Jeff McNeill

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p>This is an important, if hyperbolic, statement as it relates to how we understand, and help mentor our students in terms of website design and development.

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p>My current understanding is that websites, instead of being “designed” and “coded” as in the days of old, are now becoming more like collections of one or more of the following sorts of things, with customizations:

• Blogs
• Wikis
• Forums  
• Mashups

That is not to say that all websites do or will look like a blog or a wiki, but that  these kinds of interactions (and the underlying open-source software that provides their functionality) are becoming increasingly important as features of websites, because of the value created (and the lowered barriers to entry).

Why? Three reasons:

• It is now super easy (and free) to adopt and use the underlying software, either as a free hosted service (http://wikia.com/, http://wordpress.com/), or as software to run on a hosted ISP (http://mediawiki.org/, http://wordpress.org/, http://bbpress.org/ ) for dirt cheap prices (e.g., $5/mo). This is a dramatic lowering of the cost and time resources needed in the developing/designing of software that provides increasing functionality out-of-the-box.

• In addition, the open-source model allows and encourages people to contribute in an ad-hoc and distributed way to these platforms, which increases their value to the adopters.

• There is now an enormous variety of information/data/content that is freely available (open content) on the Internet, and putting that information/data/content in a unique form of interaction/visualization provides a very low cost way (in many cases, free) of creating value.

• Because there is now a critical mass of information/data/content on the web, the value of it can be leveraged with new/simple/easy forms of interaction and navigation of that information/data/content.

• Enabling social interaction/collaboration on a particular site regarding content that people care about enables them to create value in an additive way, that then provides even greater value as people contribute and interact. 

• Because there is a critical mass of people now using the Internet, the kinds of global collaborations that produce Wikipedia and the loosely networked blogosphere are now possible.

These three features contribute to a virtuous cycle of value creation:

• Increasingly sophisticated collaboratively-produced open-source web-based software,
• Increasing amount and variety of widely available, open-content distributed information/data/content, and
• Increasingly larger base of sophisticated web users who create and derive value through interacting with others around content and services they care about.

As an aside, things like http://flickr.com/, http://youtube.com/, and http://del.icio.us/ are places where individuals are enabled to create/upload and share their content with others, and increasingly edit that content as well ( e.g., http://jumpcut.com/). These are not blogs or wikis, however they have some of the same basic features. I use the term “social media” to describe these as a group, and is characterized by a strongly rooted interactional component so that the value generated is based on communication with others around, through, and about the content. Things like http://digg.com/ leverage user submitted content (dugg stories), search, and conversation (forum comments) all together to create value.

And that, friends, is why “we don’t build websites, anymore…”