Summary: This post is part of a series; it’s a discussion on my thinking behind Level 3 of the Internet Hierarchy of Needs. Just joining this conversation? You might want to start here. You can find the original Internet Hierarchy of Needs post here.

Level 3: Organization Needs

The ability to sort and search, based on titles, metatags, and document contents

So the Internet exists (Level 1), and its composite documents have become dynamic and relational rather than static and independent (Level 2). What next?

Patterns, of course. Finding things. Sorting things. Organization, without which, to purloin a phrase, it is difficult to make information useful and accessible. It’s no surprise that this level is where Google was born.

Imagine if you went to the doctor and said you were having heart trouble. She says she’ll check it out, and proceeds to inspect your body atom by atom, beginning on the tippy edge of your pinky toenail and continuing northward until she finds what she’s looking for. Not very efficient, is it? That’s how useless the Internet would have become if the content and connections had continued to grow without a means of organizing the information.

And organizing information on the Internet means a complete mindshift for us as humans. We tend to think of things as being singular: one document, one article, one category. But what happens when things can be multiple with no loss or expense? What happens when you can store one thing in fifty different places? How does that impact your category system?

Without a doubt the best book that I’ve read on Level 3 is John Battelle’s The Search. In the beginning, nothing about how to organize the medium was obvious: indexing, traffic, monetizing… it was all fair game, and all of these problems had to be solved in order to create a viable and stable (somewhat) platform on which to build businesses and economies.

Google’s PageRank algorithm underscores the distinct importance of Level 2 as compared to Level 1. The correlation between relationships and relevance is undeniable, spam attempts notwithstanding. PageRank says, “You can’t look at these documents and sites in a vacuum. The way to understand them is through their connections to each other.”

Level 2 says the connections have to exist, and Level 3 says that we have to be able to interpret them.

We are at Level 3 now. We will likely be at Level 3 for several years to come. Most personalization attempts exist at Level 3. Google’s algorithm tweaks exist at Level 3. Most of Charles’ alternate search engines have business models based on Level 3.

There’s nothing wrong with Level 3, of course. It has worked remarkably well for ten years, and will continue to serve us until we supplant it. But you can already hear the rumblings… once we get this stuff organized, then what? And that will take us to Level 4, Semantic Needs, for which you’ll have to tune in tomorrow.

As always, I’d be delighted to get your reactions, positive or otherwise. Thank you!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 4:42 am and is filed under General technology, People matter, VortexDNA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.