Digital Web Magazine - Home Alone? How Content Aggregators Change Navigation and Control of Content.
[...]What about starting from the home page?
With all these aggregators providing new places to start our searches for content, what will become of the home page? The hallowed ground of the home page is the most contested space in the history of the Web, and millions of valuable hours have been spent discussing its design and refining its content.
Whether or not it is important to users, the home page holds such a place in the minds of designers that it usually gets the top spot in the hierarchy of information. The reason for doing this is not entirely clear. It may be because home pages are the first pages to be indexed by search engines. Or perhaps everybody knows that the home page is (or should be) an index of what can be found on the site, so it becomes as good a place as any to start designing.
[...]A shift in control
Aggregators are promoting a shift in the control of content. They’re challenging the idea that we as designers control public access to information in our domains, that users must view things in the way we prescribe, and that our hierarchy is best to present our content. This change is also suggesting that we need the help of others to market our own ideas. It is plausible that another’s approach to our information may be working better than our own.
More concretely, it means that the skill set of designers and information architects will have to be augmented. In addition to the skill set that we have now and the current ways of producing IA, we’ll need to add whatever skills are necessary to get our content on rapidly changing aggregators that our audiences prefer. This includes an element of the unknown—a discovery of how we can create and organize content optimized for aggregation systems that don’t yet exist.
