through test crawls, subscribers may see what kind of web material would populate a certain collection before actually archiving them permanently. An optional paid feature within Archive-It 2.0, Archive-It Pro, allows subscribers to not only set caps on how many web documents are collected from a website over time, but also block the collection of materials from specific websites altogether. The digital collections, as a result, are focused and more easily managed, because irrelevant materials do not find their way into an institution’s archives.

Another issue is Web 2.0 sites, Ajax, Flash, and the increasing number of sites publishing information dynamically. Unlike static pages that can be archived as a hard document, dynamic pages feature content on demand that changes based on what information is requested from a database. Most blog sites offer Permalinks so search engines can index a permanent (or semi-permanent) record of journal entries, but as the Goddard Library Web Project discovered in a D-Lib Magazine article published in Nov 2004, the Web is becoming increasingly inaccessible for archival purposes:

We encountered several problems when performing the crawl on the increasingly complex scientific web sites. The most common problem resulted from the increasingly dynamic nature of those web sites. This includes content that is controlled by Javascript and Flash technologies, and dynamic content driven from database queries or content management systems. The crawling tool is unable to crawl a web page containing a search form that queries a database.

ISO Standards for publications

While librarians and Internet archivists try to address the issue of vanishing or inaccessible Internet content, Web site owners and content developers can play a part in helping libraries and archives document and preserve the Web. On Canada’s national Library and Archives site, there’s an excellent paper on Electronic Publishing published in 2001. While this was intended for Canadian publishers, the principles can be broadly applied to any electronic publishers on the Web. This matrix explains the scope of what the document means by electronic publishers.

Serial publications

If you publish an online journal, ezine or other serial publication online, applying for an ISSN (International Standard Serial Number) is a way to assign “a unique code for identifying serial publications, such as periodicals, newspapers, annuals, journals and monographic series” (Canada’s ISSN) and “magazines, newspapers, annuals (such as reports, yearbooks, and directories), journals, memoirs, proceedings, transactions of societies, and monographic series” (the United States ISSN). For serials distributed on the Internet and World Wide Web, the ISSN should appear on the first screen of the item.

While publishers are not legally obliged to use an ISSN, the U.S. site lists the benefits of applying for an ISSN:

The ISSN should be as basic a part of a serial as the title. The advantages of using it are abundant and the more the number is used the more benefits will accrue.

• ISSN provides a useful and economical method of communication between publishers and suppliers, making trade distribution systems faster and more efficient.

• The ISSN results in accurate citing of serials by scholars, researchers, abstracters, and librarians.

• As a standard numeric identification code, the ISSN is eminently suitable for computer use in fulfilling the need for file update and linkage, retrieval, and transmittal of data.

• ISSN is used in libraries for identifying titles, ordering and checking in, and claiming serials.
  ISSN simplifies interlibrary loan systems and union catalog reporting and listing.

• The U.S. Postal Service uses the ISSN to regulate certain publications mailed at second-class and controlled circulation rates.

• The ISSN is an integral component of the journal article citation used to monitor payments to the Copyright Clearance Center Inc.

• All ISSN registrations are maintained in an international data base and are made available in the ISDS Register, a microfiche publication which is scheduled to cease in the near future, or in “ISSN Compact,” a CD-ROM. These products are described in a document maintained by the ISSN International Centre: ISSN products

Individual publications

For individual publications, publishers should apply for an ISBN number. International Standard Book Numbers (ISBN) are 10-digit standard numbers for the unique identification of each edition of a book or other monographic publication (e.g. pamphlets, educational kits, etc.), as per this information on the Canadian ISBN site:

The International Standard Book Number (ISBN) is a system of numerical identification for books, pamphlets, educational kits, microforms, CD-ROM and other digital and electronic publications. Assigning a unique number to each published title, provides that title with its own, unduplicated, internationally recognized identifier.

As content publishers, our sites become part of the ocean of content online. We have a moral obligation to our current and future users to ensure the content we create becomes part of the Internet’s official historical record, good and bad, of humankind.

Get archived! 7 Ways to Keep Your Content from Vanishing

Most Web publishers, including me, are guilty of breaking links or removing content and having readers email you to ask “What happened to that (article/news item/link/download) on your site?”, but here are some steps you can take to help keep your content online and accessible (assuming you want it to be so!)

1. Check your links! This is a no-brainer, but with all the content management, link verification software and other tools available to Web publishers, it’s still a stinky issue. You or your Web development staff should establish link-naming conventions (e.g. Wikipedia’s) to govern the rules of how links are named, which can be followed consistently whether they are being named manually or dynamically.

