These sinister forces are of two types:

First, search sites like AltaVista and Yahoo worry that they're sending "eyeballs" away from their own pages. This is ironic since that was their entire point originally. But, since these search pages get paid for ad views, they now view browsing as a necessary evil.

Second, to many benighted employers, if you're browsing, you're distracted. In fact, this entire portal thang is based on your company's fear of browsing. Why wander in the desert when Big Brother can deliver exactly what you need?

So, let's take a moment to praise browsing. (Who would ever have thought it'd come to this?)

GUI, but not sticky

The usual argument is that browsing creates serendipity. Yeah, sure, but if you picked 1,000 random sites truly randomly, how much serendip do you think you'd encounter? A couple of yuks, an order of magnitude more yechs, and probably nothing that actually helps you with your work.

Given the explosion of content on the Web, serendipity is in fact getting worse and worse as a business strategy.

But we don't need to apologize for browsing. Browsing mirrors the fundamental and greatest mystery of human existence: attention.

Without attention, consciousness would just be an undifferentiated field of stuff of equal value and our lives would be completely random. In other words, it'd be like our college years.

Attention is the messy intersection of world and interest. It's guided by what we care about and reveals the world in terms of our care. (Yeah, I know I'm stealing from Heidegger.) It in part seeks out the things of the world that we're interested in (we deliberately turn to the kitchen to cook dinner), and it in part responds to the world (the telephone rings). The intersection is messy because our interests get altered by our attention to the world, and the world is only visible to us in terms of our interests. Neither the lived world nor interests exist apart from one another. Attention gives rise to both.

Browsing is how attention works when it isn't in its rare state of extreme need ("Water! Must have water! I wonder what that attractive passerby would look like naked? Water! Water!") Browsing isn't attention taking a vacation or attention goofing off. It's how we exist in our world. We browse, therefore we are.

And the Web is built for this type of attention because, unlike the real world, the Web is a set of sites arranged (via hyperlinks) by interests, not by accidents of distance.

The upshot

What this means for businesses and portals is: Encourage browsing. Don't think that the Web is an informational vending machine that works best when it pops out answers in response to button presses. Use your portal to help your workers find starting points for browsing. Harvest the fruits of their journeys by helping your workers to talk about the browsable domains they've discovered. Think of browsing as a distributed group activity.

That means that -- unlike Internet portals -- you cannot measure the success of your corporate portal by how long people stay on it. Quite the contrary. How good is your portal as a place from which to leave? How well does it open up the big world outside and how narrowly does it present the narrow view through the official corporate pinhole?

In short, stickiness is good for roach motels and gasket sealers, but bad for corporate portals.

Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization and JOHO are trademarks of Evident Marketing, Inc.