How to build the mesh - #2: Persistent, Ubiquitous Content
OK now that we’ve established that the #1 most important thing in building the mesh is the Human - and their ID, personas, social graph and groups they’re members of, what’s the second most important thing?
Content as infrastructure
I say the notion of persistent ubiquitous content. And when I say content - I mean all sorts of content - movies, TV shows, music and books - blog posts, links, RSS feeds, wikis - ideas, statistics, directories, memes, stories, articles, lists of links, concepts and most importantly personal expression byproduct.
What I mean by being persistent is that this content gets stored up on the web and is always there. And by ubiquitous - I mean its everywhere. So always there and everywhere.
What’s important to keep in mind when building the mesh is that everything starts and ends with the user, the customer, the human being who’s using the stuff. That’s why every one of these ‘blog series’ posts will have the user’s ID (profile page) at the center of the drawing. Then by overlaying any or all of these ‘domain’ drawings on top of each other, we’ll be able to get an idea of what the mesh will actually look like - which I’m betting will be a hodge-podge and distributed ‘mesh’ of inter-connecting pieces - loosely coupled together.
No one vendor will be able to dictate exactly how the mesh will evolve. It’ll be a hybrid combination of open and proprietary standards, all driven by market factors, latest trends and a gradual education of the mainstream populace as to the benefits of all this stuff.
You’ll also notice that I’ll put an RSS icon and the words - ‘DataPortability‘ and ‘Interoperability‘ on each chart - as well. Think of these things are portals or rabbit holes between each of the ‘areas’ I’m writing about.
Some of the connections between the components and areas of the mesh - will be based upon open standards, like RSS, OpenSocial or OpenID while others ‘connectors’ will be proprietary APIs, like Microsoft Windows Live Contacts APIs or MySpace APIs. And just so we’re clear - the purpose of these blog post series is to map out how these various kinds of areas will all exist unto themselves as their own unique dimensions connecting to humans and providing unique functionality for us all - moving forward.
If we (software developers) can all agree upon standardized constructs, such as an RSS feeds, shared public servers, user profile pages or groups - then we can have disparate implementations, techniques and solutions - while at the same time - provide a comprehensive, loosely coupled meshed architecture which anyone can contribute to and benefit from - just like the web.
This mesh doesn’t have to get LED by Microsoft or Google, but they can contribute to it - for sure. But I just wanna remind everyone that this all started with RSS and RSS readers - and the fact that no one (despite some efforts) owns or controls RSS. And even though HTML has it’s own little governance and political world surrounding it - it also is not ‘controlled’ by any one entity or constituency.
Over the years I’ve given up thinking that there’s one way to build the mesh, or that one set of altruistic standards and solutions will fit all.
As long as there is time - Microsoft will do it their own way. As the dusts of time accumulate we’ll see that Google is also it’s own world - unto itself. And there’s no way in hell you’re ever gonna tell Steve Jobs how to do something, he’s always gonna be his own man.
So now the questions are: “will Facebook continue to innovate, extend and grow - or just become a puppet aligned with Microsoft?” I’d also like to see if “MySpace will continue on it’s own path, or will it become subservient to Google?” And thank god for the Evan Williams’ of the world!
Politics aside - from a technology POV this is all possible, but it’s gonna take cooperation, devoid of ageism, sexism or capitalism to make this all work. Yes we all need to make money, but NO “you” don’t get to lock my balls up in YOUR vice. Ain’t gonna happen.
The little guys needs to live off the crumbs left behind by the behemoths and this whole thing needs to work around the world - evenly.
So as user’s behavior patterns shift and migrate and as vendors smarten up and start thinking of the user FIRST - in the center of all universes, I believe that the market trends and pressures from users will define the mesh. This series of blog posts simply lay out SOME of the domains, standard constructs and APIs - that will make up the mesh. it is by no means complete or exclusive.
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Technology solutions today enable users to assume that we can buy music (and soon) movies through the web just as easy as going to Virgin Megastore or Wal-Mart. Customers are getting over Blockbuster and are choosing NetFlix instead. Because of separate regional rights and languages - we’re seeing music and movie downloading and rental solutions pop up around the world.
End-uers are getting used to the notion of storing their files (text, spreadsheets, presentations, etc.), their media libraries (images, music, videos, etc.) and their ‘user generated content’ (blog posts, reviews, etc.) in storage facilities or storage lockers (as they’re sometimes referred to) - on the web. On-line storage is an entire market category, though it’s gonna be hard for small guys like Box.net and Omnidrive to compete with the likes of Amazon’s S3, AOL’s XDrive or both Microsoft and Google’s storage offerings (Live drive and GDrive.) But god bless them - they are alternatives to the bug guys.
But storing files you own and control is only part of what ubiquitous and persistent content is all about.
