Notes Toward a Unified Theory of the Internet, Part I

The other day on the TWIT podcast, Leo LaPorte and his crew were griping about how all the latest start-ups are cutting the vowels from their company names-- Flickr, loopt, SoonR, Tumblr, just to name a few. John C. Dvorak blamed Flickr for beginning this trend. He's not going back nearly far enough. Look to James Gleick's book, Faster-- the book with the thesis (published in 1999) that we're all so busy, we can't help but multi-task all the time.. attention spans are getting smaller and we're packing more and more activity into each day. And judging by the cover, we're all packing more and more consonants into our book jackets..

SleepyDad definitely concurs with that.. but I always attributed that to the birth of my kids and all the attendant chaos that came with them.

And since we all have to pack more and more into the same 24 hour day, what better to do than to join all the latest social networking sites-- social networking, that thing basically invented by the guys at Amazon with their user comments and recommendations features-- so enter DIGG, MySpace, Technorati, Facebook, etc, etc.

This is the stuff of Web 2.0.
Blogging, Podcasting, RSS feeds, Pipes, mash-ups. We all cease to be readers or receivers. Now we're all producers of content. Bloggers. Podcasters, Parentographers. (Hey, I've done all three of those.) Taking in information, re-formulating, recombining, and then republishing on our own sites and feeds. Three billion little broadcast stations spread out over the globe, chatting about.. about.. whatever's on our minds-- or whatever we're reading about, or whoever we're listening to... and don't worry, the irony's not lost on me. I'm right in there with them.. "Hey Leo Laporte was just talking about this.."

Enter Twitter.. this beautifully simplistic little social web app that asks an easy, and oddly compelling question: What are you doing right now? Why do I want to answer? Why did I sign up and start putting silly notes in there about the cereal I ate the other morning? Micro-blogging. Where do I think it's going? Where is any of this really going? (is there anyone out ther?) What is this thing really for?

The ClueTrain Manifesto guys (click here to read the book), said years ago (I can't believe how many now) that the internet is a marketplace of ideas-- a cacophanous conversation. So is it just enough to get your voice out there in the wilderness? To say, "Hey I'm here andd this is what I'm up to." Does it matter if anyone's reading, listening, subscribing, downloading, mashing-up, piping...

Maybe it will all add up to something. The internet becomes, at worst, a hive mind-- and endless series of Top Ten lists and 'most popular stories'-- at best, it's an incoherent stream of collective consciousness.