David,

With regard to a "brick-and-mortar" commerce, moving the racks around would be equivalent to changing key fields in the database for a website.  However, the store is set up in a particular manner with things grouped on racks.  This does not force the shopper to start in sundries and end in foundation garments while passing through pants, shirts, etc.  So you see, the store is organized from a data perspective not a User Interface perspective.

As far as your "artist" analogy goes... that sounds like plain old "ownership issues."  An artist invest their time in the UI and is offended when people don't want to use it.  Well, I am sorry.  Businesses today can't afford prima-donnas who lose their bloody minds every time someone says they don't like something the primadonna designed.  I say this because I have been both a prima-donna and a business owner who couldn't afford the issues associated with prima-donnas.

I would still offer that if the site owners were looking at the more granular activities (and this could be easily accomplished by making the granular activities services), then they would have a truer sense of metrics.  Even to the point of how well the user interface was working by seeing if the UI was the top referring URL to the service.

The power of metrics cannot be denied.  THe value of analytics is unquestionable.  But, what we professionals use to derive those metrics and form those analytics is changing from the gross "site" to the granular "service."  It's a natural progression based in technological evolution.

I would agree that many sites suffer from bad site design - and I'm not even sure it is good or bad that users can change it.  It is, however, very different than other medium.

If you walked into JC Penny and started moving the clothing racks around - people and employees would look at you weird and probably stop you.

From another angle, if you were an artist who painted waterfront and ocean scenes and somebody stood outside your exhibit hall and handed out glasses that blocked the color blue - you would probably be pretty cranky.  Many, if not most people watching would say this was rude.

But online these behaviors work.  Again - I struggle with whether they or good are bad.  However, as somebody who has spent lots of time on web analytics I wonder how website owners will come to terms with these new approaches if they ever take off.  .05% of uses using these tools doesn't matter - 25% of them using it could substantially impact my business - possibly for the better and possibly to make it worse off.

David,

While your post was interesting it also points to a fundamental flaw of eCommerce (or any other selectable content) site design.  The designers think that the users are coming to the site for the site's sake.

Fundamentally, that idea is flawed.  Most sites (like IE for instance) become popular, not for their layout or artistic endeavor, but for the real content.  And, since keeping content fresh is burdensome, those content laden sites rely on database back ends.  So, let's just take one small step forward, it would be beneficial if the content providers were using SOA type calls to place their content within their site.  And since SOA calls are largely http get/post, those calls can be monitored and true metrics of interaction derived from the same.

So, what you view as users subverting e-comm assumptions is more like "Internet user seeks content on own terms" (sounds like a bad personal ad doesn't it?).  And, honestly, if content providers actually made their content available as subscribable "bits" then published the API or even went as far as to write Google or Opera gadgets for access, how would that change the "face" of the internet?

User Interface design (which is what a website is) would change radically as everything (content) becomes data.  Then "data would be everything"

"That's the problem: people just won't do what you tell them to. If only you could control people more through the Internet. Damn those anarchists teaching people to control their own lives!"

I think you have it backward, unfortunately.  People are now doing only what Google has constructed for them to do. As far as I see, it is Google "controlling more people through the Internet" and I am one of those anarchists teaching people to control their own lives.

But then I care about individual rights as opposed to the "rights" of corporations to stomp my rights on their way to profit, which does seem to make me an anachronism.

The Socialized model I offered gives you what you wanted (free to you the consumer) and pays the producers as well, without needing ADVERTISING to do so. So it's the diffrerence between a world where ads are pasted everywhere including on your butt, and one where ads are confined to places where people browse them when shopping and are otherwise unassailed by them. I'd rather live in the latter place.

That's the problem: people just won't do what you tell them to. If only you could control people more through the Internet. Damn those anarchists teaching people to control their own lives!

All of this was well discussed years ago, back before the Internet became monetized.Welcome back to 1994.

Maybe we should ask Ted Nelson for the solution and get back to 1964. We're already retreading Lick Lickleider's power company metaphor in Grid/Cloud computing, so surely Ted's not far behind. Perhaps we can also then return to 1990's advances in hypertext.

Or maybe I'm just old.

