Take a quick look, and then we’ll talk.

I think the biggest thing here is the move from passive to active. With ads (typically) we are passive recipients of a neatly packaged “moment” designed to elicit some sort of emotional response or purchase intent. With websites, and most digital instances, we’re being given the opportunity to experience something, and how we do so is entirely of our own choosing.

You’ve probably heard that the medium is the message. I think that’s only half right.

Maybe the experience is the message.

There’s this continual push to have everything digital. Digital TV, mp3′s, e-books, movies on your iPod, etc. It seems as if the goal is to move from physical copies of things to only having them “exist” digitally. That being said, I don’t think actual books are going to disappear anytime soon… but still.

The interesting thing is that even as we’re digitizing everything, we still want to interact with it in the “traditional” sense. We want to be able to touch, pull, push, drag, and draw. Would the iPhone be as successful without the multi-touch functionality? Maybe, but it would certainly be very different. Look at Microsoft’s Courier. Purely digital content, but interacted with in the same way as a traditional journal.

Where are we heading with this? Minority Report anyone?

The first type we’ll call a “closed query” because it has a definite answer. These are questions like:

• What’s the number of the nearest Chinese restaurant?
• Who was the lead singer of Twisted Sister?
• What’s the MSRP of a new Toyota Camry?

The closed query is very straightforward, easy to define, and can usually be answered by Google or Wikipedia in a few minutes. Not much else going on. Unless you’re planning on a street fight for internet search supremacy, these kinds of queries really shouldn’t worry you. Just make sure that you’re information is easy to find (and be “find” I mean “be indexed”).

The other (more interesting) type of query is the “open query” and unlike the closed query, there’s no definite singular answer here. Some examples:

• How can I learn to break dance?
• What are some easy salmon recipes?
• What is the meaning of life?

And unlike closed queries, open queries aren’t linear. They look more like this.

As you can see, open queries are more involved. However, the key difference isn’t the amount of information, or the number of points. The key difference is that there is no definite Point B. Point B is a state of mind.

If you set out determined to know more about break dancing, when have you achieved that goal? Unlike in closed queries, where the answer is always “Philadelphia” or “19.99″, your level of understanding that characterizes your Point B may be a completely different level than mine. The other major difference is that Point B is not the end. The Point B you’ve arrived at today may be different than your Point B two weeks from now.

So what does this mean? Well for starters, unless you’re answering a closed query, you need to stop thinking of your content as a destination and more as a part of the process. I understand the pressure for better time-on-site, page views, etc. but really, shouldn’t we be focused on providing information someone is looking for and then sending them on their way to learn more?

Who would you think more favorably of? A site where you spend 10 minutes trying to find what you’re looking for and eventually give up or a site where you spend 2 minutes learning something and then move on to the next resource they suggest?

There should be no dead-ends on the internet.