Posts Tagged ‘Live Web’
May 25th, 2010 | 
Author: Until recently, the verb “syndication” was something big publishers and
agencies did. As a kid I recognized that “© King Features Syndicate” was the
one unfunny thing about Blondie or Dennis
the Menace. All it meant to me was some kind of Business was going on here.
Now, millions of individual writers syndicate their own works, usually
through RSS (Really Simple Syndication). Publishers and other large
organizations do too. This article is syndicated. So are updates to
product manuals, changes to development wikis, updates on SourceForge
and searches of keywords. You name it: if there’s something that updates
frequently on the Web, there’s a better chance every minute that the new
stuff is syndicated, if it isn’t already.
Far as I know, not many sources are making money with it. A lot, however,
are making money because of it. The syndicated world may not look like
an economy yet. But trust me, it is.
At this early stage in its long future history, syndication is primarily
a feature of blogging, which is primarily the product of too many people
to count. Blogging is not about large-scale things. It’s about human
beings who have no scale other than themselves. Only you can be good at
being you, and nobody else is the same as you. Syndication does more to
expand individual human potential than anything since the invention of
type. Or perhaps ever. The syndicated world economy is the one that
grows around unleashed personal powers of expression, productivity,
creation, distribution, instruction, influence, leadership–whatever.
In a loose sense, syndication is one side of conversation. Think about
conversation in the best sense of the word–the way people teach and
learn from each other, the way topics start and move along. Syndication
makes that happen in huge ways.
The notion that “markets are conversation”, popularized by The Cluetrain
Manifesto, was borrowed from the case I used to make for a form of
marketing that was far more natural and powerful than the formal kind:
- Markets are conversation, and
- Conversation is fire. Therefore,
- Marketing is arson.
If you want to set fires, start conversations that tend to keep going.
Nothing does the latter better than syndication.
There are three reasons why we still don’t hear as much about
syndication as we should (and will). First, it’s still new. Second, it
didn’t come from The Big Guys. (It came from
Dave Winer, father of
RSS (Really
Simple Syndication). Third, it points toward a value system not grounded
only in exchange, one especially suited for the Net, a deeply ironic
worldwide environment where everybody is zero distance apart.
But let’s park the value system until later and talk about next week.
That’s when I’ll be in San Francisco for Syndicate. It’s the second in a
series of conferences by that name. The first was held in New York last
spring.
Since I’m the conference chair (disclosure: it’s a paying gig), and
since I’ll be giving both the introductory talk and the closing keynote,
Syndication is on the front burner of my mind’s stove.
Other subjects are there as well, some of which will be visited
in sessions at the show. Tagging, for example.
That’s a practice so new it’s not even close to having
standards of the sort we find at OASIS, the IETF and the W3C. Instead, it
has emerging standards, such as the ones we find at
microformats.org.
Like syndication, tagging is a long-tail activity, something individuals
do. Along with blogging and syndication, it helps outline a new branch
of the Net we’re starting to call the Live Web–as opposed to the
Static Web with “sites” that are “built” and tend not to change.
“The World
Live Web” is the title of my December Linux For Suits column in
Linux Journal. In it
I note the directory-less nature of everything on the Web that falls
in the UNIX file path east of the domain name. Every path to a document
(or whatever) is a piece of straw in the static Web’s haystack. Google
and Yahoo help us find needles in that haystack, but their amazing
success at search also tends to confirm the haystack nature of the
Static Web itself.
The Live Web is no less webby than the Static Web. They’re both part of
the same big thing. But the Live Web is new, and very different. It
cannot be understood in Static Web terms.
In that piece I also observed that blogs, as continuing projects by
human authors, leave chronological trails. These give the Live Web
something of a structure: a chronological one that goes
/year/month/day/date/post, even if that’s not the way each post’s URL is
composed. There is an implicit organizational structure here, and it’s
chronological.
Tagging, by which individuals can assign categorical tags of their own
to everything from links to bookmarks to photos, has given the Live Web
an ad hoc categorical structure as well.
So that’s what we’re starting to see emerge here: chronology and
category. Rudimentary, sure, but real. And significant.
But not organized. New practices and new ideas are coming along too fast.
For Xtreme evidence of that fact, follow Steve Gillmor around. For the
last year or so, Steve has been directing the attention of everybody he
can to the subject of, well, attention. His message, or one of them, is
that Attention Matters, and that it’s worth something, both to those
that have it and those who want some of it. There’s your
economy-in-waiting, right there.
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