“can I find Europeana stuff on Google?”, not “can I find Europeana stuff on Europeana?” is a start. “can I find Europeana stuff everywhere?” is more what I would ask, though, because explicit, intentional search is not the only way to discover stuff, and indeed as the web improves it should become less important: we can expect to see more contextually relevant content appearing wherever we go, so that our behaviour other than conscious searching brings about the discovery of our stuff.
Because this requires that someone, somewhere brings related content into one “water mains” that VREs, Chrome, WordPress, niche websites, CMSs (of content AND collections variteites) etc can hook into, Europeana, like Google for different purposes, has the opportunity to disseminate by first aggregating.
Good post, Mike.