Photo by woodleywonderworks
When I was growing up, I loved playing with Legos. I was a pretty messy kid, and I would have Legos strewn all across my bedroom floor (among plenty of other throwaway toys). I'd put together blocks in a very haphazard way, creating these interesting shapes and spans that twisted and turned in every which way.
No matter how interesting the sculptures that you can make with Legos, there isn't anything that great about an individual Lego. They're usually square with some pegs at the top. More often than not, they're only one color. You can't really make anything out of a single Lego besides, well, a single Lego. It's only when you get a bunch of Legos together that you can build anything interesting.
This concept of Gestalt, or the sum being greater than the parts, shows up over and over again in many different areas. Art, design, politics, economics: gestalt is fairly pervasive, and it should be no different for web sites.
Applying the Gestalt theory to web sites, it's all about taking information from other sources and applying it to your own content. If you want to tell a friend how to get to your house from the other side of town, is it easier to draw a map yourself, or point them to a map that does all the plotting for you?
Integrating with other sites is so much more than slapping a Google map on your home page or posting your twitter feed on your profile page. It's taking advantage of what others do well to enhance your own content.
Here's a simple example. Say you're a librarian at a public library, and you have an online card catalog. You have a lot of patrons who pull up information on books, but still have to field answers on whether or not it's the right book they're looking for, because the only thing they seem to remember about the book is the color of the cover.
The obvious answer to heading up those sort of questions is to add cover images to your search results, but nobody has the time to scan in every cover in the library. Except for Amazon. Or Google. Either way, you've saved yourself the headache of scanning in hundreds of thousands of book covers.
In an environment where the spread of information is free, you're only hurting yourself if you limit your site to your own handiwork. By using content from others, you're making your own content more valuable and extending your reach into the internet community.
Further Listening:
Post new comment