Feeds are Just the First Step
Jeff Jarvis has a good post today about all the feeds, conversations, aggregations, and other kinds of thingies that make up what he calls Web 2.0. He says, “This is a new architecture. It's a dynamic architecture.”
It's even more than that — it's political. These meta-informational thingies are letting us see our online environment in ways we can't possibly see the offline world. What's important isn't just that these thingies are dynamic (although that's clearly important) but also that they can be (1) visualized and (2) affected by the attention of individuals. When humans can see something and act on it, they are suddenly in charge of their own environment. “Well, of course,” you say. “That's not a big deal. People have been able to see commercial web pages for ten years now.”
It is a big deal, because with all of this meta-informational depth (meta-information piled on meta-information, producing information of great quality — a term Ben Reeve invented, and something he understands better than anyone else) we can find issues and people we want to work on/with and then actually do something about it. That's the big difference. All this high-quality meta-information allows us to see the rules and roles that make up groups online, join those institutions for brief periods of time (because we're just the right person for the job) and change the world. Offline, it's hard to see who's in charge or what's really going on. Online, if enough information is available (and, boy, are we producing a lot of information), we can start to see patterns and form into groups on the fly.
What we'll do together in this new Web 2.0 isn't predictable, because we're joining a complex system that is growing more complex all the time. (In a real sense, online organizations are alive.) But it will be more fulfilling for us. The first step, though, is to realize (as Jeff has for a long time now, and many others) that meta-information is enormously valuable.
The next step is to have the tools that allow us to act on it — easily. That means ways to create groups with a click, show rules and roles and boundaries, include deliberation modules, allow adaptation and evolution and bank accounts, etc. We need all of this now. Groups are always more powerful than individuals acting on their own, and with all of this information we're ready to move on.
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3 Responses to “Feeds are Just the First Step”
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Susan, Great addition to Jeff's essay. It's hard to understand what's going on with the web right now because it's happening all around us and we have no perspective or context. But there is definitely a fundamental shift, and a huge reduction in friction. A true two-way web is emerging and evolving. This is what we are trying to track at techcrunch, and writings like yours further group thinking.
Mike
On another note, missed you in Luxembourg and hope to see you soon.
Sorry to ruin the Release 2.0 party, but one of the fundamental aspects of the Web (no need for a version number there) is precisely that feeds and resources and lists and sensors and all that stuff are not different kinds of animals, as Jarvis claims. As far as the Web is concerned, they are all really just special cases of resources, identified by URIs, and part of the Web overall.
We are not seeing a new architecture: We are seeing people finally make some good use of the existing one.
I don't disagree- we're seeing the emergence of a higher layer of applications that is useful. loosely, you could call that a change in the architecture — but I agree that the fundamental architecture of the web hasn't changed. Susan