Digital Town Mouse
Since I’ve accidently been on Mara’s block list for about 2 years, I thought I’d make a summary of the most important developments in that time. Hopefully there will be useful information here so you can get familiar with these services if you haven’t tried them already.
You have to stay abreast of the trends more than ever because the information age will be run by an ever narrowing technologically elite, those who know how to process and manipulate digital information. If the web-service uptake in your family is lagging by years (just working out what ebay is? still using a nasty mail account from the 90s?) then you may be in danger of becoming rural outcasts of the digital town.
A few observations:
1. There is no such thing as information overload, just information mismanagement (otherwise you’d walk into a library and your head would explode).
2. The propensity for real time information has changed the media landscape such that we can now receive information faster than news agencies can distribute it to us, bypassing corporate interests and widening the editorial window - there are now clear distinctions between the operations of traditional news agencies - ‘old-media’ and the modern ‘new media’.
3. Information in web 2.0 comes to us, we do not sift around it.
4. There is a quickening trend for information management and applications to be outsourced to ‘cloud’ services.
5. Since interconnectivity is the key driver, open transparent standards rule, services adopting open standards are embraced.
These are important points, and I’ll list some important technologies you should be aquainted with.
3. Old Media vs New Media
Traditional news agencies have had to change drastically and it’s now a common site to find a pair of giggling elbow-jostling casual presenters or the rise of ‘personality’ in serious presenters in a bid to keep up with the democratic face of the internet blogger. They will presumably start hiring blog-stars as it seems news agencies aren’t sure what they should be doing.
4. RSS Syndication
Most commercial content-driven sites have an orange RSS icon or link somewhere on the page and this relates to point 3 - Information comes to us, we don’t search for it - we’ve got better things to do.
The old way of doing things (which you are still doing if you don’t know what RSS is, and what a shocking waste of time that would be) is to trawl around your favourite news websites / blogs / whatever - and hopefully chance upon something that interests you.
With RSS, you subscribe to the feeds which are of interest to you and they are delivered to you. Then you may quickly glance at the headlines, perhaps marking the ones which you may want to read and eventually read them when you have free time. Try it out with Google Reader, ask me if you don’t get something - but start using it now.
The important distinction between the old way and the new way is this idea of ‘push’ and ‘pull’ technologies. If you are going to a news website to find a page, you are ‘pull’-ing the content rather than the service sending it to you. This is a waste of your time considering much of the content will not be relevant. Similarly, if you have to sign in to gmail to see if there is mail for you (even if there is not) - this is ‘pull’, if you receive an email the instant it is received by the server, this is ‘push’.
This will hopefully also answer why iPhone 2.0 has been boasting about ‘push’ email/calendar etc.
Twitter
Twitter is service where you can write a status message for the world to see, such as ‘I’m on the way back from Paris’, but you can think of it as a revolution in broadcast messaging (think long range broadcast radio as opposed to private sms). This has rocked media houses who are now out-done in their reporting by first hand witnesses. For example, Twitter users were aware of the chinese earthquake faster than any major news outlet. Similarly, I receive real time news on the move from news agencies such as the guardian, from friends, from random people I’m ‘following’ or even by tracking keywords I’m interested in - such as ‘iPhone’, ‘Flex’. What makes Twitter unique is the range of ways you can interconnect and update this message - I can send it a message by chat, by sms, by phoning it which could come in very useful for many reasons.
My mates Gordon Brown, Barack, even old John McCain are on board
Cloud Services
Operating systems of the future will most likely be run remotely (there is talk of a ‘google operating system‘) and so there is a gold rush for tech companies to control this future arena (hence Microsoft desperately needs Yahoo to compete, hence apple me.com, google docs, adobe buzzword; etc.).
Standards in an Interconnected World
This is the age of interconnectivity and so old closed market models such as Microsoft require radical change in order to compete. The open source model looks to be way software is developed and maybe even how societies will organize themselves. Google is one such service which embraces open standards.
So in summary, start aggregating your news, start embracing ‘push’ technology (stop chasing information), give up all non-standards compliant software / protocols such as hotmail / Internet Explorer, start twittering, start using PIM tools.