Every year, John Brockman asks a big selection of smart people to answer some question or another, and posts it on the Internet to provoke discussion. This year’s question is “How is the Internet changing the way you think?“
This always seems like a better idea than it ends up being in practice, because the whole thing is presented using Brockman’s mad circa-1997 web design skills (at least, I hope he’s doing it himself. If he’s paying someone to put this together, he’s being ripped off). On my large-ish desktop monitor, I have to hit “Page Down” five times to get from the top of the page to where the answers start, and then the answers themselves are in the form of an unsorted list of names, identifiers, and links to the essays. The essays themselves are chopped up into groups of ten-ish, in no particular order, and when you’re on a given page of essays, the only index of names you can see is the list of people who are on the page you’re looking at. The main index does include an alphabetical list of contributors, in the left sidebar, which just redirect you to the index page list item for that person, requiring a second click to get to their actual essay.
The idea of the non-organization scheme is probably to encourage/force people to read essays by people whose names they don’t recognize, but the practical effect, for me at least, is to make it really annoying to find anything I want to read. And given that there are 166 entries running to 130,000 words (according to the sidebar), the odds of me just starting at the beginning and reading (or even skimming) all the way through are pretty much zero.
I’m not saying that this ought to be replaced by some slick Flash-based thing– God knows, I’m happy enough with hand-rolled HTML— but given the sheer amount of stuff being presented, some thought needs to be put into how to organize and present it effectively. As it is, even when I think the question of the year is interesting (this year’s is pretty lame), I end up not reading many of the responses, because the website is so aggravating. When the question is lame…