Eric Shonfeld at TechCrunch writes:
“Once again, the Internet is shifting before our eyes. Information is increasingly being distributed and presented in real-time streams instead of dedicated Web pages. The shift is palpable, even if it is only in its early stages.”
Twitter. RSS. Facebook. Digg. You-Name-It-Feed. It is becoming apparent that this is the next big shift in internet usage, and, as with the previous shifts, it is hard to guess what the effects will be, and who will be affected.
And this, like previous shifts, will not supplant previous internet use trends. HTML, or some form of it, will still be very dominant. Blogs and Wikis will continue to exist, and will be useful tools for certain types of communication and interaction. Integration will continue to be the norm, with the “now” infusing itself throughout. How will this change be considered dramatic?
“Traffic occurs in bursts, depending on what people are paying attention to at that second across a variety of services. Someone might notice an obscure blog post on Twitter, where it starts spreading, then it moves to FriendFeed and Facebook and desktop stream readers such as Tweetdeck or Seesmic desktop and before you know it, a hundred thousand people are reading that article. The stream creates a different form of syndication which cannot be licensed and cannot be controlled.”
This “cannot be licensed and cannot be controlled.” Think about this. How much of your web presence is based on control: control of layout, content, contributors, and most of all, control over the rate at which change occurs? For a library web site, how much of this control is able to be ceded before the concept of a library web site itself changes, without controls?
As with many future technology issues, now is the time to begin thinking, discussing, understanding all of this. We cannot begin the process of deciding or planning, because none of us can predict how this will play out. What will we have in place to deal with this, to anticipate this, to harness this? One benefit of this process will be the inevitable inspiration that some will have about the potential of streams; a future must-have library web site technology might come from this.
Start thinking!