You're describing a confusion that arises at the outset of trying to disestablish the current system. The primary notion to be REFUTED by new practices is that people CAN (should be ALLOWED to) expect SOMETHING FOR NOTHING. The people you describe as needing or expecting the continuation of the free services are those who remain sold on the idea that whatever they get from the Net would (and should by some "right") be free, and I claim that this idea IS the central reason for the advertising pollution of our web content.

My sly desired outcome is that the "free" portion goes away.

There is a way to disintegrate a site's content from the compulsion to try to grab money from its use (when it began 'free'.) It applies to all sites providing content of any kind. What you do is "virtualize" the "web segment" of our economy, and count all accesses to all material of any kind (but you do NOT try to charge for it at that time.)

At the end of the fiscal year, you count the "hits" against any site X and send the site a CHECK for an amount of money equal to their percentage of hits times an annual budget allocated for this purpose.

Thus, you  directly subsidize (via your taxes disbursed by the Government) sites for your usage of them - no middleman required.

Otherwise, be prepared to run this loop for each new website ever created:

1. I want to run a website.
2. I can't (or don't want to) pay for it.
3. I won't charge any money to replace the money I spent on it. (**)
4. Someone else will pay for it. I go look for a sugardaddy.
5. Someone else gets to junk up my website with their garbage content.
6. No website is ever free of third-party BULLSHIT.
7. Someone ELSE always has their hands on YOUR site.
8. Your viewers have no PRIVACY from the datascrapers.
9. And if you use their mailing services, EVERY EMAIL to EVERY ONE OF YOUR USERS carries advertising for SOMEONE OTHER THAN YOU.

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to run a website based on your own ideas, without having to redesign your site to accommodate third-party crap JUST SO you can collect revenue? So if we recognize web services as a "public service" of a sort, we can arrange for website operators to get paid based on the consumption of their site in a direct way, without third-parties charging fees to "assist" with revenue collection. Your website should work FOR YOU, its author - and not "do work" for the advertisers, as that wasn't what people went to YOUR site for.

The problem you posed is "solved" if all web users are re-educated at the same time. There will never cease to be calls for "why should I pay for (anything)", but that is just the old tried-and-tired way we've polluted the Internet to date. When the Government allocates an "entertainment" or "internet resource consumption" budget, that was done from public taxes, and in time "everyone" will use the Internet, so this method achieves the APPEARANCE of free, without really being free. (You do NOT have to pay money at the time of download: but your download of the thing is COUNTED.) It also makes it possible to reduce the price per unit of any thing to a value that properly reflects its worth. {I didn't address cost of production - two downloads of different 3-minute videos, one costing twice what the other cost to produce. How do you account for that in "hits"? But this is one thing that can, I think, be relatively easy to work out.}

There wouldn't be any good incentive to "game" this system (try to cheat it to collect more money.) If you set up a robot to download a million copies of your own song from your site, the government just reports "we know that one million hits was from one user, sorry." The usual criminal penalties to apply. Also, there remains little need to compulsively download all songs and videos ever produced from the latest Limewire site, as the content remains free and available forever (from the original producer, who no longer needs to fear being ripped off.)

This is by no means a complete model for doing this virtualization, but it is a starting point for fixing the "internet economy". We work out the nitty-gritties when we sit down to actually design it in detail.

The above model makes everything "free" to the user (paid for by taxes.) However, as long as actual money is involved, then I do think it would be a good idea to remind the American Public that directly expecting something (things) for FREE was never the "American Way". Since when did we ESTABLISH the PRESUMPTION that anyone should be able to consume goods or services for FREE? We never did, so the advertisers stepped in to make that fairy-tale work - and now our content is again reoriented and dominated by Advertisers. Stop the BS: if it costs money, pay for it and be proud - or explain why you charge money for your labor but the people providing the content that you read every day are not allowed to ask for compensation!

Being LAZY and "handing off the counting to other guys" sells your content out, and pays third-parties for things few people really care about per se. The advertisers should not be rewarded for HAVING money and you shouldn't HAVE TO corrupt your site by devoting a significant fraction of every visible page to some unrelated trash. Yes, let's get rid of the click-through counters and make the government do that work at cost. Then my site is FREE TO YOU to use but I get PAID FOR your use of it. And the advertisements are eliminated, except for whatever cheesy ones you want to place on your site for fun and jollies (like "buy this Impeach Cheney cap". Send the viewers to your friend who makes the hats.)

