Web Darwinism – does the Law of the Jungle apply to Intranets as well?

Published August 18, 2009 by Stephan Schillerwein

At a recent intranet seminar I was giving, one of the participants stated that intranets managers ought to make more use of “Web Darwinism”. But does the intranet jungle provide an ecosystem suitable for making use of this law of the survival of the fittest?
Darwinism applied to the web basically means that those sites that are “strongest” will thrive and survive, while weaker ones will vanish. Strong equaling aspects like successful, heavily used, financially sustainable etc. it becomes clear that even the web isn’t pure Darwinism as countless websites will continue to exist, even if they fail to be(come) “strong”.

Also with myriads of potentially tiny target groups and niches it can be hard to tell whether a site is strong or not. Think of elephants and ants, each being a strong species.
The intranet jungle is a different habitat
While the web can (at least in some parts) be regarded as the wild open, the typical intranet resembles more of a wildlife reservation or zoo. There are all kinds of protection mechanisms that hinder weak areas of an intranet (e.g. content or functions) from becoming extinct. The range goes from the (financial and emotional) investment made to create that area to politics and regulations that make it mandatory for those things to be in place.
So, what would potentially die when left to itself in the jungle might life a long live under the care of its respective owners in the intranet environment.
What to do with all the carefully cared for weaklings?
The main operational goal of an intranet is supporting employees do their jobs better, more efficiently, with higher quality results etc. Weak content and functions are obstacles to achieving that goal. While you usually can’t just kill the weaklings, one approach would be to move them to places, where they can still be accessed but are out of the way in the predominating number of cases where they are of little or no relevance to a user.
Fast and easy information access being one of the biggest challenges on almost all intranets, mechanisms to provide quicker access to the “short end of the long tail” sure is a critical issue. But also one that so far often remains unaddressed due to lack of suitable solutions.
Iceberg-style Navigation
The approach I want to discuss can be thought of as a pyramid-shaped iceberg. It comes into play whenever any form of navigation – be it navigation menus, search results, shortcuts, tagclouds, … – is displayed. In each case only the top of the iceberg is visible (the head of the pyramid), containing the most important part of the respective content. The rest, which can be as much as 80%, is hidden below the surface (but can still be used by “diving down” to it).
One option how this can be achieved is to factor relevance metrics into every piece of content. This is then used to calculate the importance of the content whenever it is delivered in any kind of navigation. That means, that for instance a navigation submenu is no longer made up of static entries but the most relevant contents to be displayed are calculated on the fly in the very moment that a user is opening the menu.
The metrics used to calculate relevance can be made up of things like:
• Frequency with which the content is accessed
• Up-to-dateness of the content
• Frequency of the content being clicked on in search results
• Frequency of the content being bookmarked or subscribed to
• How well the content is rated by users
• …
Every organization will have to find their individual formula that reflects its strategic intranet goals, content quality guidelines etc. The selected indicators can then be used to calculate the current relevance of each piece of content at any given time.
Whenever a navigation element is delivered anywhere on the site, the entries of the navigation are delivered according to the respective relevance of its potential entries. For instance:

• Search result lists: only content with relevance above a defined limit is shown in the main result list. Content with lower relevance is made accessible via a link (e.g. “250 more results with lesser importance”)
• Navigation menus: only high relevance content is shown in the navigation menus, the rest is displayed with lesser prominence in a sidebar of the respective page
• A-Z Index: similar to how a tagcloud is designed, the title’s size of an A-Z entry could reflect its calculated importance
• Content teasers.: only content above a certain threshold is eligible to be featured in overviews and lists promoting defined contents
• Shortcuts (featured links): only the top 5 links of the respective category are displayed based on the relevance of its contents
• …

Things to consider
Care has to be taken not to create a “lemming effect” by further promoting the anyway popular items. In practice this means to select the above mentioned relevance criteria with circumspection and providing for mechanisms that take this problem into account (e.g. by treating a click on a promoted content different than one on the same content but coming from a source not boosted by the relevancy system).
If you feel that the approach outlined above is suitable to substantially help lessening information chaos on your intranet, please bear in mind that it (naturally) also has its drawbacks:

• complexity is added to your intranet systems
• performance is likely to be affected as every navigational element becomes dynamic
• badly chosen metrics and formulas will do more harm than good
• users can potentially be confused by (constantly) changing navigational elements (“I’m sure the document was here when I opened this menu just yesterday!”)
• adequate data needed to calculate the relevancy might not exist for all content on a “fair basis”. E.g. important content might have been hidden away so far and thus not have any user ratings or only few clicks in search result lists. Thus the new mechanisms will continue to hide it away.

I’m curious to hear if anyone has successfully implemented mechanisms along these lines in their intranets, yet.