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Let's say that you're designing a web for the Kenmore Police. Your audience is Joe Smith, a Kenmore citizen and recent assault victim who had a not-so-wonderful contact with an officer. Joe uses the Web to learn more about the department. One of your objectives might be to give Joe the resources he needs to overcome his TV-induced mirage about police officers and to learn how crimes are really solved.
To tailor that information for Joe, you would scour the Web for the best resources, link to them, and then provide some text explaining where the links go and what you want Joe to get out of them, that is, the reason for his going there.
How would you scour the Web? You might go to a search engine and use the term "forensic," a technical term you picked up and which Joe Smith might not know. The results from the search engine won't end your search. They only begin it.
You would soon find your way to Zeno's Forensic Page. You would find your way there because many other sites link to it and it claims to be the web's best resource. Then you can continue your search because Zeno has done for you what you are trying to do for Joe Smith. You may well visit the Forensic Science Society and their Forensic WebLinks Search, which might get you to the Roanoke County, Virginia, Police Department or the American Society of Questioned Document Experts, which would be way down any list of search engine responses to the term forensic. But it might have exactly what you're looking for. How do you know?
The best thing, then, is to find the constantly updated web page of someone who shares your search interests and shares the results. That is, you're looking for someone who is already doing it.
If you don't find that someone, you can always become that someone.
For example, about five years ago, I found Alan Liu's Voice of the Shuttle, specifically his list of new media links. VoS is highly selective, it has several dead links, and it has especially useful annotations. For more examples of grown-up links pages, try Smartcard.org or Politics.com. The folks at Piano World have taken it up a notch to make what looks like a successful web-only business.
Another that I found in the early 1990's was Martin Ryder's lists at the University of Denver, especially the one on Teaching and Learning on the Internet. Sometimes called "hubs", these sites have little content themselves other than links to other sites -- which themselves may be lists of links. As the Web grows, they are part of its maturation. You'll soon come to realize the value of annotated links.
Many commercial web sites began in this manner, a carefully tended list of links that got popular enough to support a business. Yahoo is the most famous example, having started in 1994 as the bookmarks of David Filo and Jerry Yang, Ph.D. candidates in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. In June 2000, the Guardian interviewed Jerry Yang.
Five years ago, Jerry Yang ... lounged around in an
open-necked shirt, swigging Coke straight from the can while enthusing about his
website.
Today he still wears "California casual" clothes, swigs Coke straight
from the can, and enthuses about his website, the invisible difference being
that he's now a multibillionaire. Because what started as Jerry's Guide to the
World-Wide Web - actually a pooling of links between Jerry and his friend
David Filo - is called Yahoo!, and it's the most popular site on the net, with
145m users.
Obviously some things have changed. Yahoo! has become a profitable
multi-national corporation with subsidiaries in more than 20 countries and more
than 2,000 staff.
One of my favorites is Nua, which began as Gerry McGovern's list of bookmarks in 1995. Nua now has offices on two continents and bills itself as:
a thought leader in the Internet space through consulting, development of enterprise web publishing solutions, and the publication of its acclaimed range of newsletters, which reach over 280,000 readers worldwide each week.
Where were you while all this was going on?
The difference between a specialized hub and a more general directory can be subtle. Whatever you want to call it, About.com's expert guides are just about the most comprehensive.
Part of your value as a professional researcher will be your carefully tended, up-to-date list of links to the topics you specialize in. You'll do for your professional topics what Zeno has done for forensic science students. Whether you share that information via a Web page is up to you.
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