(**) This is the advertisers' propaganda that YOU have swallowed. They TELL YOU "you can never expect the public to pay for anything." They don't do anything for YOU without getting paid, do they? THEY created this world within which they have tried to CONVINCE the public that anything on the Internet "IS FREE". It is THEIR propaganda that you believe that leads you back to using THEIR services. If I was in the business of taking the internet over site by site (e.g. Google), then OF COURSE I will tell you you can't expect anyone (but me) to pay for your content. Besides which they encourage the PUBLIC as well to believe in the "free" fairy. They set both the consumer and producer up to create a really cozy, lucrative middle ground for what I consider useless work and useless content. They get to impose a tax on your time and attention coming and going.

When people compare the quality of what they can get for free versus the quality of what they have to pay for(*), I think there will be little doubt that pay-for-service is the better deal. The ones who only care about FREE versus what they GET for free -- Golly, why worry about airheads? If your site's worth a damn, charge for it (pennies per user is the target price.) Or let's virtualize the "web economy" and get paid (by the Government) for trying at all! That would be nice.

(*) Presuming self-respecting sites get the clue and start offering commercial-free services. As long as "all are cowards at once", cowards they must stay. Be brave: the first cost to you is to produce the variant site. Then, if the for-hire side is not doing well enough, badger the crap out of the users on the free side to join up. Why not, they're on a place where they pretend not to care how harassed they are. Blink and fade in and out and wave your hands in big flash icons, if it takes being that rude to make the point. After all, the other advertisers on your site do the same and not for you. Use even more ad space and pump yourself. Those ads serve you. (Within reason and taste.)

Has anyone done an analysis to determine how 'efficient' ads are, versus a site funding itself? For example, if Huffington (popular site) solicited donations in a visible way, would it be possible for donations to "buy ads off the site"? I asked PBS to tell me how much money they'd need the public to send them to get the ads off PBS, but they ignored me, of course (neocons still run it.) We can ask Huffington the same: POST a request for donations. SHOW how much more is needed to knock the ads off the site and keep it updated. And then, I predict, watch people do exactly that, if the amount required does not commence from the exosphere. In case that's original, I said it here.

One wonders human psychology: are we really such butterflies that so many of us do click on the obnoxious ads? {re: socially conscious ads below.} Who clicks on the ads? Do you? (Click on ads, say, for a travel service or music video unrelated to the site you're visiting.) Just because links are found there doesn't mean they need to be explored; I think there is still a small 'hangover' from the first web days, when links were so cool you had to try them all. But I think most of us are smarter than that, aren't we? The more purpose-driven of us will always be mindful that we are reading Huffington now, and that although there is an ad for a ski vacation and we like ski vacations, still we will do Everything Else before worrying about that ad.

When we are looking for something, we should go to an INDEX SITE. Crap put at you on the site you're visiting, when that site is an informational site like Huffington, is someone else's subselection and redirection of your attention for you, I suggest to be ignored in favor of going to a value-neutral index site of your choice. Brin and Page might think you'd like this other thing, but ya know, I already know what I care about, and I also know people I trust better to find things I may not know about, and I don't need to hear from Page and Brin on Huffington, or CNN, or {ad infinitum}.

As to socially conscious "ads", if they want you to check out a site, and if the current site likes them, then they should be a link, not an ad.

==

p.s. "cost of maintaining two sites": if your webgrrl is slick enuf, she plays a few simple tricks with CSS and that cost is minimized or eliminated. Let advertisers try to spurn sites that try to do without them: as the ad revenues dry up, they'll quit being proud and take what they can still get.

The problem to be solved is to make payment easy. When I do a search, I won't panic knowing it just cost me $0.005, for example. Of course, this conflicts with making massive profits, but that doesn't bother me in particular. Sites can still compete on price if they like. But I think Socializing the system is the way to go; that's a lot of research and planning but it would be well worth it. Now we're not burdened with counting mils ourselves, and it washes out of our taxes. And we see what we wish to see without regard to what someone else compels us to see for the sake of their income.

