Linkaholics Unite!
It’s a sunny Monday morning here in Tartu, and the sun has stimulated the grey cells a bit.
After all, every now and then, one has to make sense of the world. We can stumble around in the dark most of the time. But we all need those occassional great moments of — Aha! Like when you finally find that sock that went missing last Christmas. Like when you finally make perfect hollandaise. Like … well ok, back to business.
Here is the epiphany. And it is good news. The web (as a tool) is moving towards a weird sort of distributed coherence. Huh? I imagine readers around the globe raising an eyebrow and getting ready to find another blog. Wait!
What I mean to say is that linking is starting to create coherent “streams” of information that stimulate learning — not just overload us with data.
Case in point. Yesterday I happened to read a post by BBC on how a painting of the murder of Thomas Becket is in danger from exposure to the elements. It was a random injection of info, but it got me thinking about Becket … and the great film “Becket” starring Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole. A few years ago I would have probably forgotten about it. But I when I visited YouTube, there it was … with links to related interviews with the actors, information about Becket and on and on. From a Charlie Rose interview of Peter O’Toole I learned why the London theatre went into a decline decades ago, which explained why Burton and O’Toole went into film. … who, BTW were great friends, and drank and smoked way too much. I am forming links in my own mind to these various streams of information.
You want more? Check out this post from TechCrunch by Erick Schonfeld (that I found on TechMeme) called “Jump into the Stream”. Erick makes the same point — the paradigm for the web is moving away from the idea of “web pages” and fixed packets of information to information streams. It’s a great post. Just to prove my point, Erick took his ideas from Jeff Borthwick - who started off this “stream” concept. Now I get to share this great thread which gives it a tiny push forward to “mainstream” thinking. This will sooner or later make graphic designers realize that content management is more than just filling out a web page.
Fred Wilson makes the same point in his blog — relating to the future of TV - as usual, Fred is right on.
Enjoy!
FOLLOW - Or go to this NYT article to see how the web is changing how univesity students learn (by visiting “cramster”)
May 18th, 2009 at 12:53 pm
I think that this is right, but we have to remember that even while we treetop dwellers spend our time swinging through the jungle canopy there still needs to be deep information feeding (and supporting) the web’s roots. In other words the stream still needs something to link TO. At some level web pages, blogs, news reports etc. still need to be produced in order to allow the kind of grazing described here.
To switch back to the water metaphor, a world of streams isn’t meaningful without riverbeds, pebbles and boulders to give the stream shape and direction. So, go with the flow, but watch out for the rocks…
May 18th, 2009 at 4:13 pm
Thanks Drew - that is a nice comment and I agree. But I guess my basic idea here is that the more we link, the more we create demand for meaningful web content — things to link to. So far, from my perspective, this seems to be working pretty well. I see more and more meanginful content available, more linking between content providers, more tracking and updating and through that more “coherence”. I see this as an enhanced learning opportunity that we didn’t have before. But you are right to point out that somebody still has to create the meaningful content. It doesn’t just spontaneously generate.