Russell Reflects: How the Web is Changing

The web is changing – everyone knows that. But now it is becoming much more than a collection of interlinked pages, as newer tools (and older ones with a new lease of life) start to make major inroads into the public consciousness. In turn, these web tools are altering the way in which we see the web.

The most obvious new web-based system is the blog (e.g. http://www.blogger.com) – a diary-style web log for people to share ideas, views but predominantly comments on the wider world. Blog writers range from the everyday user to major authors, from technical people to passionate amateurs, from politicians to cult groups. Blogging tries to offer simple web publishing for the people, so that anyone can get on the web without any HTML or hosting knowledge. The increased use of blogs is evidence of their success, though many blogs are short-lived commentaries and many more are nearly moribund. Popdex and Bloogz are sites that track the popularity of blogs, whilst Blogdex (http://blogdex.net/about.asp) goes one step further and tracks the viral spread of news and comment through measuring their occurrences in blogs; as with Google, the most linked to stories bubble to the top, whilst the unregarded ones disappear – real democratic choice in action! Surveys have shown that such blogging community selection of stories tends to reflect the major concerns in society at the time (war, major politics, and so on) but drift towards the more technical and away from the vacuous celebrity material. This perhaps reflects the more technical nature of the typical internet user, but maybe it also shows us that celebrity culture really is a media fascination, not a societal one.

Wiki’s offer another approach to simple internet content creation, but rather than working to a temporal, diary-style model they take a much more hypertextual approach and allow you to easily create a web of material. Users of wiki’s are not creating complex, pretty websites with them: they are using them as collaborative tools for mind-mapping, brainstorming, research, as collective group memory, and so on. I know of one user who takes notes in a meeting on a Psion using a concept mapping tool, imports this into the Wiki where it is formatted as a bulleted list, and then gets interlinked with other relevant pages and work. Concepts are worked upon, then cut and paste transfers them to Word for final polishing and dissemination. The fact that it is publicly accessible is not the key – the simple publish and link approach is, however. And because you can become dependent on such tools, having it on the web and accessible to you wherever you are becomes increasingly important.

Blogs are developing too with many offering RSS feeds. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an XML format designed to allow the sharing of information between websites. An RSS feed provides headlines, brief descriptions and links to the original material in a standard format, which RSS readers can display. So why is it important? Well, it's currently used by providers to extend the reach of their material – blogs are one driving force, but institutions such as the BBC have many tens of RSS feeds available, and they are not alone - technical publications such as VUNet and others use it heavily too.

But I think a sea-change is on the horizon - readers are becoming more powerful, and more importantly, integrated into websites, and screen scraping is becoming more advanced. This can lead, in a very short timescale, to web applications that allow people to construct their own websites containing fragments of anyone else's. Anyones, because we can quite easily scrape or make an RSS feed from any HTML page and so the originator does not need to have provided the feed for us.

This is important in two senses. Firstly, and most fundamentally, we have split the web atom - previously atomic units were web pages - once you'd got them you could analyse them into text and graphics, but you generally dealt in whole pages. Now our atomic unit is much smaller - we can construct things out of fragments of pages. And this makes a second difference - consumers can look only at what they want to, can miss adverts and poor material out; producers have to think smaller scale and making their stuff work on segmented as well as page levels. Copyright will become a big issue (and the law may well need altering), our shorter attention spans may be better catered for, and pretty layouts might take a backseat compared to content.

Associated Link: Russell's blog

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