Vertical Integration at Uncharted

Used under the fair use doctrine for illustrative purposes.

Funny the things you only notice after you've been on the web for a few years.

And by on the web I don't mean surfing. I mean having a presence on the web, a place you want people to go and to hang out and to contribute to. Like Uncharted.

Integration is the thing now, because Web 1.0 just doesn't work any more. I know this is no serious revelation to those long familiar with the current state of the Internet. Nor is it a real revelation to my current way of thinking. Just seeing Web 1.0 versus Web 2.0 -- and, really, it's more like 3.0; I'll get into that in a minute -- and you know how far the whole hairball has come.

This is going to build a little bit on my earlier post about "Facebooking" Uncharted, or integrating the efforts we're making in various spots on the web into a united whole that all can see.

Look, for example, to the blogroll on the left of my own blog. I have a good handful of blogs that I follow. There are a few I will go to via their "homepage" on a regular basis, but there are others that I will only hit from time to time, when the mood strikes me or when I see something interesting that I know I want to read or watch. To make it easier on myself, I used Blogger's blog list tool, thus shwoing me in an instant, on my own page, what's going on on others' pages. I can use my home page as my launching point, rather than theirs. And that suits me. I know I can go to one place on the web and find what I want. It suits those whom I visit as well, because it inspires me to visit more frequently when I know, before going there, what I'm going to find.

We need that at Uncharted.

We need a spot on our site, a ubiquitous spot that's always there, where people can instantly see what's new, hidden in our pages. Furthermore, we need the same thing for our other promotional efforts -- Facebook, Twitter, the Uncharted blog, our institute, and, soon our store -- so that our visitors can have one-stop shopping, so to say.

This'll make promotions easier as well. We have stories like the Holi Festival of Color, Shelley Spud Days, and the American Dog Derby, that we might want to promote every year. That's most easily accomplished through a Facebook post letting people know what the current information is, while providing a link to the story at Uncharted. Those posts should also be showing up on Uncharted itself, so visitors there are reminded of our other presences, our updates, and such. One-stop shopping.

This might be one of the reasons Facebook is so successful: They're trying to become the Internet for a lot of people. They're doing blogging and photo posting and messaging and instant messaging and providing a place for you to share Internet links and inanities and such. Add search -- which they're working on -- and a few other little oddments, we won't need things like, oh, Google or Gmail or Yahoo any more.

We need to integrate fast.