What's the opposite of "sticky?" Try "clicky." A clicky site is one with plenty of interesting hyperlinks to elsewhere. What better to support than curiousity?
A few weeks ago I was talking with Tim O'Reilly about the noun information, which lately has been replaced with content. Not that we've lost much. Both now carry the meaning of cargo: something we aggregate, store, move, address and deliver. Where we're moving, clearly, is away from real meaning.
Information, we noticed, derives from the verb inform, which derives from the verb form. In conversation, we don't just "deliver information" back and forth. We form each other. When I learn something new from you, and what I learn is meaningful -- that is, I can't forget it -- you have literally formed me. In other words, we are authors of each other. What's more, we are in the market to be formed. We demand it. Otherwise we wouldn't learn a damn thing.
That's why it's misleading to conceive information as a substance that we "deliver" to each other (or worse, to an "audience" of "eyeballs"). When we do that, we insult the verb at information's heart.
So how can we start to recover some of the meaning lost when information becomes content? I suggest abbreviating information to fo. When we're in the market for something meaningful, we don't want content, or even information. We want the real deal, pure and uncut. Give us fo.
Okay, "clicky" has a better chance. But time will fo.
- Doc Searls