The thirteen commandments of the World Wide Web

My friend Willy Chaplin first became involved with the World Wide Web on the day people first started calling it the World Wide Web.

I might be off by a week or three, but not much more. In any event, by 1995, four years before Chris Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto, he already had a pretty good handle on the situation and encapsulated his thoughts into what he calls The Thirteen Commandments of the World Wide Web.

What he wasn’t very good at is self-promotion.

Credit should go where it’s due. Beyond that, for those readers of this column who have some level of Web responsibility (most of you), Willy’s Thirteen Commandments are still worth your attention. Here they are, abbreviated in bold, followed by my comments (because otherwise, this would be a very short column — just my intro plus the link).

1. Willy: The Net is completely voluntary.

Bob: Many businesses work hard to make the Web less voluntary — for example, financial institutions that make on-line statements free while charging for the paper version, and technology companies that put most customer service on-line, charging more for the other kind.

Less true isn’t untrue. Every Web practitioner should ask, frequently, “Why would someone spend time here, and why would they come back once they have?”

2. Willy: The Net is deflationary on ALL price structures.

Bob: Long before the Web, ads that included price pulled better than ads that did not. On the Web, everyone knows what you charge … for everything … and, thanks to Pricegrabber.com, how it compares. Or else, don’t show what you charge and everyone will draw the same conclusion: That you don’t want them to know.

3. Willy: Attention spans on the Net are short and getting shorter all the time.

Bob: Attention spans everywhere are short and getting shorter. This affects the Web just as much as it affects everything else. Write and present for short attention spans.

4. Willy: The principle virtue of the Net is asynchronicity.

Bob: Yup. You publish when you want. Your audience reads when it’s ready. It’s an on-demand medium. Leave pages up and findable so long as they’re relevant. Date them too, so readers will understand their context.

5. Willy: It is critically important to shorten development cycles.

Bob: For the Web, fast and good enough is better than too late and perfect, and lateness is as much of a defect as bad logic. Iteration and the Web are made for each other.

That’s the technology. There’s a reason the Internet has become synonymous with “unreliable information,” and you shouldn’t contribute to it. If you haven’t checked your facts and done a reasonable job of copy editing, don’t use the immediacy of the Web, or its ability to hide your mistakes, as an excuse.

6. Willy: The Net is international.

Bob: Culture and language, on the other hand, are still local. Few among your audience will be conscious and forgiving enough of this that they’ll say to themselves, “In California this sort of thing is considered just fine — I shouldn’t take offense, even though here we consider it an abomination.”

Decide on your audience and make the trade-offs. For example, I write for an American audience, recognizing that readers from other countries will have to perform some mental gymnastics to make it work, including, for some, figuring out what “mental gymnastics” means.

7. Willy: The Net is the most truly interactive medium ever devised.

Bob: Is isn’t the same as can be. The Net can provide the most scalable and flexible interactive medium yet devised. It’s still inferior to face-to-face conversation for rich interaction and nuance.

But as a medium … television, the movies, books, newspapers and magazines are passive. They have audiences. The Web makes conversations, and especially asynchronous conversations (#4) possible. This empowers your audience to become a community, with you as its convener. Much more powerful.

8. Willy: Because of the fickleness of customer loyalty, you MUST keep in touch with them, constantly reminding them you are there.

Bob: Nothing new here, except that the Net makes it cheaper and easier, so there are fewer excuses for failing to do so.

9. Willy: The Net is…A NETWORK.

Bob: Willy’s point: “From the standpoint of functionality there ARE NO SITES…just a single massively interconnected web of HTML pages.” My point: You’re known by the company you keep, so keep track of who links to you and be judicious about which other sites you link to.

10. Willy: Copyrights are nearly meaningless on the Web.

Bob: Willy’s point: Any effort to protect material on the Web is doomed to failure. My point: As a matter of practicality, Willy is right. If you want to protect it, don’t put it on your website. As a matter of business ethics … just because stealing is easy doesn’t make it either legal or ethical. Don’t do unto others as many will do unto you.

11. Willy: While not readily apparent, cooperation on the Web works MUCH better than competition.

Bob: Here I disagree. Whether on the Web, in a mall or on a street corner, cooperation is one business strategy among many, that makes sense in some circumstances but not others.

12. Willy: What the Web does best is form communities.

Bob: See point #7. Virtuality often makes community more real than in the physical world, where geography defines community much more than shared interests and values.

13. Willy: EVERYTHING is subject to change on the Web.

Bob: This is where I both agree with Willy’s statement the most, and disagree with it most intensely.

New capabilities hit the Internet all the time. New capabilities mean new possibilities, which in turn make constant re-evaluation of the fundamentals essential.

People, on the other hand, don’t stop being people just because they’re on the Web, nor do businesses stop being businesses. The fundamentals of human nature, culture, competitive essentials and profitability never go away.

They just take on different forms.