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Monday, December 5, 2005
A question for the listening audience 
| | Let's say I want to listen to Internet radio in my car, using a laptop equipped with a Verizon (or equivalent) EVDO broadband connection, and either a direct connection to the car audio system, or short-range broadcast through one of those little FM thingies. |
| | Anybody know of any problems with that? Say, with handing off from one cell to the next, or with the carrier's own policies? |
The Live branch
| | There's a split in the Web. It's been there from the beginning, like an elm grown from a seed that carried the promise of a trunk that forks twenty feet up toward the sky. |
| | The main trunk is the static Web. We understand and describe the static Web in terms of real estate. It has "sites" with "addresses" and "locations" in "domains" we "develop" with the help of "architects", "designers" and "builders". Like homes and office buildings, our sites have "visitors" unless, of course, they are "under construction". |
| | One layer down, we describe the Net in terms of shipping. "Transport" protocols govern the "routing" of "packets" between end points where unpacked data resides in "storage". Back when we still spoke of the Net as an "information highway", we used "information" to label the goods we stored on our hard drives and Web sites. Today "information" has become passé. Instead we call it "content". |
| | Publishers, broadcasters and educators are now all in the business of "delivering content". Many Web sites are now organized by "content management systems". |
| | The word content connotes substance. It's a material that can be made, shaped, bought, sold, shipped, stored and combined with other material. "Content" is less human than "information" and less technical than "data", and more handy than either. Like "solution" or the blank tiles in Scrabble, you can use it anywhere, though it adds no other value. |
| | I've often written about the problems that arise when we reduce human expression to cargo, but that's not where I'm going this time. |
| | Where I go is toward building an understanding of the Live Web as something very different than the static Web we've known for a decade. That difference is why, for example, Google separates its main (static Web) search and its blog (live Web) search. So... |
| | ...one effect of the search engines' success has been to concretize our understanding of the Web as a static kind of place, not unlike a public library. The fact that the static Web's library lacks anything resembling a card catalog doesn't matter a bit. The search engines are virtual librarians who take your order and retrieve documents from the stacks in less time than it takes your browser to load the next page. |
| | In the midst of that library, however, there are forms of activity that are too new, too volatile, too unpredictable for conventional Web search to understand fully. These compose the live Web that's now branching off the static one. |
| | The live Web is defined by standards and practices that were nowhere in sight when Tim Berners-Lee was thinking up the Web, when the "browser war" broke out between Netscape and Microsoft, or even when Google began its march toward Web search domination. The standards include XML, RSS, OPML and a growing pile of others, most of which are coming from small and independent developers, rather than from big companies. The practices are blogging and syndication. Lately podcasting (with OPML-organized directories) has come into the mix as well. |
| | These standards and practices are about time and people, rather than about sites and content. Of course blogs still look like sites and content to the static Web search engines, but to see blogs in static terms is to miss something fundamentally different about them: they are alive. Their live nature, and their humanity, defines the live Web. |
| | It is essential that we understand the live Web on its own terms, rather than those leveraged from the static Web. |
| | Blogging predated syndication, but it was syndication that began to give form to the live Web. Syndication provided a way for people, and the tools they use, to pay attention (through subscription) to feeds from syndicated sources. At first these sources were blogs and publications, but later they came to include searches for topics of conversation, including the names of authors, URLs and permalinks for particular blog posts or news stories. Many of those sources were not the blogs themselves, but search engines reporting the results of keyword and URL searches. |
| | Kudos go to Dave for bringing syndication to life, giving everybody with a blog a hyper'd form of the power only newspapers and magazines enjoyed for a century or more. As a fresh grace on humanity, I can't think of anything better. |
A new high
| | Other people (though not many) may fly more than Marc Tacchi, but nobody blogs more about it. Even me, with all my zillions of pictures. |
One week away
| | I'll be doing the same again this time. Plus a conversation with Jonathan Schwartz. Plus the brief opening talk, since I'm the conference chair. Disclosure: it's a paying gig. Also why that little item is over there on the right, where it will stay through the show. |
| | It should be a fun event. While on the one hand it does conform to certain pro formalities (tutorials, tracks, sessions, keynotes) that conference-goers (and -givers) still expect, we are also going out of our way to make every session as interactive and conversational as possible. Even though we've lined up a lot of good speakers, we know balance of brainpower and knowhow is tilted to the participants formerly known as "the audience". |
| | We should have plenty of wi-fi. Blogging is encouraged. (Blogs of participants are already listed, with more on the way.) IT Conversations will podcast it. |
Press, sure
| | It¹s not about saving anything. Instead, this is about seizing the opportunity of the internet and whatever that brings. |
| | The people here who are trying to save papers are concentrating on the wrong assets... |
| | I'll say it again: Distribution is not king. Content is not king. Conversation is the kingdom. It's about relationships. Burda gets it. That's what my conversations in Europe were about. |
| | Those are three lines in a piece about 5000x longer than that, and with about 2000x the links. All required reading, if you care about this stuff, which many of us (especially those, like me, in the employ of print publishers) do. |
| | I just disagree with Jeff about one thing. |
| | Print is good. People like print. The reality and the metaphor of print are basic and inescapable. Newspapers without paper are like houses without kitchens. Somehow they don't qualify for the definition. Newspapers are embedded in culture. Saving newspapers means saving newspapers. Not just websites with newspaper names. |
Maybe he'd use more hand gestures?
| | Ethan Zuckerman: It¹s interesting to think about what Jon Stewart might look like if he wasn¹t able to get on the air in the US - maybe he¹d be a blogger like Beppe Grillo. |
My electrician is in a hurry to place an order
| | If you have any answers, feel free to post them. |
The Times, they are a-blogging
| | Last Thursday, the paper ran another big blogging piece, The new faces of the city, on the front page of the Weekend section. Featured were heathervescent, Hot Dog Spot, and others I don't have time to link to, because I'm on a backup laptop while the main ones are down, and this one is slow as shit. |
| | Anyway, seems like the LA Times has blogging on the brain. As it should, of course. |
| | If you want to read the pieces, I suggest you start soon, because they're due to scroll behind the &%$# paywall pretty soon. |
Just a couple points
| | I added the text to the picture, becuase it reminds me of that old saying, which I think may have come from Lyndon Johnson (that would make sense), but could have come from anywhere. |
| | I heard it for the first and only time when I was in college, going on forty years ago. |
| | I never could forget it, which is why I couldn't resist mashing that picture up with the text. |
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