Media Flows
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 ;-)
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Hi Richard - If you want to evenly distribute your "Bloglines splashing", check out my Bloglines Splicer web app - http://jonaquino.textdriven.com/bloglines_splicer . I wrote it specifically for the very problem you face: too many feeds and not enough time. The solution: cutting across feeds "horizontally" rather than reading them "vertically".
Posted by: Jonathan Aquino | April 22, 2005 4:51 PM
The "river of news" analogy is exactly how I use my Yahoo Ticker populated with items from My Yahoo. My RSS feeds just scroll in my Windows taskbar throughout the day. I have the opportunity to grab things as they scroll, but if I am busy or miss them, no big deal.
It is interesting how some aggregators treat posts within news feeds as some type of gem that must be kept safely stored. Some even make it seem as if attention must be made to new posts - action needed! It is almost like having a whole new inbox to check and browse through.
A lot of us feeling the pressure of information overload will likely realize this river cannot be dammed up with your aggregator - you will drown. Let the news flow. Most of the important stuff will become apparent through repetition from various sources anyway.
Posted by: Brady Joslin | April 23, 2005 4:09 AM
Should I mention.. "attention.xml"? hehe.
It's been a while I last saw a glimpse of your background in English literature (is that right?). yeah, your blog has turned a lot more professional or even media-like since you set the goals for this blog and even went web 2.0 :) but hey, that's greatly appreciated!
BTW, thanx for the great introduction to the two above.
(and yeah, I'll just go by Danny, I've concluded that's much easier!)
Posted by: twdanny | April 23, 2005 3:55 PM
Thanks for the comments folks. You're exactly right Danny, the old creative writing style sometimes gets hidden behind the veil of business-talk. It's a balancing act between professional and creative writing ;-)
Posted by: Richard MacManus | April 24, 2005 2:44 PM