The URL is Not Enough

by Charles Miller on September 5, 2003

For the past... well at least six months, probably more, some company has been chalking their URL onto the pavements around Sydney. I've seen them in the CBD, North Sydney, Newtown, Kings Cross, and they're probably lots of other places too. They're not laying down works of art, just chalking a few lines:

example.net
...pithy phrase here...

I'd say it's quite significant that I, someone who spends more of his life than he will comfortably admit to online, have never felt even remotely like visiting the URL in question. The same goes for the plethora of URLs that appear in print and television ads. Never bothered with them.

Most web-browsing is purposeful. Even when we're doing what looks like random browsing, we're doing it purposefully: starting at some point we know has interesting links and branching out from there. The web is such an enormous place, there's little incentive for me to visit some site just because I saw the URL on the pavement.

URLs are cheap. Give me a reason to want to go there.

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