I'm going all the way back to the middle of January with this linkback, but I've got a few hours of breathing time on the plane heading to Torino, Italy (check out 2010.dailyvancouver.com).
Bill Burnham doesn't post often, but when he does, the posts are information rich, either from a data perspective or filled with deep thoughts. His Unified Theory of Search, Social Networking, Structured Blogging, RSS and the Active Web falls into the latter category, and does not disappoint. Burnham frames his thoughts around supply-side vs. demand-side economics. RSS is described as being a demand-side, benefiting mainly consumers. This is interesting, as it is increasingly an oft-asked question: for websites that rely on advertising, most of which occurs directly on the website, does RSS help the publisher at all? My answer is yes, although second hand. Advertising earnings are made from people who *don't* use RSS. RSS blasts content around the web, meaning that more and more incoming links accrue, which means a higher Google ranking, which means more non-RSS using searchers coming to the page and clicking on ads. Whew! I think that's the first time I've written down that train of thought...
Burnham next looks at social networking. He believes that today's social networking sites are actually pre-cursors to identity:
People will use these sites not just as a way to socialize, but as a hub to manage their broader digital identify on the web. Part blog, part digital cubby hole, these sites will provide each human being with a digital homestead from which they can manage their entire digital identify on the web.
+1! 43 people is the best example of this today, at least on the hub side. You subscribe to people, rather than information slices, and people can add any RSS feeds that represent "them". Burnham goes on to say that everyone will have their own website in the future (perhaps where "website" actually means identity representation), much like everyone has email today. I support the sentiment, although I believe that large providers will host/maintain the majority of these sites.
Next comes the section on Structured Blogging. I'm going to skip the details and go straight to the concept that Burnham calls "Your Own Global Megaphone". This was very well put at Moosecamp by Ken Rickard -- mass media should strive to amplify a community's voice, rather than function in a broadcast mode. So, once we can easily post structured content -- like an announcement that your house is for sale -- on the web in a structured manner, the incentives to go to a specialized portal and put an entry there diminishes. Your place your for sale sign, your event details, or your review directly on your space, and the structured data underneath ensures that this rich machine readable data is slurped into everything because of the underlying transport of RSS which notifies all the appropriate sources. As Burnham says, this is "write once, distribute everywhere".
I'm currently experimenting with the opposite of this -- "write everywhere, suck in to one place" -- over at my personal site (Will Pate is doing this too): I suck in all content I create on all external services, from Flickr to 43 Places. But this is really a complex way of doing things, since it relies on the least common denominator of RSS to crunch down the rich inputs into simple text blobs. The right of way doing things is to have your personal site offer the facility to push your data to the external, specialized aggregation sources/communities you choose to participate in. This might start with platforms being not only endpoints for weblog editing APIs (metaweblog, ATOM), but also sources: publish locally, define your external endpoints (e.g. publish a photo locally, and also send it to your Flickr photostream). Our fat pings, I predict, will get even fatter, carrying the full text and structured data content.
So why I am covering this here on Bryght? Well, I believe the main platform that Bryght has chosen, Drupal, is well optimized for being a container for information sources, as well as a way to push content to multiple external services.
I'll close with Burnham's final pronouncement -- that we are undergoing a transition from the passive web to the active web:
RSS and its extensions on the demand side, combined with structured personal (and business) websites and search on the supply side will transform the web from a passive entity into the Active Web and will comprise the first major step towards a more autonomous web that adds real value to people’s daily lives without requiring constant effort and input.