While the dual-site idea is interesting, I can't see any companies willing to do that for what would likely be a smaller percentage of their users. If I can go to the free site using FireFox and AdBlocker, why would I pay money to get the same thing? The company has to go to the expense of maintaining two sites, plus they need to add e-commerce infrastructure whether they are an e-commerce company or not. They have to have a relationships with advertisers on one hand, but then deny them access to a certain group of customers on the other.

I think there has to be some sort of creative middle ground that could actually provide some useful benefits to the customer rather than just removing ads and then charging them to visit your site.

In particular, provide a paid version of your site alongside the so-called "open" site. The paid version eliminates all third-party links to direct traffic to unrelated, usually commercial content. It eliminates all the cutesy ads that can't be stopped from moving, blinking and otherwise doing their level best to distract your attention from the content you went to the site to see. You will be directly subsidizing the site and enhancing their ability to get rid of "click-through revenue" requirements (read: third-party junk plastered on their site in obtrusive ways.)

We (citizens) are allowed to reengineer our society on our own. I don't believe that advertising should pay for anything anymore and that's the economic structure I want to work for. We're going to get rid of the gladhanding self-invited third-parties who tax our time budget and our attention span and convert everything we consume into "a little bit o' substance with a whole lotta advertisements".

While I can certainly see the dilemma these tools pose, I think that it just reinforces to me that companies can't rely on auto-generated data and committee-designed web sites. There is no way of escaping this personalization trend and it is only going to increase as sites themselves allow for greater customization. So what's a company to do? Design your website so that the majority of people won't need to use the tools. Give them the ability to make the site what they want, but using your tools, not someone else's. If NetFlix was to offer a desktop tool, most people would probably use it instead of someone else's. If you normally use FireFox with a bunch  of plugins, try them against your own site. Not only will you see what your cusomter sees, but you may be able to find ways of taking advatage of the new view.

Of course, if all else fails, companies could try communicating with their customers to get some feedback. Offering surveys or calling people after a sale to guage their satisfaction might generate some interesting information. Nothing beats talking to someone to find out how they truly feel.

I'm impressed with the anti-ad tools available for Firefox. It lets me visit sites without being pestered by garbage someone else assumes I "must" pay attention to.

I'm happy to see a clear path to escape the methodologies advertisers want to impose upon us for their parochial purposes. Since the non-advertising-driven mode of information access is not available, people now have tools to eliminate as much of the third-party "camping" as possible.

I have long argued that the concept of "free" has been thoroughly abused. Free means UNENCUMBERED, and any web page that puts UNRELATED and especially COMMERCIAL content on the site alongside the content I came to see, is ENCUMBERED with that extra irrelevant content.

I would GLADLY pay a minor amount of money (personally) to get site content from sites WITHOUT ADVERTISING. That implies that site X (Huffington or CNN etc.) would have an "open" page cluttered with stupid ads, and ANOTHER entrypoint which is PAID access but NEVER bothers me with anything that is NOT FROM THE SITE I'M VISITING.

I don't care who esteems "advertising" as part and parcel of their preferred Milton Friedman world. A huge slice of the population would just as soon do without "advertising" and the ideology that intends to export it to every square micrometer of our existence against our will.

If people no longer want to play with the Capitalists, that's the lesson - and spending more and more time and effort trying to figure out how to MAKE people interact with you on your terms, WHOEVER you are, is the only path left to you if you wish to pursue the current (call it "Google") method of interacting with the consumer.

And the people are opting out for cause: they don't like the garbage. Google thinks everyone should love advertising - well, I didn't drink that Kool-Aid, sorry.

The thing to do is figure out a different method of interaction that can sustain the sites consumed. The easiest thing to think of is microcredit (not Grameen, but charges down to the mil.) One easy way to implement that is an ANNUAL fee to the subscriber - $20 or something.

Quit providing CRAP for "free" and that will make plenty of space for people to remember to pay for what they want to consume.

Anyone who says that the current advertising model of finance is the only way to go is just someone whose only imagination is to make money that way. Smart people can figure out better ways of doing "this" which will please the MAJORITY of consumers without having to invade their privacy whatsoever.

I hope every next desperate attempt to "hang on" to the consumer-capture market fails. Kudos to the ad-killing software authors!