What I MOST excited about is when we can rely upon old news reels, stock photo libraries, statistics libraries, biographies and documentaries - from places like the BBC open project and the Internet Archive. Wikipedia is also morphing towards this sort of on-line knowledge dissemination and availability.
Pioneered by Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive - the idea of ‘backing up the web’ was so outrageous that I just couldn’t believe it when I first heard of it.
“You mean they’re going to backup - the entire web - how many times? Forever?”
And then when I heard about the BBC Open project - my head did a similar thump “you mean the entire library of everything the Beeb has ever done will be available - on-line forever?” (Of course we’ve found out later that its not quite everything and that it’s gonna take YEARS to get all the rights clearances - but at least they got the right idea!)
Soon after the Beeb announcement Pathe also made their catalog on-line BUT they were charging for it - and it was minuscule compared to what the Internet Archive and the Beeb have.
We tried to to do a storage play for bloggers, podcasters and vloggers called ourmedia.org (back then) - as a UGC front-end to the Internet Archive. But the same month we launched - YouTube launched. So we know what happened with that scenario.
Now persistent ubquitous content is available for everyone. Your great American rock video, novel, soap opera or viral video - can be stored up in YouTube (or blip.tv.meta-cafe, Revver, whatever [insert 40 brand names here.]
If you step back and think about content as infrastructure you can take a different attitude towards stock photos, soundtracks and beats, 3D models, 3D city models and all sorts of reusable digital content assets. You can bake historical references, sports statistics, background on diseases and weather trends into your blog posts and software. You can make collaborative hypermedia a dream come true.
A mesh which has ubiquitous persistent content in it - as a key construct - is a mesh that can provide health information, small business knowledge and courseware for all ages - free and built into word processors, email, spreadsheets or browsers.
A mesh which has ubiquitous persistent content in it - can enable entirely new kinds of record labels, movie studios and book publishers - which have a fighting chance of surviving. By lowering distribution, development and www costs - we can enable the Long Tail to at least cover their costs and pay the rent and feed themselves.
A mesh which has ubiquitous persistent content in it can seamlessly tie into other domains like the ‘Live Web‘ or ‘Tools‘- and seamlessly ‘mesh’ with other constructs like micro-content, aggregators or collections.
Persistent ubiquitous content is an idea who’s day has come.
I’m hoping that in all the billions of dollars of revenues, greed and exploitation of users, we can make sure to get enough content on-line and available for free - that new kinds of educational tools, knowledge bases and learning environments can evolve - to make our kids even smarter than we are.
Persistent ubiquitous content is a domain which can mesh into any other domain, construct and API. Here’s a chart outlining some of the ways I think of this:
Action Items in this area include:
- MORE free content - we’ll never be done, they’ll never be enough!
- APIs for content infrastructure - not sure what two-way APIs would be here - but they’re important!
- standards for content infrastructure - hmm - I wonder what that would look like?
- educational ‘objects’ - that’s an idea that’s been bantered around for a while!
- persistent conversations - which are re-entrant and annotatable. That’s what ThreadsML was all about.- and (of course) we need to continue to educate end-users on‘what the hell it is we MEAN by persistent ubiquitous content!
Action Items in general include:
- make sure that ALL the open standards continue to rise in popularity, that all implementations are compatible with each other and that more open standards get created
- testing and compatibility labs - a place where we can guarantee that everything works together. Building a COMPATIBLE mesh will be a challenge - and it won’t ever happen if things break or don’t work.
- two-way APIs - until we can write back into systems and services as easily as we can get data from those services we won’t have a symmetrical architecture and a successful mesh environment
- establish OutputThis as a standard for content producers to list all of the destinations they’d like to route their content - to. SEE Dataportability.
Summary of persistent data repositories discussed here:
Box.net, Omnidrive, S3, GDrive, Live Drive, XDrive, Wikipedia, Revolution Health, Stats Inc., Freebase, Twine, DMOZ, Technorati, Hulu, iTunes, Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, all sorts of wikis I didn’t even bother to put down. All the micro-content places - I’ll cover in the next post!
Major players and people to watch and listen to:
Brewster Kahle, J.D. Lasica, Ross Mayfield, Brad de Graf, Jon Lebkowsky, Harold Gilchrist, Susan A. Kitchens, Mike Linksvayer, Mary Hodder, David Weinberger, Howard Rheingold, Stephen Downes, B.K. DeLong, Brian Dear, Marc Eisenstadt, Christopher Allen, Aaron Swartz, Paolo Valdemarin, Jamie Faye Fenton, Bernard Goldbach, Jeremy Zawodny, Larry Lessig, Joi Ito, Jimmy Wales
Major organizations and advocacy groups:
BBC, Internet Archive, ourmedia, mediaventure, Creative Commons,
Final NOTE: This is my second post in this series - I ain’t done yet! Next up - #3 - shared structured content servers
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