Among my most propelling reasons to launch and maintain my blog was this: web-logging had caught on like a blaze, empowering everybody with a very simple, yet powerful publishing tool. RSS was the hip thing. I wanted to engage in this community and find out first hand what it was all about. A blog is your personal story you want to share with anyone who'd care to listen - you piece the words, the images, the videos and tell a story. Despite the anarchy and consternation it created in the formal publishing world, this was the last that the voice of the web would be this coherent.
XML feed - a standardized presentation of data - is the foundation of this technology. So regardless of blogspot or typepad or wordpress or your own private installation, everyone can subscribe to everyone else's blogs. One other technology that bloggers need to thank: the browser. Its what made access to your blog platform-agnostic.
Multiple changes have coincided since then:
1. the collective amorphous voice of the web is less interested in writing a story and more in sharing raw data in real time
2. the 'cloud' has developed a gluttonous appetite to absorb data
3. the web has long grown out of the browser and into mobile apps
4. walled gardens have set up camp and very successfully too
The result? Crazy s***load of data pushed into the cloud every day. This is not too bad really. What the web is struggling with currently is fragmentation. And that's directly influenced by 3 and 4 above.
You can upload videos in youtube or presentations in slideshare etc. And even though you're using different services, you have the power to stitch them all together, any which way you like by embedding links or scripts into your html. Not so with walled gardens - the most famous one being FB. Interestingly, FB exploits the open access of the web (eg: those ubiquitous 'like' buttons in non-FB parts of the web) while guarding studiously its own space from external services.
Mobile apps have created a different problem altogether. iTunes - another walled garden - is the platform that created mobile apps. Mobile apps are inherently platform dependent. Your total available reader-base is limited by the platform on which the app runs on.
The web today is fragmented. The question is 'so what?'. So what if the basic tenets of the 'world wide web' and its courier service, the lowly browser have been challenged?
1. The online audience is now fragmented. It was that you could publish at http://www and potentially get visited by everybody with network connectivity. Not anymore. You may be online but not logged into specific online platform. You may be online but on a specific mobile device. If you now yearn for the 'global presence' that once used to be served with a simple domain installation, here's your minimum investment:
a. website b. facebook page c. twitter account d. mobile apps - atleast one for apple and another for android (and I won't even get into the various flavors of android)
That's minimum. If you're a knitter and selling patterns, you gotta be on ravelry.
The other add-ons would be a 'channel' on youtube to publish videos, podcasts (the personal radio channel - are they still alive?), etsy or other marketplaces (if you're selling things), HP's magcloud (if you're selling pdfs), betterfly (if you're selling instructional classes). This is just to give you a taste of things. I do not claim to know all the individual services available out there. Point is, there are way many and way too scattered.
2. Along these lines, one quickly starts seeing the effort in managing a coherent, visible and dynamic online presence. Apps are clearly for the big players but even between publishing on your website, and re-publishing on every credible closed platform, that's a lot of re-work. And with how frequently the web expects to get refresh data, that's a load of work.
3. That was the publishing entity's story. But what about the consumer? Researching information online is turning into black art. A very important section of the internet may be completely hidden in your blind spot and you will never know.
4. Finally, fragmentation of a single user's cyber presence.
In all this, I haven't even touched upon google gadgets and facebook apps. Neither those 234 buttons to share, tag and bookmark links.
Google's search is not good enough anymore. RSS aggregators are old news. The new problems need 2 unified platforms:
1. one to publish
2. another to consume
Life would be simple again!
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