Your Website is not a House
Brendan Greeley, February 23rd, 2007
Blogger Dave Winer took this picture of Doc Searls. Dave is, in fact, somewhere else in the room right now, ’cause he just took this picture and I’m sitting watching Doc, too. Doc is talking about the metaphors we use to understand the web; they all lead us back to property, to architecture. We have web sites, we find them at addresses, we build home pages. When we go to the web, we think of moving from site to site, from place to place.
But the metaphor is insufficient. The web moves. All of these houses we build on the web have mail now; they can send things back and forth. Dave’s picture there provides a simple example; Dave and I both belong to the same photo-sharing service, Flickr. Because I have Dave listed as a “friend” on the service, his pictures show up in my account, like this one of Doc just did while I was idly poking around.
My point is, Dave didn’t have to tap me on the shoulder and say “Hey, I just took a great picture of Doc; you should put it on your blog.” And I didn’t have to go to his website to find it. The picture just showed up, here for me to use. The things you make — what you write, what you record — don’t just sit, static, in the houses you build. They move, they travel on RSS feeds and show up elsewhere: displayed on other websites, crowding into personal RSS readers, getting sucked into iTunes as a podcast.
For us, in public media, it means that not only do we have to build a website, but we have to know that often our audience reads our prose in ways completely removed from the websites we so carefully build. Your website is not a house; it is a source of information, of audio and video clips, constantly making their way out into the world.
You know, like you’re an Irish family, and podcasts are your children. I don’t know. I gotta go to the PRI reception on the mezzanine and get a drink.