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 My friend
Willy Chaplin first became involved with the World Wide Web on the day people
first started calling it the World Wide Web.
I might be off by a week or three, but not much more. In
any event, by 1995, four years before Chris Locke, Doc Searls
and David Weinberger wrote The
Cluetrain Manifesto, he already had a
pretty good handle on the situation and encapsulated his thoughts into what
he calls The
Thirteen Commandments of the World Wide Web.
What he wasn't very good at is self-promotion.
Credit should go where it's due. Beyond that, for those
readers of this column who have some level of Web responsibility (most of
you), Willy's Thirteen Commandments are still worth
your attention. Here they are, abbreviated in bold, followed by my comments
(because otherwise, this would be a very short column -- just my intro plus
the link).
1. Willy: The Net is completely voluntary.
Bob: Many businesses work hard to make the Web less
voluntary -- for example, financial institutions that make on-line statements
free while charging for the paper version, and technology companies that put
most customer service on-line, charging more for the other kind.
Less true isn't untrue. Every Web practitioner should
ask, frequently, "Why would someone spend time here, and why would they come back once they have?"
2. Willy: The Net is deflationary on ALL price
structures.
Bob: Long before the Web, ads that included price pulled
better than ads that did not. On the Web, everyone
knows what you charge ... for everything ... and, thanks to Pricegrabber.com,
how it compares. Or else, don't show what you charge and everyone will draw
the same conclusion: That you don't want them to know.
3. Willy: Attention spans on the Net are short and
getting shorter all the time.
Bob: Attention spans everywhere are short and getting
shorter. This affects the Web just as much as it affects everything else.
Write and present for short attention spans.
4. Willy: The principle virtue of the Net is asynchronicity.
Bob: Yup. You publish when you want. Your audience reads
when it's ready. It's an on-demand medium. Leave pages up and findable so
long as they're relevant. Date them too, so readers will understand their
context.
5. Willy: It is critically important to shorten
development cycles.
Bob: For the Web, fast and good enough is better than
too late and perfect, and lateness is as much of a defect as bad logic.
Iteration and the Web are made for each other.
That's the technology. There's a reason the Internet has
become synonymous with "unreliable information," and you shouldn't
contribute to it. If you haven't checked your facts and done a reasonable job
of copy editing, don't use the immediacy of the Web, or its ability to hide
your mistakes, as an excuse.
6. Willy: The Net is international.
Bob: Culture and language, on the other hand, are still
local. Few among your audience will be conscious and forgiving enough of this
that they'll say to themselves, "In California this sort of thing is
considered just fine -- I shouldn't take offense, even though here we
consider it an abomination."
Decide on your audience and make the trade-offs. For
example, I write for an American audience, recognizing that readers from
other countries will have to perform some mental gymnastics to make it work,
including, for some, figuring out what "mental gymnastics" means.
7. Willy: The Net is the most truly interactive
medium ever devised.
Bob: Is isn't the same
as can be. The Net can provide the most scalable and flexible
interactive medium yet devised. It's still inferior to face-to-face
conversation for rich interaction and nuance.
But as a medium ... television, the movies, books,
newspapers and magazines are passive. They have audiences. The Web makes conversations, and especially asynchronous conversations
(#4) possible. This empowers your audience to become a community, with you as
its convener. Much more powerful.
8. Willy: Because of the fickleness of customer
loyalty, you MUST keep in touch with them, constantly reminding them you are
there.
Bob: Nothing new here, except that the Net makes it
cheaper and easier, so there are fewer excuses for failing to do so.
9. Willy: The Net is...A NETWORK.
Bob: Willy's point: "From the standpoint of
functionality there ARE NO SITES...just a single massively interconnected web
of HTML pages." My point: You're known by the company you keep, so keep
track of who links to you and be judicious about which other sites you link
to.
10.Willy: Copyrights are
nearly meaningless on the Web.
Bob: Willy's point: Any effort to protect material on
the Web is doomed to failure. My point: As a matter of practicality, Willy is
right. If you want to protect it, don't put it on your website. As a matter
of business ethics ... just because stealing is easy doesn't make it either
legal or ethical. Don't do unto others as many will do unto you.
11. Willy: While not readily apparent, cooperation
on the Web works MUCH better than competition.
Bob: Here I disagree. Whether on the Web, in a mall or
on a street corner, cooperation is one business strategy among many, that makes sense in some circumstances but not
others.
12. Willy: What the Web does best is form communities.
Bob: See point #7. Virtuality
often makes community more real than in the physical world, where geography
defines community much more than shared interests and values.
13. Willy: EVERYTHING is subject to change on the
Web.
Bob: This is where I both agree with Willy's statement
the most, and disagree with it most intensely.
New capabilities hit the Internet all the time. New
capabilities mean new possibilities, which in turn make constant
re-evaluation of the fundamentals essential.
People, on the other hand, don't stop being people just
because they're on the Web, nor do businesses stop
being businesses. The fundamentals of human nature, culture, competitive
essentials and profitability never go away.
They just take on different forms.
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