Good News Bears
The stream of information into my inforouter has reached an unmanagable level of overflow. This is bad news, forcing me into TechMeme, Scripting News, Valleywag, and Between the Lines as a triage strategy to become acceptably uninformed. However, this is good news, because the collapse of the inforouter paves the way for application strategies under direction of the user in charge.
Faced with some 1500 unread items in Rojo, spread across two rivers of news, I have now reached the point where, several years ago, I abandoned NetNewsWire. As the threshold crosses 400 items, I have to checkerboard between the two streams 100 items at a time. If the phone or email doesn't interrupt within 20 minutes, I may be able to descend to the next level. Without a solid block of time (at least 2 hours) I can't clear enough to ever catch up without resorting to some other scenario.
This is the same wall I hit with the New York Times and Wall Street Journal in print and then online some 18 and 6 months ago respectively. The resolution: I rely mostly on Peter O'Kelly's triage in the tech space; the Arts content is mostly lost. Google alerts on Beatles and West Wing sustain me for now. Taking that history as instructive, I would predict more alerts to cherry pick the Blogosphere spillover. Given the relatively high volume of citation of Gillmor and Gillmor Gang these days, that alert has kept the lions at bay to some extent.
Those who read between and beyond the no linking and xxx is dead themes may see that alerts are becoming a more and more fundamental gesture, both in how they suck the marrow out of the infostream and even more strategically, how they are perceived and folded into social contracts with the user in charge. Just as Engadget's 7 million page views offers a vision of the micromedia, so too does it presage the microglut that arrives within minutes of that success. How do we deal with increasingly alert-driven streams to maintain discoverability, context, and a sense of empowerment. Systems that fail that test will be discarded as quickly as I am flushed out of Rojo and into… what?
This is the moment where the commercial begins in the current model. Demo, discussion, denunciation, distraction — all tools of the trade, and to some significant extent deprecated in this next phase. What happens when Arrington, Malik, Wilson, and MacLeod hit the network with equally authoritative takes? For one, the silence of accelerated consensus a la the Gang wins over the individual endpoints. For another, the ahead-of-the-curve proposition becomes increasingly valuable. Watch Calacanis, the lightning rod. Watch Mernit, the synthesist. Watch the micromemes emerge from the boredom and ennui of the RSS rush hour.
These are the early stage gesturers; the W.C. Fields cigar boxes being juggled while the core stream is delivered as "entertainment." These folks have the goods, they know it, and those executives who pretend they don't are in for a rough ride. I'll repeat that: We have the control, and we know it. No amount of slime or power politics will stop this. As Doc says, we're still throwing tea into Boston Harbor 200+ years later. And if you're not with us, get the hell out of the way. We wish you no ill will — well, nothing significant — but don't get between the mama bear and her cubs.
August 15th, 2006 at 6:26 am
>Get the hell out of the way.
I think John Galt was all about something like that.
August 16th, 2006 at 6:09 am
I sort of get it. Watching the gesturers, throwing tea, waiting for stuff to arise from the muck. What I do not get is your position. Simply stated. What do you stand for?
August 16th, 2006 at 8:45 am
Who is John Galt?
Steve: Good drum roll to the building crescendo that “when” is now. The “what” is pretty clear, the “why” is deafening, “who” and “where” are everybody all over, but it’s the “how” I need some help on. Looking forward to the details.