I'm exploring the Design for Data thread and later in this post I'm going to get arty on ya'll. I think tomorrow I'll begin to investigate Atomflow, but for now let me give you an informal overview of my thoughts so far: 

- it's about movement of data/content (in time); not places where data/content resides. A word that I've been noticing lately, which I think sums this up nicely, is momentum. Portability is another word I like: not tied to one place.

- Design for Data is about the user being in control of their webfeeds (RSS and Atom). Whereas the reality circa 2004 is that it's still mostly the content producer that has control over feeds.

Think about it - blogging is currently more people-centric than topic-centric, because you're subscribing to a person and you generally can't filter out the content that you don't want to read from that person. What if you, the user, could aggregate feeds from people but only view the topics you want, or automatically filter content according to your tastes? This is something developers are beginning to explore now and it's basically all about giving control of data/content back to the user.

- Design for Data is about DYI websites for the users. If you can aggregate your own content from a variety of sources, then does that mean a complete overhaul of what a "website" is? Traditionally a website is a "place", but increasingly it's about taking bits of content from movable webfeeds and making your own "place" to consume them. You and I have RSS Aggregators and our weblogs for this purpose, but Yahoo! sees this as an opportunity to be 'the place' where ordinary people aggregate their content. And they're going to mix in music and other multimedia too.

- It's all about Information Flow. And it's going to affect a lot of content creation industries.

- And it's also about Rip, Mix n' Burn. Re-using content is going to be where a lot of current "consumers" find their value in the webfeed system. Whether it be music, podcasts, other audio, multimedia, or just plain old text - it's all there to be re-mixed (putting the painful legal stuff aside for now!).

- Web of Ideas. That's a phrase I've long been attracted to and Design for Data is bringing us closer. As Joshua Porter commented recently: "The more we rip content away from visual style and present it in different contexts, the more we get closer to pure ideas. That is the goal, isn't it?" Indeed! p.s. I must read Nova Spivack's The Physics of Ideas - that's sort of what Joshua and I have been rapping about (found via The Grandmaster Flash of Meme Rapping, Marc Canter).

Visual design is a package for our data/content, but we want to make it easier for users to get at the kernels of truth via webfeeds!

There's much more, but I'm still exploring... now for an artsy-fartsy segue.

The red shed

I was feeling a bit down today. Being so far away from all the conferences and other Web events makes me feel sorry for myself sometimes. Which is why I can't understand all these disaffected US liberals who want to move to New Zealand - are you crazy? Webfeeds and ideas may be free to roam about the world, but the people who matter in the Web industry are still by and large in one place: America. You can't get anywhere in this world without F2F with your peers.

Anyways, at lunchtime I walked over to Te Papa, the national museum of New Zealand, to draw some inspiration from an exhibition of New Zealand artists (some pxts here).

This one painting, by Toss Woollaston, caught my eye because in a way it expressed what I'm thinking about with Design for Data. Here's the blurb which accompanied it:

"This orchard near Nelson was where Woollaston worked during the early 1940s. His landscapes are more a response to his surroundings than a literal depiction of them. He said he wanted to 'invent new strategies for reproducing not nature, but the emotions felt before nature.'"

I'm not sure if there is a connection... however one phrase I read later that was applied to this kind of painting (a form of expressionism I think, but I'm no art historian) is 'living paint'. There's a fusion between the oil paint and nature - and so the paint becomes 'alive'.

So too data (words, music, whatever is your preferred format) becomes 'alive' in webfeeds, in the sense that it moves, interacts with the world and is malleable...and produces ideas. So I think what I mean when I talk about Design for Data is 'living data'. Webfeeds (RSS and Atom primarily) are making content come alive to us.