2. Archive your links. If you really need to remove a link that is still valid, but isn’t relevant/essential to your site anymore, consider creating a Link Archive page where you can move the links so they can still be indexed by search engines and found by your users. Otherwise, create a redirect for old links so they point to a message indicating they are no longer available, or to new pages/content.

3. Archive your old site(s). Redesigning your site? Replacing it with a new version that has new content. Consider leaving the old site on your server in a Historical Site Archive area. If you don’t want search engines to index it and return pages of outdated results to your users, try using a robots.txt file that will exclude the historical pages from spidering.

4. Let the Internet Archive do the work. Read How can I get my site included in the Archive on the Internet Archive’s site. It’s a blast from the past to see older versions of sites going back to the mid-90s on the Internet Archive, and users can link to these pages, too.

5. Let search engines archive your pages. Find out how to ensure that your site is search engine optimized and that pages are not being published in a way that will cause search engine spiders to exclude them from indexing. Search Engine Watch is an excellent resource for SEO, SearchTools.com has some useful information on indexing robots and spiders, and the all-important Google provides guidelines for Webmasters on how to make your site Google-friendly.

6. Open up your content. Mirroring your content on other sites is another strategy for keeping your content alive and accessible. By licencing your content through a Creative Commons licence and/or offering it for republication or repurposing on the Internet, you can help ensure that your content stays alive and accessible. For more information, visit the Open Content Alliance, Connexions, or the University of British Columbia’s innovative Public Knowledge Project.

7. Use Universal Design principles. Last but not least, using Universal Design principles to ensure accessibility to the broadest range of users. It’s not only good from a usability perspective, but also from an archiving perspective.

Garth A. Buchholz, BA, CUA, is a certified Internet business strategist, usability analyst, researcher and publisher at DigitalPractices.

1. The Web Strategy doesn’t follow the Business Strategy.

Whether you’re designing for a Fortune 1000 corporation, a SOHO business, a government agency or a non-profit, your organization has a direction and a purpose, and your Web strategy must reflect and support that purpose. Read The Chemistry of Web Strategy.

2. The Web Design doesn’t follow the Web Strategy.

Assuming your organization has taken the time and effort to develop a documented Web Strategy, your entire Web Design (or redesign) project must be aligned with the objectives of this strategy as it is aligned with your organization’s Business Strategy (see #1 above).

3. No one has developed a content strategy.

Among all the discussions about the site’s presentation design (graphic design), its tools and applications, and its navigational structure, has your Web Design team given any thought to developing a Content Strategy? If your team cannot clearly answers questions such as “How is all the site content being prioritized?” or “What is this content supposed to achieve for us? ” or “Who are the 2-3 target audiences for this content?” then you need to write a Content Strategy or a Content Requirements Plan.

4. Users are not consulted in advance about the Web Design.

Web analytics, surveys, focus groups, use cases, heuristic reviews — these are some of the tools of usability analysis. Often organizations will undertake a major Web Design or redesign project, then afterwards consult their users to try to confirm whether they did a good job designing the site. You can’t please everyone, but once you know how people want to use your site (task flow) and what content and applications are important to them, then you MUST consider these when developing your prototype Web Design.

5. Users are consulted too much about the Web Design.

Don’t be held hostage by user feedback or usability studies, either. When you continue to over-research what people want on your site, you can set up expectations on the part of your users that cannot be reasonably met. As well, you cannot possibly offer everything on your site that users want because the site has to align with your Web Strategy, which has to align with your Business Strategy. (See #1 again)

6. The Web Design is confused with “look and feel”, “colors” and “branding”.

Too often, early discussions about Web Design and redesign centre around “look and feel”. “How will our content fit the new design?” asks the marketing and communications staff. “Let’s not talk about Web Design yet,” say the developers. “Give us a few possible designs,” say the senior executives. If you are leading a Web Design project, one of your first tasks should be making the entire organization know that Web Design is not just about what the site will look like, but also how it will be constructed, how it will be used, and how it will be managed. Yes, branding is a part of Web Design, but it’s not all about branding, either.

7. The Web Design has no muscle.

Web sites that perform tasks for their users must have muscle to do it. That means not just search engines, payment processing, and other applications and databases that make the site work, but also the static content and how its information design helps users with the task of scanning, reading and interacting with content. Sites should be designed based on task analysis and task flow rather than by gathering heaps of content (focus on how it will be used to tell you what will be used).

