The Browser: A Great Big Thought Process

If this is the information age, what are we so well-informed about? –David Gelernter

Assessing Navigational Strategies: "I want it NOW!"

What do we know at any given moment when the stream-of-content flashes so fast it may as well be considered subliminal?  How do we capture the moment worth considering?  Are we becoming a culture of headlines without any content?

The Browser is a content aggregator trying to get out in front of the data swarm to pause or suspend—the valuable moments worth considering—from a stream of authorial content.  What it delivers is fresh, high-quality "best of the moment" content from well established sources.  What it adds in value is lively, "best of the moment" videos, blog musings, interviews, and book reviews.
 

Organization

The challenge of any navigational strategy is how to capture the right content stream—how to get that ticket exactly right.  The Browser captures and organizes articles, videos, and blogs from top publications around the world culled from over 250+ RSS feeds.  It is structured into three distinct columns for articles, blogs, and video.

The overall site is further tabbed with topical themes and world regions to suit the global discourse. The linked articles and blogs have their own writing spaces in their active comment sections that add to the discussion. The site solves the data overload problem with clear organization. It is not just another social communication tool like so many others.  It is a thinking space.

"We must remember there are many more important things, many more important things . . . off hand, I can't think of what they are, but I'm sure there must be something." 

- Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

Interactivity

The Browser is now a hybrid space for reading, viewing, and writing. With continued use, the site has evolved beyond being just a navigational strategy or content aggregator of high quality "Best of the Moment" media. It does perform that function quite well by capturing high quality, free-to-read content prior to subscription gating.  However, the editors transformed the site from a passive reader to a thoughtful discussion space of interactive reading, viewing, and writing when they added video and blog columns.

In the “Browsings” blogs, there are thought-provoking discussions taking place from a number of fields that do not make traditional media spaces.  I believe the value added to the site will be in these interactive spaces.  It is a relatively new site, but the editors seem to have settled on a stable format. The tabs are another interactive feature to sort the material. 

Viability

The viability of the navigational strategy relies on a clear editorial vision and an ability to evolve—perhaps even to code or take cues from the searching habits of its users.  If they get their algorithm correct they can know far more about their users and provide "best of the moment" content selected their reader niche.

However, that requires a great deal more data gathering than many users prefer, and they run the  risk of giving readers perspectives that accord with a narrow community of readers. It undermines their stated goal of providing content that makes you think and examine your views.

So editorial vision remains key to the value added to the site. For now, the site is accessible free of charge as they try to get out content in front of  pay walls and copyright considerations.  Time will tell whether they are truly a thought space or whether they will turn the site over to a corporate pay model and destroy its innovation with ad space.

Writing Space: In the Box or Out  
In its current hybrid form, The Browser blurs the distinctions between reading, writing, watching, and thinking spaces. I agree with Bolter that it has become difficult “to decide where thinking ends and the materiality of writing begins, where the mind ends and the writing space begins…the writer may come to regard the mind itself as a writing space. The behavior of a writing space becomes a metaphor for the human mind as well as for human social interaction” (Bolter 13).  It hard to know anymore whether we live in the box or outside the box.

I view thinking as essential to the writing process, and I have come across a number of reads that have altered my thinking.  I find myself forwarding articles to friends and family who then pass them along. It is an affirmation of the site's impact. Their was a recent PBS show on the nature of human learning, and it seems our ability to share is fundamental to the learning process.  This site is a testament to that notion.

Assessment: Reading is Writing

The Browser's organizing principle is “Give us 15 minutes of your time, and we will give you everything that matters in the world.”  Their fifteen is worth a good sixty. The editor is the former deputy editor of The Economist, and he has a keen eye for capturing the strongest writing on the Internet. The selection of videos are clever and timely and the addition of the blog column "Browsings" has increased the already strong discourse.

I have come to the conclusion that all forms of reading and viewing on the Internet are in fact interactive forms of writing.  When content is generated by forwarded RSS feeds and twitter recommendations and when search algorithms track all Internet activity, the action of clicking, forwarding, or linking spells out a virtual "yes" and registers the promotion of a page. Behind the scenes, each click of activity is analogous to a recommendation on "Digg."  It is all so mysterious...and the algorithms are proprietary.