TheFlowInternet

ThoughtStorms Wiki

This is a very early piece. Historical value only.

Weblogs 1.0

Been seriously running this weblog for just over a month now. What have I learned?

(editor's note : this was originally written on my blog in 2001)

Scary how the ease of use, sucks you into spending more time surfing and contributing to it.

There are now two internets. The static internet, is the traditional internet full of permanent documents. The dynamic, or what I'll call flow internet, is the network of weblogs and newsfeeds.

The flow internet is more densely interconnected, more massively parallel, and more redundant (as information is echoed from one blog to another) than the static internet.

Actually, the flow internet is already a bit like Usenet - and could be made more so. (Maybe P2P is the buzzacronym I'm reaching for here :-)

Information need not be stored anywhere in particular. Drop a meme into the flow internet and it diffuses and reverberates through multiple sites.

By SmallWorldTheory the more weblogs there are, and the more connected they are, the shorter the number of steps between you and the information you want.

This is true of the static internet too. But on the flow internet, all you have to do is loiter in roughly the right locality and the information you want will soon come to a node near you.

On the static internet, the challenge is finding the right information. On the flow internet, the challenge is finding the right locality.

Similar

JonUdell has a good piece on the importance of the network of blogs : TheNetworkIsTheBlog

: highlights what was missing from the above : the blog network is Connectionism

MediaAsFlowsAndStocks

StoweBoyd finds it faster than ever in Twitter and FriendFeed : http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/2008/03/beyond-blogs-th.html

: Blogs get relegated to dead static archives while the conversation is in quicksilver twits : The way I am getting tugged to blog posts is increasingly as a mention within a conversational bite in Twitter or Friendfeed. I then click out of the flow to see the larger post, and offer my view in the flow – not on the blog – and then I return to the flow, where I will be spending most of my time.

Details

"How blogs work in 7 easy pieces" : http://www.streamlinewebco.com/blog/_archives/2004/3/23/28903.html

then follow the story spread in LinkPropagation

Marc Cantor is now thinking about something similar to a flow internet : http://blogs.it/0100198/2003/03/21.html#a799

ZbigniewLukasiak is generalizing this idea in his thinking about SocialRouting

The flow internet means that there are certain points, certain AddressableThings, which you trust to be interesting even though you don't know what's there.

Why not automate it all? : http://trainedmonkey.com/entry/1891

the information flow in the blogosphere has its own Way (ChineseBlogs)

MacManus : http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/002417.php

According to ChristopherAlexander architectural patterns comprise both patterns of space and patterns of activity. Spaces become places because things happen there. Nodes on the flow internet are also places where things happen. (See also SmallPiecesLooselyJoined)

May 2005, Consolidation in the industry : http://chris.pirillo.com/blog/_archives/2005/5/16/864924.html

sig : A flow. Everything is a flow. And a flow consists of events and tasks and transactions and instructions in sequence and/or loops and forks. A meeting on it's own have no meaning, a meeting as a part of a natural flow has meaning. Ditto for a mail. Ditto for a report. Ditto for everything.

:Reality is a flow, why not reflect that in all programs and systems and applications?

: That's the next.

: http://thingamy.typepad.com/sigsblog/2005/08/thesequence_of.html

StevenJohnson : Essentially, the Web is shifting from an international library of interlinked pages to an information ecosystem, where data circulate like nutrients in a rain forest.

http://www.discover.com/issues/oct-05/departments/emerging-technology/

Interesting comparason of desert and rainforest's energy-efficiency. (WarpLink) FractalCleanUpCrew. OTOH, is it information or attention being captured efficiently? Maybe both?

2009, TechCrunch catches up: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/17/jump-into-the-stream/

Interesting perspective, as the WebTwoPointZero FoodWeb gets more complex, interdependent, does it also become more brittle? http://enthusiasm.cozy.org/archives/2009/06/market-concentration-in-web-20

2010, http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/david-gerlernter-on-flow.html