8. The Web Design has no brain.

Web sites with muscle also have to have a brain that controls the muscle. The brain is the documented site architecture and interaction design — making the site logical and intuitive to most people through the application of best Web practices as well as a by thoroughly following how people want to use the site. The site’s critical navigation design has to be based on task flow so it will make sense to users.

9. The Web Design has no soul.

The soul of Web Design is the collective mass of human beings behind it that may hide behind the “Browser wall”, but nevertheless must imbue the site with humanity and human qualities. A Web Design has no soul if it doesn’t use the language of the marketplace. It will also have no soul if it does not provide ample means for users to contact the Web site’s owners and administrators. And a good Web Design also should have some images of the people who are behind that browser wall.

10. The Web Design is not scalable.

If a single generation of a Web Design cannot be sustained because it cannot accommodate new content and applications without distorting or mangling the original design, then it’s not scalable enough. A Web Design should allow for continuous improvement of the site, a kind of progressive evolution that allows for change as the rule, not the exception. While it’s common to implement minor site design changes through small variations, and to conduct major site redesign every couple of years or so, Web Designers should always be designing for the unforeseeable, the Black Swans, and should always design two years into the future. Not “what we are now,” but “what we will become.”

For more information on Web Design Strategy, contact Garth@DigitalPractices.com.

In 2004, author Lawrence Lessig coined the term “email bankruptcy.” After he spent 80 hours in one week sorting through email that had been in his inbox since January 2002, he concluded that “without extraordinary effort” he would never be able to catch up. So he sent out an automated message to everyone who wrote him, then deleted all their emails.

Many office workers, and most senior managers and executives, dread email. Just a few years ago, in the late ‘90s, business leaders used to freely give out their email addresses to anyone who asked because it allowed them to reduce phone calls or keep their numbers private. Now email overload has become the biggest wave of the digital tsunami.

Are unmanageable email volumes really the issue, though? A 2005 Intranetjournal.com article cites several behavioral and time-management issues causing information overload at work. “External causes” such as constant interruptions by colleagues (either in person, by phone, or email) certainly contributed to employees’ info stress, but there were also other “internal causes” for personal unproductivity and information overload, such as:

• An obsessive need to be “plugged in”, such as constantly checking email or voicemail;
• Poor attention span and lack of focus;
• Rampant multitasking and the inability to prioritize tasks.

Email is not the only digital wave overwhelming workers. Ironically, Blackberrys (affectionately called “crackberries” by those who have become addicted to them), cellphones, (both voice and text messaging) Facebook sites, blogs and other electronic communications help keep us connected at all times while subversively disconnecting us as well.

The Consumer Research Center of the Conference Board recently released the results of a survey of 1,800 affluent consumers in seven countries. The report found that “the largest share of luxury consumers (44%) and the largest share of consumers in each country most strongly agree that ‘luxury is having enough time to do whatever you want and being able to afford it.’ So, for luxury consumers worldwide, time is the ultimate luxury.”

One of the leading authorities on conquering information overload is David Allen, whose 2001 book, “Getting Things Done,” is a guide to “the art of stress-free productivity.” Allen writes about the problem of “open loops”: uncompleted tasks, unresolved issues and unanswered emails. His solution is to simplify by channelling all the tasks in our lives into a single “in box.”

Most productivity or time-management experts have two basic strategies for handling large volumes of incoming mail: 1) prioritize and organize emails by moving them into sub-folders or by using inbox rules, or 2) simply delete or ignore any emails that don’t require a response.

Here’s an example of organizing emails by priority. You can either use inbox rules to move emails from specific people or with specific subject lines to sub-folders. Or if you want to manually sort your email, you can create sub-folders as in the example below, or use coded labels, e.g. UR (Urgent – response required), IR (Important – response required), FR (Follow-up required); PR (phone response only), and NR (no response required – file or delete). This can help you triage your inbox so you respond the most important messages first.

The problem with inbox rules is they don’t always work as intended, and sometimes they can actually cause us to miss important messages unintentionally. And the problem with manually sorting emails by priority is that this process takes time as well. You have to at least browse a message to sort it by priority, and in the time it takes to browse some of them, you could almost skip the priority sorting and simply reply.

If time is a luxury for you and your employees, here are a few information management strategies to help you save time and turn information overload into information overdrive.

1. EMAIL

If you’re a busy executive or senior manager, delegate your emails as much as possible. Ask your Executive Assistant to read your email, respond to easy requests, and then send more urgent or time-sensitive emails to your attention. You could even request a second company email address that is private – available only to a small, select group.

