In recent times I have been playing with and giving a lot of thought to the space occupied by RSS, Atom, Blogging and various other technologies and processes.
Yes, news feeds are one aspect of this but they are no more than one aspect of it.
With the advent of Blogging, Atom and so on we have a new web where INFormation FLOWs around the WEB in ways that didn't happen before when Web pages were the unit of currency, whether they were static or dynamically generated.
An analogy for this emerging paradigm shift is the comparison between on the one hand an African woman carrying her water pot to the river or well daily and on the other hand a Western town where water is piped to the home and is on tap in the quantities and at the temperature that we desire. The "old days" of walking with our water pot browser to the HTML well are becoming just that - the old days. We are at the beginning of a new information paradigm analogous to piped water.
So, attempting to find a new term which encapsulates this new paradigm, I am proposing the term InFlowWeb as a label for this new more flowing information.
I anticipate that a lot of effort will be focussed over the next several years in channelling the flow that we want to our ... um ... flow container and diverting away the 99.99% of the torrent of information that we choose not to have to cope with. Tools that allow human beings to turn the tap on these impending torrents of information will be key to how we effectively work with information.
We as information workers will have to learn at least the basics of information plumbing to control the quantity and characteristics of the information flows which come IN to our homes and businesses and threaten to INundate us.
The INFormation FLOW WEB ... the InFlowWeb. I like it. I wonder if anyone else will.
InFlowWeb. A term of 5 minutes dabbling or something that captures the essence of a new theme in how we use information?
Let's take the step forward from the Water Pot Web to the InFlowWeb!
Posted by Andrew Watt at March 11, 2004 09:28 PM