25th
Set My Data Free?
There’s a conversation that’s been bouncing back and forth among my online circle lately. It involves the use of forums or collaboration sites to further our conversations or increase our visibility. Some feel this is a vital step forward. Others, like myself, either see little value in the idea or actually feel it would be a step backwards.
Yesterday, on Twitter, Michael Abbot suggested to Roger Travis that my Blogs of the Round Table (BoRT) was… well, let’s just quote him:
“@CorvusE BoRT is a model of how to have it both ways. Broad reach; individual voices.”
If you’re not familiar with the BoRT, it’s a monthly blogging event in which people are invited to post on a single topic. They submit the permalink to me and I add it to a MySQL table that updates a centralized list on my blog. However, it is important to me to make the BoRT as decentralized as possible. It is not my event—it is a community event. And although it may serve as a promotional tool for Man Bytes Blog, that’s a side effect. It would be more accurate to say that I’m leveraging hatever caché MBB might have to promote the BoRT contributors.
To this end, I ask that contributors include a drop down box at the end of their post ( I provide an IFRAME code that calls a script on my server), which automatically updates with new contributions so you can navigate the BoRT without the need to visit a centralized site.
Anyway… I joined in the Twitter conversation with the following:
“I see this as the pull between consolidation of access vs. consolidation of broadcast.”
I thought it would be worth following up and trying to clarify that a bit. When I first started using the internet, it looked a lot like this:
Lots of individual nodes at discreet URIs that I had to visit each node one at a time to see if any content had been added. Often times, as sites weren’t the data driven affairs they are now, the only way to tell if content had been added since your last visit was to click around the site for a while. This obviously wasn’t very efficient and posed a problem for the exceptionally curious. I wasn’t the only one to think so and a lot of people put their minds to finding a solution.
And so the search engine and the portal were born. Portals went and visited sites for you, scraping them for new information and letting you know if they found anything. Concurrently, internet forums became HUGE repositories and social meeting spots for like minded people to share their experiences, links, and ideas.
The problem here is one of homogony. Corporations, not wanting to be liable for presenting innapropriate content to minors, became gatekeepers of the signal—consolidating content into an editorial channel of their own choosing. There was suddenly a hidden message in the data—a message comprised as much of what they chose not to tell you, as what they did.
Community forums were also subject to power struggles over how to control the flow of information, as well as corporitization. The internet experience, while becoming ever more popular, became safer, more predictable, more bland, and less useful.
The answer to this issue lay in the technical solution to a problem portals had—ever increasing server loads. That answer was RSS—really simple syndication.
RSS, along with the rise of blogs, helped transform the face of the internet. Now we could easily return to the distributed broadcast signals of the early days and allow usere to consolidate their own signals. The portal sites haven’t gone away, but with the dramatic increases in internet citizenry, they have become more free to specialize and with our ability to consolidate their data into our feed, we can track more of them in less time than we once could.
This has given rise to the social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Friendfeed. These are nothing more than skeleton structures with APIs to allow customized input and output filters, as well as RSS, SMS, and email outputs—so it’s possible to interact with sites on your own terms, to a large degree. We have become the gatekeepers of our own individual portals. This allows us to connect directly to the content providers we wish and allows them to connect directly to us as well. This is consolidation of access to the data on the web.
You’ll notice what is missing from this final diagram—the community forum. I believe it is possible to decentralize a forum, but I have yet to find a community forum platform that uses RSS well, or allows new models of interacting with the conversation. Google Groups and Yahoo Groups aren’t a terrible platform, but they’re heavily branded and not highly customizable visually. The upcoming IGDA site is attempting to merge the concept of forums and mailing lists, which is an excellent start. But the idea still has some major issues to work out at this stage in its development.
I prefer this decentralization and expect it will continue. Ultimately I’d prefer to have a single application that used plugins to receive output from RSS feeds, email accounts, Twitter timelines, Friendfeed streams, and any other input I wished. And furthermore allowed me to fully interact via inputs of my own choosing—using SMS to comment on a Facebook shared item, emailing a Twitter reply, or leaving a voice mail message in response to a blog post.
I think there’s a place for both consolidated broadcasts and consolidated access. But until I never actually need to visit a web site to successfully interact with it—I’m not sure I’m going to feel the web has reached its true potential.
