Moving Beyond Page-based Thinking
06/21/2005As a person or organization that wants to use the Web to communicate, your message probably isn't "I have web pages I'd like to share with you." More likely you want to share news, event or product information, journalistic essays, survey information, and so on. These and other types of information often have a degree of structure to them -- an event's date and time, or a surveyed building's address and current owner. And yet when people look to bring their content onto the Web for the first time, they often think "I've got to make web pages." On their conceptual journey to the Web, they think in terms of the technology involved and flatten their richly structured information into a one-size-fits-all document format, mistaking the delivery mechanism for the content delivered.
The truth is while novice web authors find themselves thinking in web pages, their audience doesn't travel the same conceptual path. Ask a web user what they are doing and they'll tell you they are "looking up movie times" or "searching for a good fudge recipie." They aren't thinking "I'm downloading a document that provides movie listings" or that "I'm looking for a web page that describes a good vanilla fudge." They've subconciously skipped the delivery mechanism. For them, the unit of content is "movie times" and "recipie," not "web page."
Why should the content owner's perspective be any different? After all, his or her goal in publishing on the Web isn't to make web pages. It's to move product, or raise awareness, or help people connect. The less time the content owner has to spend thinking about the medium, the more time they have to effectively shape and craft their information -- which is likely to be where their expertise lies in the first place.
The proper tool set is essential in abstracting the crafting of the information from the medium in which it will be communicated. Such tools allow the content owner to represent their content in the structured format most fitting to that information, and automatically render it appropriately into the medium required for transmission. This keeps the owner in the same mindset as the audience -- movies and recipies, not pages. An author and audience working on the same conceptual level can only improve communication.
The beauty here is that this translation of the source data to the target medium can be made for any number of formats. It doesn't matter what the web might look like in five or ten year's time -- the only thing that needs to change is the thin translation layer.
Even without looking to the future this architecture has benefits. The same information can be represented in many ways right now -- web pages, RSS feeds for syndication, WML for mobile devices, email and printed documents, to name a few. All without any additional work at the authorship layer -- write once, publish anywhere.
On a mundane level Osiris does what good software has always done -- hiding the technical details involved in what would otherwise be a tedious and somewhat arcane process. But more fundamentally it strips away the ancillary concerns and distractions that surface when publishing to the Web. This allows the owner to focus on questions like "have I effectively communicated the pertinent details here?" rather than "I wonder what shade of blue I should use for the background?"
This focus is what produces content that your audience will be drawn to. This focus is what will differentiate your site from any others that share the same content niche with you. And it is this focus that brings your information, and therefore your expertise, to the forefront of what could otherwise be a technologically overwhelming endeavour.