"The world just got unbundled. Like it or not, there you are."<p>The world has been unbundled for some time. Some largish media companies have a history of making a stink about this in the form of trying to stop what they mistakenly called "deep linking". As if the Web were not, you know, a <i>web</i>, but rather a nice linear set of defined paths and pages.<p>Godin's advice isn't wrong or bad, but it's something that information architects have been pointing out for some time now; you cannot assume how a user reaches any give page.
Good point that the way you want to present yourself on the web isn't necessarily the way you get perceived. This is kind of like the difference between procedural and event-driven programming. We design sites as collections of "fuctions", but most of the time people just pop in from Google for one thing -- that's how we get to introduce ourselves to the world.<p>
I know I have a technology blog where I'm getting between 5 and 10K unique hits per month. When I designed it, I thought how people would come to the main page, read what it's all about, check out the topics and latest comments, maybe take a look at the feed What I'm finding is that Google is dumping all kinds of traffic onto my site due to searches for Salma Hayek, Pluto the Disney Cartoon, the Sweedish Bikini Team -- all kinds of extraneous stuff I added to mostly technology posts in an attempt to keep things light. I love ya, Google, and I love the traffic, but I never thought it would turn out this way.