Toms Shoes is a company based on a brilliant but simple idea:

“For every pair (of shoes) you purchase, Toms will give a pair of shoes to a child in need.“

This succeeds on a couple of important levels:

1. Every time you wear a pair of Toms Shoes you can feel good about helping others.
2. These are more than ‘just shoes’. If someone else asks you about your Toms Shoes, you can quickly relate a story that possibly compels the other person to buy some Toms for themselves.
3. As such, word of Toms spreads virally (albeit with some help from an AT&T commercial) allowing them to sell more shoes and do more good.

All of this got me thinking… Could you apply the same business model to the world of web design? For every web site we design, could we design a free web site for a non-profit? The proceeds from the commercial site would help fund the non-profit site. The two sites would be linked in much the same way as sister cities.

 photo credit: hnnhlh14

In his 2009 SXSW Presentation, “Everything You Know About Web Design is Wrong“, Dan Willis talks about the Transcendent Web and the idea that tomorrow’s web sites will no longer be billboards but instead will be data aggregators.

“The popularity of mashups (the combination of data from more than one source into a single integrated tool) will continue to grow throughout the century. Content from a wide variety of sources will flow like water into vessels designed for a wide variety of purposes to be displayed by a wide variety of devices. Eventually, most Web sites will likely become a type of mashup themselves.”

Dan Willis, Everything You Know About Web Design is Wrong

Willis points to the example of Flickrvision, one of “why didn’t I think of that?” ideas where Flickr photos are overlaid onto Google Maps as they are posted. This creates a voyeuristic insight into lives of random photographers around the globe. Other (more complex) examples include Mapdango, a web site that acts like the crazed 21st century offspring of an Atlas and the Encyclopedia Britannica. Search for a place like “Boulder, Colorado” and Mapdango will bring together relevant information from Google Maps, YouTube, Wikipedia, Eventful, WeatherBug, Google, Panoramio and Amazon.

What happens then when we take these ideas and apply them to disaster relief or environmental issues? It’s not to hard to imagine a web site that pulls data from Flickr and Twitter and lays it over Google Maps to show where humanitarian travesties are taking place or where ecological hotspots exist. We know from the 7 July 2005 bombings in London that citizen journalists provided the initial coverage of that event as it was happening. Once a site that pulls all of this data together breaks through, it can use Twitter, Facebook, AllTop, Blog Widgets etc to greatly magnify the impact of it’s efforts.

A fully-realized web is emerging, one that goes beyond the static web pages rooted in print design. As web 2.0 matures, charities and causes will be able to leverage community and crowdsourcing to both uncover issues and publicize their efforts at solving them.

At Stormlab, we hope to be a part of this revolution.