You just gotta read this article. Wonderful stuff in here.
- Normally I would simply link to the URL, but in all their wisdom, Linux Journal wants everyone to create an account before they can read this essay. WTF?!?!? Never mind that Doc Searls’ thesis is about individual people helping individual people – and that this happens through blogs. You would think Linux Journal would sleep in their own bed.
The article can now be read online and as such, I am only including a few choice exceprts. Please read the entire article =)
Linux for Suits – The World Live Web
By Doc Searls
Created 2005-10-31 02:00
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”.
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. Instead I’m making the simple point that large portions of the Web are either static or conveniently understood in static terms that reduce everything within it to a form that is easily managed, easily searched, easily understood: sites, transport, content.
The static Web hasn’t changed much since the first browsers and search engines showed up. Yes, the “content” we make and ship is far more varied and complex than the “pages” we “authored” in 1996, when we were still guided by Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision of the Web: a world of documents connected by hyperlinks. But the way we value hyperlinks hasn’t changed much at all. In fact, it was Sergey Brin’s and Larry Page’s insights about the meaning of links that led them to build Google: a search engine that finds what we want by giving maximal weighting to sites with the most inbound links from other sites that have the most inbound links. Although Google’s PageRank algorithm now includes many dozens of variables, its founding insight has proven extremely valid and durable. Links have value. More than anything else, this accounts for the success of Google and the search engines modeled on it.
I bring this up because 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.
I replied that I was already 57 years old and tired of pushing large rocks up steep hills for short distances-also of getting flattened by the rocks that rolled back over me. I told him blogging might make Sisyphus’ life a bit easier in some cases, but that its better leverage was on snowballs. My work as a blogger, I explained, is rolling snowballs downhill. Some I create new; others I push along, adding a small measure of mass along the way.
My point: rolling snowballs is way different from building sites and transporting content. Not totally different, perhaps, but enough to fork the Web.
Today there are a half-dozen engines devoted to searching the live Web. They’re all different. Blogpulse stresses trending and ranking (with a great UI and excellent graphics). PubSub doesn’t offer Web search but instead concentrates on keyword search feeds to users’ aggregators. Bloglines integrates search with aggregation and other services. IceRocket emphasizes performance and simplicity. Technorati focuses on rapid indexing, tag search and hot topics. Feedster leads with personalization and index size.
All those characterizations are simplistic and incomplete. They are also obsolete by the time you read this. The whole category is changing as rapidly as the individuals and social trends they follow, as well as the technologies that make them possible and the developers who do new things with those technologies. A couple days ago I talked with a new company that gathers and syndicates conversation around local businesses and services, making the Live branch of the Wide Web as local as possible. I have at least one of these conversations every week.
Is it possible that “live” will join “free” and “open” in our pantheon of adjectives? Possibly. Whether or not it does, I’d like to thank my son Allen for being the first to utter “World Live Web”, providing me with a perspective I never knew I lacked, until I heard it.
His original vision of the World Live Web was a literal one: a Web where anybody could contact anybody else and ask or answer a question in real time. When he first encountered the Web, as a researcher, he saw it as something fundamentally deficient at supporting the most human forms of interaction: the kind where one person increased the knowledge of another directly.
We’ve moved a long way in the live direction since Allen first introduced me to the concept. VoIP alone is a huge live category. Mobile Web progress will all happen along its live branch.
Where it goes exactly is anybody’s guess. All we can say for sure is it’s headed toward the sky.
Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal. [2]
Links
[1] http://microformats.org
[2] https://www.ssc.com/lj/subs/NewUSA.html
Source URL: http://interactive.linuxjournal.com/article/8549
More reading:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8573
1 thought on “World Live Web by Doc Searls”
Sorry that article was still behind the subscription wall. That’s fixed now. Anybody can come read it here.
All our articles, far as I know, are only behind the registration wall only until the current issue is off the newsstands. This article was in the December issue, which has since been replaced by January.
Thanks for digging it. Much appreciated.
Doc