Digital Media Strategist

According to the NetCraft statistics available at the time of this writing, there are probably about 125 million sites that make up the World Wide Web. This represents an unbelievable amount of information, and the Web certainly isn’t getting any smaller. In an interview last week, Richard Sambrook, Director of Global News for the BBC, addressed one problem inherent in this explosion of the web:

[T]here is now much greater access to information, but also much more of it. And the issue now is, how do you find what you want?

While the goal of many sites is to create more and more content, the web also needs ways to filter that content. Of course, there are many automated systems doing this very well (Google’s search engine is fundamentally a filter), but human-filtered information is still very useful. It is especially useful if the humans doing the filtering are trusted by the users of that information. In fact, Sambrook stated this as something that has always been a primary goal of the news media:

[N]ews organizations have their own sense of what they’re about, and their own filters in terms of what they provide. I think that’s going to become increasingly important. With this huge morass of information available, people are still going to want to know where they can find the stuff that matters to them.

So, in addition to approaching web content from a “What can I add that is worth looking at?” point of view, another equally valid question is “How can I help people find the stuff worth looking at?” More and more big sites are thinking this way, and that’s what I set out to simplify for those of us without a web-development team. (more…)

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