Web-scalable narratives

Posted on November 23, 2008
Filed Under Semantic Web, information architecture | 4 Comments

As we build larger and larger websites it becomes increasingly difficult to scale meaningful user journeys.  Success is dependent on indentifying your key user journeys (narrative structures) and ensuring these can be dynamically populated as the site grows.

Some of the largest and most successful websites have taken simple narrative structures and made them scale successfully.  In the mold of the fairytale “once upon a time” and “they all lived happily ever after” these sites have come to own their simple narrative structures and this has played a significant part in their success.  Some familiar examples:

• Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought – noun (book) verb (also bought) noun (book)
• Buy it now – noun (user) verb (buy) noun (item)
• Such and such wrote on your Wall – noun (friend) verb (wrote on) noun (wall)

These simple noun-verb-noun narratives should be familiar and are very much part of the brand of these sites. This is a result of them getting these narratives to scale and ensuring there is the quality of data to back them up.

Now in order to make sure these narratives are applied consistently as the site accumilates content these structures need to be understood by your application. This means the noun-verb-noun structures must be encoded into your domain model ( and so your database) from the outset. Designing the site in this way means that as new content, pages and data are added to the site these narrative structures will be automatically created. This guarantees new pages are incorporated into the site and automatically become a scene in the sites larger story.

Weak and strong narrative structures

As we move from flat published pages to large dynamically created sites we need to think more and more about the primary narrative structures. These user journeys will be encoded into the very core of the site and you will want to be confident you have selected the right ones and that there is the data to back them up.

One of the strengths of the BBC News site is its contextual navigation with strong narrative. For example a BBC News story about Kosovo will carry an explicit user journey to the background story of the independence of Kosovo. This is in contrast to tags. Tags help to open up new user journeys but are weak in narrative, taking the form ‘this content is about this tag’. Related links also often fall into this category of weak narrative. One of the problems with rich narrative structure is that they are difficult to scale, this poses a significant challenge.

Web-scale narratives

When George Lucas was looking for a narrative structure for the beginning of his Star Wars films he used a well understood simple narrative structure, ‘once upon a time’.

He knew that this would be something that his audience would immediately understand.

The dream of the Semantic Web project follows a similar logic. Take the simple narrative structures that have been so successful in creating user journeys within large scalable websites and apply them to the web at large.  This means narratives (in the form of domain models and ontologies) that are not limited to a single site. Not just ‘people who bought this on Amazon also bought this’ rather ‘people who bought this on the web also bought this’ web-scale narrative structures. This will not only help create more coherent user journeys across the web but also provides more structure to help machine understanding.

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