Thursday, October 22, 2009

Shopping Centers without Roads, Billboards without Messages

I wonder when people will stop trying to represent just about everything on the Web as a simple counterpart of real-world events, situations, and so forth? Why can't the Web just be the Web? It's not like the pre-Web days, when we had to explain things like chat rooms and IMs in terms of CB radios and telephones. Today, there's no t need to entice people into the online world by downplaying their fears with metaphors.

Oh, well ... as long as we're still doing this, I am inspired by an earlier remark to say that publishing thousands of books about selling online by getting found and noticed, without publishing more books to show people how to search is akin to building a shopping mall with no roads to it.

Or might a better simile be "... like putting up billboards in Antarctica?"

Okay, okay--it's a reach! But I think that there's a huge imbalance of subject matter. And the books are largely derivative of one another, packed with such solid advice as, "Put quality content on your Web site to attract people." And a lot of telling the reader what to do, but not how to do it.
--Mike

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