Discoverability and Visibility in the small web
I found a cool website by Manuel Moreale called The Forest which will send you to a random blog every time you click on "Walk the Forest". Most of the sites I landed on are personal websites but I did stumble on some that are promotional websites trying to get you to buy something, probably submitted by some people trying to exploit the tool to increase their reach. Anyway, I guess this is understandable since manually monitoring all the links submitted to the system would be a huge undertaking.
This, and many other sites like it (as well as web rings), are trying to solve a situation with the small internet, one to which I've also been giving some though lately. That is, the issue of discoverability (note that this is different from the issue of visibility).
I'm using discoverability as how hard is for someone to randomly end up at your site, be it through a search engine or something like The Forest. On the other hand, Visibility is how many explicit links there are to your website which a person would need to explicitly click to get to you.
In the normal (i.e., corporate) web the canonical goal is to maximize visibility, which motivates the rise of highly unified mega-sites such as Facebook or Google.
But I don't think visibility should has role in the small web.
This is mainly because of the astronomical amount of sites there are. It's impossible to be highly visible. And by consequence, being highly visible (or popular) has no real meaning besides the fact the the blog in question is lucky. But this fact doesn't mean it is good or better than the competitions, as it is often interpreted in the normal web.
Actually, the terms of good and bad are a bit misleading in the small web, since these also don't mean anything. A personal site is good as long as it is crafted with love and attention. It has nothing to do with form and content since each are tailored to personal aesthetics, which can't really be measured. I guess you could argue that the do (or don't) align with some status quo, but again, that doesn't mean anything.
I think the aspect of discoverability itself can't really be addressed in its entirety. It would be nice to have a website like The Forest that redirects you to a random blog, but it's unfeasible to imagine that everyone would register their site there. There are also aggregators like Bearblog that show you lists of the most recent posts as well as the most popular, but these have the important drawback that they only show info about the sites they know about (in the case of Bearblog it would be only those sites hosted there), and the most popular list is extremely easy to hijack.
I'm thinking a cool idea for a side project would be something like The Forest but besides allowing you to hop on to random blogs it also shows you the latest posts from the feed of those blogs it knows about, all aggregated in a single list. Of course, there might be a nontrivial amount of computational requirement in pulling and processing the feeds of lots of blogs, but it would still be fun!
... shameless plug below ...
I wrote the above a couple of weeks before publishing it, and since then it has come to my attention that there're actually many different sites that help people find other small blogs (for example, see this list). After navigating through them for a while I'm starting to appreciate just how many blogs are out there, and I'm sure I haven't even seen the surface of the proverbial iceberg.
Sill, as the good software developer that I am, I just had this idea that it would be nice to create such a site, regardless of how many other such sites exists. So I went ahead and after some thinking and investigation created Mire, which is itself a fork1 of the excellent vore.website, a minimalistic RSS reader.
I basically kept the RSS reader functionalities from vore and on top of it added a couple more features. Most relevant to this are the global and random links at the top of the page: the former will show you a global feed of all the feeds Mire knows about, while the latter will send you to a random post that Mire has in its memory.
Some other extra features it has:
- Keep track of whether you've read a post or not
- Provides a public blogroll link that shows which blogs you're following (example)
For those interested, the code is hosted here; any collaboration (or complaint) is welcome! If you want to collaborate but don't know what to do then feel free to send me an email.
For non-tech people, a fork is basically a copy of another project, and usually means that the first project's code was licensed in such a way that made this possible. For example, vore's code is public and the license allows anyone to copy and modify the code as long as the original license is preserved.↩