No Clicks Without Bricks

Today’s post is primarily from Shelly Albaum who explains what he meant when he told me that a web site would not be sufficient to create community communication because ‘no clicks without bricks.’

"The research shows that most people do not regularly visit very many websites. They have dozens or scores of bookmarks, and they could check them all regularly, and a few people do, but the vast majority have only a few well-traveled paths -- less than 10 sites visited weekly -- and people are resistant to change. For example, just knowing that a great website is out there, or a better search engine than Google is out there, has almost no impact on my actual behavior.

That's because I don't have a real problem with Google, and information overload is such a serious problem for most people that news of a new website isn't really all that welcome. Or at least it's not particularly good news.

So creating the website that has all the information about Point Roberts is critically important, and is a must-do, important step. However, 95% of your intended audience won't remember to go there, and thus they will not hear the news. RSS was supposed to solve this by pushing the information out to your customized Yahoo Portal Page or your iGoogle Page, or your iPod, or your cell phone, but that still doesn't reach most people.

In the physical world, we have many more well-worn paths and thus are way better at receiving serendipitous information from our peripheral vision. That's why the big sign at the main intersection is so helpful.

What you'd want ideally is a big comfortable public space with great seating, occasional entertainment, lots of displays and bulletin boards, great drinks, cheap food, and convenience services like photocopies, faxes, or whatever people need. This would be a meeting place that everyone would have occasion to visit daily, or at least regularly, and would encounter visual reminders of interesting things, and then they would check the website to find out more. In its most fully articulated version, this idea would actually bring blogs and web sites into the physical world with large screens and plenty of free browsing terminals.

This kind of thing would have a different personality in every town, but every town needs something like it. Almost no town has one, though, I think. The main thing is to create a common public meeting space that is analogous to and complementary of the virtual town square that is a web page."

The Point Roberts Community Center comes immediately to my mind. It isn’t what Shelly describes, but it is extraordinarily easy to imagine it being that. I can see where we are; I can see where we can end up; but I can’t at all see what are the steps in between. I suppose that’s why ‘almost no town has one.’ More to think on.