If you don’t have an assistant, and you can’t control what email gets sent to you, remember that answering email is an administrative task like managing your budget or attending meetings. Find a quiet time of day when other staff are not around (e.g. 30 minutes before the office opens or 30 minutes before most people get back from lunch), then dedicate that time to checking voicemail and sorting/responding to emails.

It’s important not to lose productive time by getting the “email twitch”: feeling the urge to check your inbox every minute or every time you hear an email notification “ping.” Blackberrys are a wonderful to access your email but should be turned off when you’re at a meeting or working on something. Same thing applies to your personal Webmail accounts, e.g. Gmail or Hotmail. Some organizations allow employees to check their personal Webmail accounts from the office, but if you’re already feeling overloaded by your email inbox at work, don’t waste your time checking your personal emails during work hours.

Another email management strategy is to undertake some “human engineering” strategies to change the way people send emails to you. You can also use your inbox rules not only to move mail into different folders, but also to create an automated message that is sent to everyone who sends you an email message. For example: “Thank you for contacting me by email. I receive a large number of communications by email each day, so I can only respond to emails by priority. If your message is of an urgent nature, please call me at XXX-XXXX or drop by my office. If I do not respond to your email immediately, please be assured that I will follow-up on it as soon as possible.”

Of course, every time someone emails you, they will receive an automated message, and these will fill up the inboxes of chronic emailers – which should reinforce why you are trying to manage your own email volumes in a productive way!

2. CELLPHONES/BLACKBERRYS

Two things about voice communications devices create information management problems:

1. We have too many devices – we have a home landline phone, a personal cell, an office landline, a cellphone/Blackberry and sometimes even more.
2. We have too many voicemails, usually one for each of the devices mentioned above.

Make it a personal policy NOT to check your personal voicemail during the workday. At work, limit who has your business cell number to your boss, your assistant, and a few colleagues. If you have a landline, too, forward your landline to the cellphone when you’re out of the office, or vice versa when you’re in the office. Avoid having to login to several different voicemails by limiting the number of phones you use. But when you leave the office, leave your business cell and Blackberry at work if you can.

3. WEBSITES/FACEBOOK/MYSPACE/BLOGS

The World Wide Web is a great time-waster for employees and managers when they succumb to the temptation of browsing non-work-related sites during office hours. Well-intentioned Internet usage policies can help a bit, but instead of prohibiting such behavior, why not find ways to redirect your employees’ information explorations and exchanges into something productive? Channel your staff’s desire to express themselves by allowing them to create their own internal “homepages” profiling who they are and what they do, participate in collaborative workspaces (e.g. Sharepoint), or post to company blogs that are semi-moderated. New generations in the workforce will thrive on this, and you may find that this activity pays off in better internal communications, collaboration and knowledge management.

Garth A. Buchholz is an author, educator and corporate Web strategist at DigitalPractices.

Down with the Times New Roman empire! 

Who the hell uses Time New Roman anymore? Not for Web sites, anyway. Ol’ TNR serif may be popular with the digitally challenged who don’t know how to change the default font on their Microsoft Word, but it’s such a dated, hokey-looking font that it doesn’t belong anywhere on the Web. There’s a guy who publishes a site called Ban Comic Sans, but I hate TNR even more than I hate Comic Sans.  

The Page Title tag is for, um, a page title.

How many professionally designed sites do I still see with a meaningless page title such as “default” or even something embarrassing like “insert title here.” Uh, last count was 5, 186, 327. Search engines like page titles. And when people bookmark sites, they like to see something in their Favorites other than “default” or “homepage.” 

Stop using splash pages. 

You heard me. Stop it. Stop it right now! Splash pages were indeed invented by a man named A. Bored Webdesigner in the 1990s so that Web designers could slap an attractive-looking graphic at the front end of the site. You know, that place where everyone is looking for information, links, functionality, etc. Not that users don’t want to  

• Stare at a pre-load animation that says “Page Loading!” for 15 seconds for their lives;
• Gaze in admiration as your Flash splash rolls out its animated images and other bragware about your company for 2 minutes, and
• Find the tiny link that says “Click here to go to homepage” when they thought they already were going to the homepage, and now have to click one more time to get where they wanted to go to begin with.

Some splash pages offer a helpful link that says “skip”, which should actually say “click here to skip this self-indulgent crap that you didn’t want to see in the first place and make that extra effort to visit our site even though we are trying to frustrate your attempts to do so.” 

Rant over and out. 

(more to come!)         

Email Garth @ Digital Practices