Your Site Doesn't Have a Homepage. Get Over It.

Old Media that’s got a little bit of New Media lip gloss on has a
somewhat totemic attachment to the idea of “landing pages” – magic
pages that will attract search traffic through their SEO gravity. These
pages can actually be incredibly useful, as long as they fulfil a
genuine information need. If you build a quick page which can direct
people to the best content on a breaking story, then you will reap the
benefit. But you can do that as easily in a blog or forum post as you
can in a conventional CMS. And you’re still not building a frontpage,
just a “focus point” in the information stream.

I think many people in the traditional media are looking at YouTube and
missing the point. They look at YouTube and say “video is popular –
let’s do video”. And they build an online TV site. And they miss the
main fact – that YouTube exploded the idea of video by making it
shareable, through links or embedding. And the sites that they’ve built
don’t allow you to link directly to video, or embed it elsewhere.

I think that for as long as Old Media mentally think of ourselves as
building sites, rather than contributing content in an increasingly
diffuse way out into the general internet, then we’ll really struggle
to meaningfully contribute to the new information culture.