By definition it may seem that the answer to this question is yes. It’s simple. A user starts a web browser, enters your company’s domain name, and your website appears. You have hopefully spent some time thinking about those users, but making sure your site is connected to the web means more than viewing your site in a web browser.

Search Engines
The most obvious example is search engines. Companies write software called “Spiders” that visit your site and ask for every page. You have probably invested some money into “Search Engine Optimization (SEO)”. One goal of SEO is to make it easy for the spider to find, prioritize and index the important content on your site. This is accomplished by improving the HTML code behind your web pages.

HTML is one language of the web, but a more powerful language is XML. For instance, to optimize your site for the Google spider you can add an XML sitemap file to the root of your website. This tells the spider where to find content, what content is important, and when content has changed.

XML can take different forms and that’s where it gets interesting.

Feed Readers
Many people read their favorite sites without ever opening a web browser. Instead they use a Feed Reader.

Many websites offer their content in XML formats called “Real Simple Syndication (RSS)” or “Atom Syndication Format (ATOM)”. A feed reader, which may look like an email application, checks your site for updates and sends the information back to the user. Internet Explorer 7 has a feed reader built-in and you will notice in the screenshot below that the content of the Elexicon blog looks very different in the IE feed reader.

Mashups
As soon as you provide an XML feed, other websites can combine your content with other sources to create a new experience. The richness of your data enables unforseen value as others start to piece it together with additional web resources. Here are some examples:

Widgets: A web feed allows users to put your information on their site. This is great for SEO and for your user. If your company has a dealer network, each dealer site could host your news widget and drive traffic to your site while adding value to theirs. In the screenshot below, you can see a simple widget displaying the Elexicon blog feed on my Google home page.

Geocoding: If your data has a geographic connection you can include the latitude and longitude. Many digital cameras will geocode and timestamp every photo when it is taken. If you upload your photos to the Flickr website, then sites like flickrvision can combine the Flickr feed with a map and you get a fascinating worldwide photo tour in real-time.

Aggregation: Others may chose to load your data and analyze it for patterns and trends. For instance, Twitscoop reads all the words from the microblogging site, Twitter, and creates a real-time tag cloud revealing the most popular topics of conversation on the web at any given moment.

Here is a Mapdango map of Grand Rapids, Michigan, which pulls together weather, events, photos, history and more.

Sites like technorati are trolling for content and if your information is tagged properly, it will likely be included.

Visualization: Besides aggregation, advanced visualization is another trend. Software is used to analyze data and create new ways of seeing things. SpatialKey is a new company doing some nice work in this area.

Application Programming Interface (API)
Another level of web integration is providing an API. An API allows others to develop even more robust web applications with your data. It will be easier to do business with you and it will offer valuable exposure for your company. A great example of this is the UPS API which provides information about a package in an XML format. Web users have used the API to create multiple ways to track packages, by map, IM via Twitter, and more.

What you can do
It is not enough to think only of people visiting your site with a web browser. You need to think about what rich information you can provide to the web. Organizing your data will benefit your company and you may be surprised what it inspires in the web community. There’s a lot going on; just look at the full spectrum of sites in this analysis dubbed The Conversation Prism.

As a web consultant I help companies create web-based applications. This often involves either automating some business process and/or exposing an internal data asset, such as a catalog of products, to the world.

In order to do this, a discovery process takes place to define what data, actions, people, conditions and exceptions are required to accomplish a particular business process. What I have discovered will shock and surprise you. Ready? Often what a company thinks is happening is either far from the truth or severely underestimated.

There are several reasons for this that often stem from the simple fact that people do what they must to get the job done. Sometimes they cut corners; sometimes they make mistakes. Often the business applications they use have productivity flaws that inspire creative workarounds.

For instance, data visibility is often a problem. Users don’t have the information they need when they need it. To get around this they type text into an “unused” field, add special codes to an existing field or, worse yet, they create separate documents and try to keep them synchronized manually.

Overtime the corporate database and business processes become an esoteric mess that is hard to maintain. The problems survive primarily because they are only visible to employees and even 90% of them “dare-not-tread”. This happens whether there are legions of DBAs or not.

As with most things in life, a little accountability will often motivate people to do the right thing. The solution is to kill two birds with one stone. If you automate a business process through a web application, inevitably you will have to expose a portion of the corporate database to the world. Often it is product information, scheduling, or order status. For instance, a nightly refresh of product data could send product descriptions and pricing straight to the web site.

Suddenly, that once hidden data will be visible to the world. If things don’t look right, customers will be calling; senior executives will be calling; You get the idea. Suddenly the visibility of problems will force some action. Senior executives will suddenly find funding to improve operations. Users will be more careful when entering data and will find more satisfaction knowing that their efforts to keep the database clean do not go unnoticed.

There is nothing like millions of web users to provide some accountability. In the end, they will appreciate your new customer focus through accurate, real-time information. The new visibility will help improve your data and the application itself should automate the process and improve overall quality.