Search and Connect

I was struck recently by the idea that you could boil all Web activity down to two things: searching and connecting.

Search: We search in many ways on the Web. We use search engines, favorite sites, shared links, directories, and so on. But the underlying concept is that we're always searching, always looking for something new, always linking down corridors that we didn't know existed.

Connect: Remember the days when email was the killer app? Of course it wasn't email itself, it was the idea of connecting. Being in touch with people. We communicate, by email, instant message, voip, video conference, virtual worlds or any other of the plethora of ways to connect with other people through the Internet.

A lot of the time we combine the two. We search for something, find it, or something else interesting that we weren't even looking for, and immediately communicate it through Twitter, Delicious or email.

Or we're connected with someone in Google talk and we're searching for the answers to questions that arise in our conversation as we talk.

Search and connect. Connect and search. All the time.

But of these the dominant partner is connect. We're still human after all.

So what does this mean for the future of news? The most obvious answer would be, your stories have to be where people search and connect. That primarily people will not find you at your site; they will find you in search engines and networks.

News sites are aware of this and are working on it. Trying to improve their standing in search engines and increase their presence in social media sites. But if you're not the New York Times very few people are going to make your site a regular part of their day. So I suspect there is a mental shift that needs to be made away from the home page. The home page is probably the third step for many visitors. (e.g. Step 1. Link in search engine. Step 2. Inside page. Step 3. Home page, to find out what site the user has landed on.)

So the headline to concentrate on is the one that appears on someone else's site.