Want to be an Eb? Say 'see you,' See-Yous

This is Issue 1 of The Sensible Internet Design Letter.

Even upper-deck observers should see signs of the ideology battle brewing over the future of our friendly neighborhood Internet.

In one corner are people who keep trying, with growing urgency, to find substantial, sustainable business models that connect content and commerce online. Though adamant about the potential, most of them have yet to succeed (yeah, I know: other than pornographers, that is).

In the opposite corner are people who either helped develop what we now know as the Internet, or were the earliest of early adopters and content providers. They're now armed with plenty of "in-my-day-we-liked-our-300-baud-modems-and-Gopher-servers" hard-times stories. They may not say it this way, but they regret the commercialization of the Internet, all or in part.

Plainly labeled, the sides are the "E-Businesspeople" vs. the "Culture-of-the-Internet Utopians."

I'll refer to the former as Ebs and the latter as See-Yous, derived from the abbreviation "CIUs." (If we played with the capitalization, we could find a more colorful acronym -- think "Culture-Of-the-InterneT UtopianS" -- that might even drive up page views if dropped in our site metatags. But that's beside the point.)

See if you agree with my representations of these two crowds.

What the See-Yous say about:

• Net culture: The Internet, especially the Web, was built to support free exchange of ideas and data. We optimized hypertext for this purpose. Selling physical property online is passable, if distasteful, but if you dare try to sell information there you Just Don't Get It.
• Free vs. know-me vs. fee: Information wants to be free. Any attempts to impede that free flow by restricting so-called "deep links," implementing site visitor registration or charging fees for content are Orwellian oppression. Disputes should be handled by Web server programming.
• Advertising: We may tolerate attempts to subsidize content presentation with advertising, but we'll complain a lot and never click through.
• Open source: You can solve any problem with open-source software as long as you RTFM. Don't know what that means? Run a Google search, you Eb, you! (By the way, if you do so, you might conclude it means "Rseaux Tlmatique Francophonie Multimedia." In geek parlance, though, it means "Read The F---ing Manual.")
• Microsoft: Those people are pure evil.
• Weblogs: They are the grassroots journalism of the future, the great communications equalizers that will bring down big media.
• Customer experience: People actually know what "FAQ" stands for.

What the Ebs say:

• Net culture: The Internet is a new frontier of potential profit. Earn a buck wherever you can, even if it's selling content, especially porn. If you give everything away online, you just Don't Get It.
• Free vs. know-me vs. fee: Deep linking may interfere with a site manager's intended navigation workflow, and even if it brings more page views, they're worthless anyway because they just expand unsold ad inventory. If we don't charge fees, we must at least gather contact information and personal preferences of people who visit our sites. Otherwise, we can't call them "customers" on the investor-relations calls. Disputes should be handled by attorneys.
• Advertising: Pop-up, pop-under and dance-across ads really aren't so bad, are they?
• Open source: Our CIO won't let us use open-source software because it's "buggy" or "a security risk." Ideally, we'd find a way to write a few lines of code on top of open-source roots, then slap on a release number, claim a patent and charge professional rates to install the bundle.
• Microsoft: Those people are monopolistic, but we love how they do it, we're jealous and we wish they'd just buy us and get it over with.
• Weblogs: What's a Weblog?
• Customer experience: People actually know how to block those X-10 "spy camera" ads.

Do you have friends in either corner? Sure you do, and you know both sides make some sense, sometimes. But how do you see yourself: as a See-You, an Eb, some compromise of the two, or beyond the extremes of either position?

I've painted shades of gray in this discussion for years. So here's what I believe:

• Net culture: Just as authors of the Bible, the U.S. Constitution or even the Communist Manifesto could not anticipate all future uses of their works, framers and early adopters of the Internet and Web could not foresee all possible permutations. So even if the Net were originally designed for simple, free data exchange, it did not stay in that flower-child ideal and will never go back to it. It is commercial. Adapt already. On the other hand, the Internet will not eliminate physical retail stores for sales of goods (Retail Forward says eight of the top 10 e-retailers in 2001 were "multi-channel," meaning both online and offline sellers), or physical media for distribution of content (half of the top 20 news sites in June were affiliated with newspapers, says Nielsen), or face-to-face contact for rendering of services (do I even need a stat to demonstrate this?). If you believe any of those extremes will come about, you just Don't Get It.
• Free vs. know-me vs. fee: No one correct answer exists regarding deep linking, required registration or paid content. To believe it does is to believe one correct context for success applies across the whole Internet, and that's impossible. If you run a site full of promotional content, then yes, it wants to be free and it wants to be deep-linked until it hurts. The value of promotional content increases only when more people see it. But that's not the case with some other forms of information -- news, commentary, statistics, business intelligence. Free access sometimes reduces the value of these forms. Of course, people who believe they can profit by digging a moat around common knowledge or "me-too" expressions will fail. But people who believe ALL information wants to be free likely haven't sold an article or landed a book deal yet. Or maybe they have, and therefore need no more money.
• Advertising: It has an important role, especially to help keep whole classes of content free to consumers. But Internet managers still have little idea how to shape advertising to gain maximum client value with minimum detriment to customer satisfaction. The swelling of unsold ad inventory -- especially Web pages presented to roughly counted, essentially anonymous audiences -- is nearly a crisis, and only aggravates the problem of users learning to tune out anything that looks like an ad. It's time to trim the number of ad spots per page, target the remaining spots precisely, and design for greater sensory impact per spot. It's also time to dive head-first into permission e-mail.
• Open source: It is marvelous at its best (Linux, Apache, MySQL etc.) but scary at its worst (95 percent of all "alpha" releases on Freshmeat.net). RTFM works only if the manual is F'ing readable, and that's an open-source rarity.
• Microsoft: Those people are shrewd and patient in a volatile online marketplace. Their products just keep coming back, improving slowly but relentlessly, competing and, in many cases, eventually dominating. They spent $40 billion on research and development in 2001, a lousy year for spending anything.
• Weblogs: At their best, they are useful aggregations of topical information. At their worst, they waste time and server space. Either way, Weblog formats and methods don't determine the quality, the bloggers themselves do. Writing professionals and subject-matter experts who run blogs tend to adapt their considerable skills to the format, and the results are often excellent. But when blogs are poorly crafted, well, let's just say no blogging tool has a button to filter self-inflating prose.
• Customer experience: People ignore "FAQ" menus and X-10 ads.

Practical Internet design cannot be based entirely on cultural ideals (unless it's a philosophy site) or sheer greed (unless it's a porn site). Better to thrive in the gray areas between these extremes; clearly, most audiences live there, too.

It comes back to knowing who you want to reach, how to engage that group, and what to do with their attention when you get it. But it isn't enough to identify a target audience, then scattershoot data with foggy hope the right crowd will notice. It's also crucial to clarify the message or product you want that audience to receive.

Curiosity brings visitors; needs and wants bring customers. The more confident you are that your message or product has high value to the audience, the more reasonable it becomes to raise a door in front of it and barter -- for degrees of personal information, or money if you're bold enough -- before giving the audience a key.

It's risky, too. An Eb could easily take it too far, and the See-Yous will rail against the whole idea. But somehow we have to pay for all that information that wants to be free.