This is a unique medium, after all, and it's coming of age in a time of lots of new stuff. Well, I think we should get bogged, to some degree. I know it's a new medium, but it's still people communicating with people, trying to get things done. And a lot of folks who came before us spent time researching the psychology of communication. Maybe we can learn something from them.
Books are a good example.
Tables of contents are really useful, so we use them on the web and they work great. When we get bored and start moving them around and making them less obvious, they became less effective. The reason tables of contents in books work so well is that they're always structured the same way, and they're always in the same place. We don't pick up a book and complain that it's not innovative because the contents are in the front. We're relieved to find the contents right where we expect them to be.