The web as platform: The distributed self

Been thinking about a bunch about content creation and the web lately (sounds like Cameron Neylon and Google Wave, but not quite as ambitious).  Part of it is “new shiny toy syndrome”, but also from the way the web is evolving and my own thoughts around distributed content and presence on the web.  Some of those early thoughts around online presence are were written up when I first investigated posterous but some of these have been in my head for a while and recent posts by Steve Rubel and others and discussions on This Week in Google have brought some more nuance to those thoughts, although they’re still incomplete. 

I’ve always been a proponent of distributed content, where the destination is not as important as the specific object, and the web with it’s search and discovery mechanisms helps you find those objects and the discussions around them.  Today we are somewhat fragmented because we aren’t quite there yet, but as we move to an event and notifications based web (read Anil Dash‘s wonderful post on the Pushbutton Web) does a single destination site matter any more.  I know I don’t bookmark any landing pages.  Everything comes to me via search, RSS, Friendfeed, and when notifications become more mainstream that will only take it one step further.   There is a chapter in Beautiful Data that refers to the event driven web as well.  It’s actually not one of the better chapters in the book, but you get a sense of the direction the web is going.  In fact an image from Anil’s post actually explains it best

Before I had written this post, I had removed my blog from the list of Posterous destinations, but as I was writing this, mostly Steve’s posts and Anil’s post, I went back to using Posterous as a more general conduit.  Today it uses email; tomorrow it might use some other mechanism, one even more pushbutton; or it might even be something else altogether.  The point is that in a truly distributed environment, we need to think distributed, so while individual sites are important, where your content lies isn’t as important as how it can be found, especially if you are not trying to monetize eyeballs.  So science related stuff stays on bbgm and c2cbio, a wiki/portal which serves as a personal and general resource, specialized sites for pictures and video, a conduit/scrapblog, and to bring everything together for discussions and conversations, there is Friendfeed (if you’ll notice, I use Twitter in the same way as I do my phone number or email address, i.e. as a messaging environment)

There is a flip side, making your blog a one stop shop.  You can use your blog to orchestrate activity streams, aggregate all your data and in general act as the hub for all online activity, but having tried that and done that for a while, just found it too constricting, and the success of Friendfeed was probably the tipping point.  That said, I can see others using this approach quite successfully

In the end it boils down to this.  As a content producer, will that content be found.  You don’t want to dilute it too much, duplicate it too much, and make it too noisy, but in the end, as long as you can find the content via the various mechanisms available today, it should not really matter where it originated.  And that is the flip side of the web of tomorrow.  It will not be about destinations, but about objects and entities which get distributed and discovered in various ways.

To be continued …

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