Everyone is an Expert addresses four questions:
1. How to I get more traffic to my site?
2. How do I find what I’m looking for on the web?
3. Where are the experts?
4. Can I be one?
A thesis
I believe when you go online, you don’t search. You don’t even find. Instead, you are usually on a quest to make sense. That’s the goal of most visits to Google or Yahoo! or blogs or the Wikipedia.
How do you make sense of the noise that’s coming at you from all directions? You won’t take action–you won’t buy something, book something, hire someone, or take a position on a political issue–until you’ve made sense of your opinions.
Blogs are time-based, like movies
The best blogs have a regular readership.
Because so many blog readers are regulars, returning every day or every week, the blogger has the luxury of using just a few words to pick up where she left off. She can invent conventions, pursue open topics, pick up dropped threads, and talk in a vernacular that her readers enjoy.
A great blog is an ongoing exposition of meaning on the blogger’s chosen topic(s) within a particular point of view. A great blog is like a movie.
Sometimes we need a starting point, not a movie. We need a nowblog
Tell me what I need to know right now. Point me in the right direction.
We need a nowblog. A place where a stranger can go to get insight and meaning–and then leave that site and go somewhere else.
A nowblog is a place, the best place to start. I call this place a lens.
Lenses
An online lens is a page, a single page, that highlight’s one person’s view of the Web–not the whole Web, just one tiny part of it.
A lens gives context. When it succeeds, it delivers meaning.
Lenses are personal
A lens provides meaning and the links necessary to take action on that meaning. A lens is a guide. Provide the meaning, and the surfer will go ahead and take the action.
Lenses are connected
Lenses don’t hold content. They point to content. And like all good guides, they comment on what they point to.