I've seen the sentiment expressed of late that content is no longer being created and presented as creatively as it was on the earlier days of the web (read: a few years ago); that all the potential outlets for content are draining away the impulse to build weird and wonderful homes for our ideas. Certainly I've watched myself and many others blog far less because of Twitter. Personal sites have gotten duller, and more people seem to be migrating to "ego aggregators" that pull together an individual's activity across a variety of sites and services into one narrative stream.
The reason, I think, is this: some content makes sense here, and other content makes more sense over there. I could write a post about a web site I liked or build a special "links" section on this site, or I could put my link on del.icio.us. I could let you know that I listened to a new song a bunch, or I could automatically let Last.fm know. I could write posts about the daily mundanities of my life, or I could put them on Twitter where you could consume them voraciously, ignore them entirely, or something in between. I could record my consumer activities on this blog, or write reviews on Amazon.
For now, I'll put my content over there, because my content has more value for other people over there. It can be structured, tagged, archived, processed, taken in aggregate. Putting our content in specially-designed boxes is a stop-gap, a long bridge over the troubled waters that lead to the Semantic Web. There's no question that it's less creative, and maybe even a little unsettling to trust a faceless virtual entity with what we've thought, written, and produced. But it's efficient.
In a marketplace of ideas, you still have to go to market. You can sell out of your home, sure, but you'll do a brisker business if you head towards the optimal place to sell what you're selling. Jewelers work in the diamond district; I post links to del.icio.us. It's a strained analogy, but I'm sure you get my point.
To that end, I've added a sidebar here with links to the various places where I share content. I'm not ready for a full-on ego aggregator, but this'll do for interested parties.
Jul 17, 2007
Why This Is Here and That's There
3 comments:
Well, al3x. consider this. when you originally started blogging, it was an evolution of what I believe was hyouden.net, which was a simple text board where a select group of people could post updates and converse with each other. short messages. etc. you shut it down because it diverged from the original purpose, if i recall.
remember that? where do you work?
this is what we've been waiting for. blogs were first a way of communicating to your friends and interested parties. then they became "media" somehow. diverged from the original purpose. still useful, but not what you want.
share a link? de.li.cio.us. update your friends on the big picture? facebook. daily mundane activities? twitter. isn't this what we always talked about? technology to make doing things easier. not everything at once, but stuff that made sense.
I think that the many specialized services make sense for the keeping up with friends type stuff. Also realistically, not many people are good enough at writing to maintain a blog.
I remember hyouden quite fondly. I think that kind of system is great for boot strapping communities, and every internet enabled group of friends should have something exactly like it.
What is keeping you from doing a full on ego feed page? I am personally avoiding it because there isn't anything off the shelf that does exactly what I want (i.e. being able to run perfeed regex or even better giving me a little ruby interpreter). Jaiku, Profilactic, and tumblr come close, but no cigar.
Thanks al3x for weaving the Semantic Web into that explanation.
It is a very simple explanation for hinting at the full potential of the Semantic Web, one which I will try to remember for future efforts to explain the whole thing.
Maybe somebody who does not know the Semantic Web idea, might read this, so let me explain what the Semantic Web does, while sticking to the metaphor used:
The Semantic Web is about reclaiming those specialised boxes of content.
Right now you want to put e.g. links and bookmarks on delicious, because they have a certain structure and format, which is represented very well on delicious.
Imagine if this structure where independent of a specific website. Now you could put all those links and bookmarks back again on your own site. Delicious could then aggregate the bookmarks of the whole blogosphere.
The same could be done for pictures, reviews, event listings or any other kind of format or structure.
The result would be a Web where you do not have to aggregate your own stuff, but where dedicated sites could aggregate content based on the content format/structured.
This would represent an inversion of control, compared to today.
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