Remember the hypothesis that an infinite number of monkeys, if set to typing, would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare just by banging away at their keyboards? With each day that passes, it becomes increasingly likely that a single monkey typing into a Web browser would link to a real URL on the first try.
Late last month the folks over at Network Solutions threw out some numbers that illustrate the point. This is the company that, for now, still has a monopoly on the registration of what are called “top-level” Internet domains–the ones ending in “.com,” “.net,” “.org,” and “.edu.”
As of June 30, the number of those domains had grown 120 percent from a year earlier, to 2.29 million from 1.04 million. That’s a lot of dots, and, as you may have noticed, your friends here at what my absent colleague Jim Coates calls the “interactive multimedia sweatshop” are doing our part.
Not long ago, we moved the newspaper’s main Web site to its own domain, chicagotribune.com. After more than three years as chicago.tribune.com, lurking in a subdomain of our parent company’s, it seemed time to become masters of our own. In fact, we did research that showed users expected our address to be dotless–and so, with more than a little technical legerdemain, we helped swell the number of overall domains by “dropping the dot.” Update your bookmarks and your home pages, please!
So there are millions of Web sites for users to view, if only the users could find them in the first place. That is what is fueling the stock market and mindshare successes of what we used to call the search engines: Yahoo!, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos and the like. What we call them now, along with America Online and Netscape, among others, are portals.
(By the way, “portal” is one of the best buzzwords to drop if you go to a party and an Internet discussion breaks out. Last year’s buzzword, “push,” is pretty much passe. If you can also work in “sticky” and “Y2K,” you’ll have hit the tech-talk trifecta.)
Portals are envisioned as doorways to the wonders of the Web– places where millions of lost surfers can go to create or find directories of content, directories of services, directories of pages. If a portal can build a brand name among Internet users, it can generate significant piles of revenue in a couple of ways: selling advertising to companies that want to reach lots of Web users, or selling real estate on the portal site itself to Web companies that can’t match the portals’ overall reach.
Portals have an important function today, as every business, Web-happy individual, movie, breakfast cereal and lampshade registers and begins using its own vanity domain. For your own infinite-monkeys experiment, go to Network Solutions’ Web site at internic.net and type a random word into the search form. You might have to wait a while, but as Dr. Seuss might have said, oh, the places you’ll go . . . and, oh, how few are worth going to.
But if portals are just gateways to something else, is there really value at the portal itself? Even the portal folks ask themselves this question, which is why they start building or aggregating content and services that will keep users on their sites. Content that does this successfully is “sticky.”
Sticky content is one thing that newspapers believe they have more of than most other Web publishers. The Tribune’s Internet and America Online editions are intended to be very sticky, with stories, interactive features and classified advertising that keep users within their space for long periods of time. That makes them more like “hubs,” to try out another buzzword, with long spokes of content radiating out from them. Hubs also aspire to build community among users.
One of the most interesting variations on the portal theme comes from a company called Alexa (alexa.com), which offers a tool that Forrester Research calls a “traveling portal.” The idea is that, instead of your going to a portal site every time you need newer or more refined information on a given topic, the information is brought to you by the Alexa tool, a version of which called Smart Browsing also is included in Netscape Navigator 4.5. (If you have installed the tool, every time you visit a Web site, Alexa queries its own servers, then provides both information about the site and suggestions about related sites through a small window on your screen.)
Needless to say, what Netscape now offers, Microsoft and others will soon match; the Forrester folks say this sort of integration will result in “a new model for Web navigation . . . a hybrid of portal and push.” Buzzword convergence–now there’s something anyone can support, especially when their report also says it could result in “a new stickiness”!
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Owen Youngman (oyoungman@ tribune.com) is the baiduhai’s director of interactive media.