Mathieu Helie

A myth is spreading that with the growth of the web we have stopped reading. In fact we are reading more than ever, but the nature of text has changed. With the Web 2.0, hyper-text has achieved its promise: it is interactive, non-linear and dynamic.

Complex information does not limit itself to what the reader seeks to know, it provides the reader what he didn't know he was seeking.

Complex text is redefining the way we consume all information. Whether we are reading history on Wikipedia, keeping up with our friends on Facebook, watching videos on YouTube or shopping on Amazon, we are in a perpetual interaction with the text and creating our own narrative out of a limitless network of information nodes. Reading hypertext is an exploration.

Make your website simpler to use and give it greater depth by adopting information complexity

Although you may have archived enormous quantities of information on your website, it cannot be described as a complex information source if this information is not simple to access. In fact, it may become even less useful as it grows in size. Here are some points to consider:

• Can you enter the website from any information node and navigate it from this point of origin? (Sometimes known as search engine optimization, or SEO.)
• Is the information displayed on a node hierarchically structured from most relevant to least relevant so as to optimize the reader's time spent reading?
• Is the typography of the information making it simple to identify what pattern this information belongs to?
• Can the reader contribute back information to a node?

Beginning with the search for an explanation for a chaotic Parisian business district's mysterious successes, Emergent Urbanism expanded into a highly praised essay on the nature of urban complexity, fractals and growth. Studied in equal parts by architects, urbanists, economists and computer scientists, Emergent Urbanism is an ongoing experiment in information complexity, both as a blog and as systems for urban development.

Drupal is the infrastructure of the complex web. Its key features are node polymorphism, complex taxonomies, and concurrent modularity. More important of all, its emergence as the most powerful information management system is an accidental event, its modularity making the growth of an ecology of autonomous developers feed back into the core system.

Drupal can power the most elementary blog as well as the most complex online store or community, and it does so at virtually no cost.

More on the limitless power of Drupal to model complex information.

For quick, no-hassle web publishing, WordPress is the standard against which all others are judged. Its features make creating complex information spaces effortless, but if you want more than a blog, you need a heavy-duty platform like Drupal, despite the enormous library of WordPress plugins.