It's
been awhile since I forecast the future of blogs. I am increasingly
convinced that what will drive almost all technologies for the
foreseeable future is simplicity, disguising under-the-hood sophistication, enabled by elegant design.
The digital divide is getting ever-wider, and we need to have tools
that will let us more easily pull friends, colleagues and family
members who are quickly being left behind, into the information age. As
I've mentioned before, my father is my benchmark for technology -- I
can get him to use e-mail (though attachments are a challenge), and
Skype, and even to view our daughter's wedding pictures on Flickr, but
not to get a webcam or to participate in online forums. That's the
dividing line that will, I believe, largely determine the future
success of technologies, including blogs.
What is the simplest way to allow people to 'publish' and otherwise share their stuff with others? Drop it in an electronic 'mailbox'.
Bandwidth and storage are now both so cheap that we will soon not care
about 'mailing costs' or 'storage costs' for information, photos,
software, or anything else that can be represented in bits. So why not
just have a folder that sits on our hard drive for everything we are
willing to share with others? Whenever we initially save or change a
document, message, or other file, we would be prompted to decide who it
could, and who it should, be shared with. It would then be tagged,
indexed and permissioned, and a shareable (XML+) version would be
created automatically. All of the stuff in the Shareable Stuff folder
on our hard drive would be subscribable by others, using the indexing
and tags, and subject to permissioning access restrictions we had
personally decided on. Google and other search engines would spider it
(and probably keep archive copies of it). A viewer trying to access
this via a search engine, via a bookmark, or via a subscription, would
be able to view it either in the context of other articles with the
same index or tags, alphabetically (for browsing), or in reverse
chronological order (blog-style, for 'newsreading' and getting up to
date).
Eventually this Shareable Stuff folder might cease to
reside on our hard drives entirely (except as a back-up and off-line
version) -- it could sit out in cyberspace, accessible anytime from any
device anywhere.
The next stage would be to make this Shareable
Stuff collaborative. If I'm reading something from someone else's
Shareable Stuff, I would be able to comment, adapt or annotate it and
then, if I'm appropriately permissioned by the original author(s),
those additions and changes (appropriately 'signed' to show they were
from me) would be made to the authors' 'original' version.
Alternatively, if I just want to annotate or change it for my own
purposes, my 'copy' (with the original authors identities or
'signatures' maintained) would be added to my own Shareable Stuff
folder. It would, in turn, be accessible by those I have permissioned
to view my Shareable Stuff folder, and they might further annotate it.
This
would create wiki-style collections of stuff that would ultimately
become 'collectively' owned -- each of the 'collective' owners would
have their own copies with any private annotations they did not want to
share, but there would be an emergent 'collective' collection that
would in effect be owned jointly, with each of the members agreeing to
honour a particular indexing, tagging and permissioning protocol for
the collection that might, for example, allow (a) anyone to subscribe,
(b) only certain specified people to append comments, and (c) only
members to edit or change. The 'official' copy could reside anywhere
(it would be any member's copy minus that member's 'private'
annotations).
I know this sounds complicated, but all this
detail would be hidden under the hood, invisible to the individual
writer or reader. From their perspective, it couldn't be simpler:
- Whenever you save a file (document, message or whatever) you would be prompted to decide:
- how to index (subject or category) and tag (keywords) the file, and
- who the file, or the changes or annotations you have made to the file since it was last saved, should be immediately shared with (those people would immediately get an e-mail) and who it could be shared with.
Defaults
would usually make this decision as simple as clicking 'OK', drawing on
the indexing, tags and permissioning that applied the last time you
saved the file, or those that were suggested by the initial author of
the document or message, or the permissioning you have assigned to
other files with the same index or tags.
- The search engines would spider everything that you've said could
be shared with others and, if the search engine makes a copy of the
whole file to more quickly respond to search queries, it would also
pick up permissioning restrictions you have specified, and honour those
before granting access to those doing search engine queries.
- The RSS engines would be pinged whenever you save a file that you say could
be shared with others, and deliver that to anyone who subscribed to
your stuff. Subscribers could choose to subscribe to everything you
write that you permission for general consumption, or just subscribe to
stuff that meets certain indexing or tagging criteria.
So in an extreme case, you could simply make all your stuff available to anyone who was interested. Your entire hard drive
would then become (a) a filing cabinet -- in the form of a huge wiki --
open to the public to browse and (b) a weblog documenting everything
you write as you write it. You wouldn't have to do a thing except write
(or draw, or podcast, or whatever it is you do to communicate and
record your stuff). No need to set up and maintain separate
weblogs or wikis, no need to 'publish' anything, no need to keep
e-mails in a different format from anything else you write. No need to
worry about different formats at all. The system would automatically
'blackline' the changes and annotations you made to any file since your
last 'save' so that people who should or could read them get to see
precisely what changes you have made in context, and don't need to
re-read the entire file.
You may have noted that this 'system'
uses the 'save' command as the trigger to share stuff. And of course we
don't just 'save' when we're finished writing. We 'save' often because
of the shoddy and unreliable hardware and software we are forced to use
by the technology vendor oligopolies (sorry, I couldn't resist). So we
would need to differentiate between 'save in case the system crashes'
and 'save because we're done writing'. Maybe we call these 'save' and
'done' respectively.
My father could handle this.
With this system, everyone
becomes a blogger and a wiki writer, just by writing in whatever
applications they're comfortable with. In fact a single
meta-application, a kind of superwiki, could be developed for producing
bits in any format, with all the underlying applications and
translation code shoved under the hood where the end user needn't worry
about them.
You know who could rather easily do all this for us, of course. I'll give you a hint -- their name starts with a G.
Cartoon above is from this week's New Yorker by ex-National Lampooner
PC Vey. It brilliantly and poignantly captures what all of us (and our
spouses) felt and feared when we started blogging (and sometimes still
do). I'm getting it as a sweatshirt to go along with my Alex Gregory dog cartoon. Get your favourite New Yorker cartoons as prints or apparel here. Cartoonists need our support. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
