If Information Flow can
be likened to a river,
then lately I’ve only had time to occasionally splash water on my face as refreshment.
Which is to say, I’ve been dipping in and out of the Information Flow that is my
Bloglines account.
This is the reason why the daily Web 2.0 News feature I
started last week has since escaped my grasp and quietly floated away downstream… my
current workload prevents me from scooping up enough Web 2.0 water to deposit daily into
my main blog bucket, to quench the thirst of my readers. But don’t worry, the tap that is
my del.icio.us account continues to have
glorious Web 2.0 H2O pumped into it, so that it may be used for my weekly Web 2.0 Wrap-Up
splash-around. And I may start squirting items of Web 2.0 news at you, as stand-alone
posts (if I can restrain myself from babbling on, like I’m doing now).
You might surmise from all this that I haven’t had time to go for any decent swims in
the Blog River? While that’s true, I have been paddling around in two large eddies of memes. One
was the latest speech by Associated
Press CEO Tom Curley, in which he expounded on his brilliant ‘containers’ theory. The
other is a series of posts by Seth
Goldstein – about Internet alchemy, algorithms, APIs and automata.
(ok, enough with the river / water metaphor)
AP and The Future of News
I’m still absorbing the Curley speech, but here are some highlights:
“Yesterday, we were entirely focused on fashioning our content to fit certain
containers – the morning or afternoon newspaper, the 6:30 evening newscast, and,
most recently, the Web site.
Today, users want content to flow free of those containers to the the desktop, the
cellphone and, soon, the set-top box in the living room.”
…and he follows up by saying nobody is in control now, except for the users. I have
much more to write about Curley’s speech, but I’ll save it for another post(s).
The Future of Internet Content
Seth Goldstein’s series of posts about
“Media Futures” is stunning. Here are some tasty extracts:
From Automata:
“When you aggregate all of these individual reading and writing agents, it looks more
like a landscape of cellular automata than a tradition publishing model.”
–> his point being that next-generation Internet content will be much like
cellular automata – “dynamic, member-generated, and excitable”.
From Alchemy: “…how
we describe something is in itself an act of creation, beyond simply representing some
external object.”
Goldstein goes on to identify some Internet alchemists and “alchemical moments in the
history of the World Wide Web”. He riffs beautifully on Joshua Schachter’s del.icio.us,
Marc Andreesen’s web browser, Yang and Filo’s Yahoo, Bezos’ Amazon, Omidyar’s eBay, and
Page and Brin’s “simple search box”.
Summary
If you have any interest in the future of the Web – and I presume that you do
if you read my blog 😉 – then go check out Curley’s latest speech and Goldstein’s
inspired writing. I’ll follow-up with some thoughts of my own, when I get a chance
to dive back into the river and have a decent swim 😉
