![Robin Blandford [ ByteSurgery.com ]](http://www.bytesurgery.com/blog/wp-content/themes/starkers/images/blank.gif)
28/02/07 ByteSurgery “Plug Hole” - Analogy Innovation
A comment from James Corbett on my post “Idea Generation: Take A Shower” struck a chord with me:
Many of the ideas behind feed grazing have come from my time in the shower. The biggest insight came from the actual shower unit itself - the realization that the shower rose has numerous small nozzles directing individual ‘feeds’ of water. But by moving the rose in various directions I was only under a certain subset of nozzles at any one time, effectively grazing that subset of feeds.
And then wrote about the uniFeed concept on his blog:
Instead of blogging here, twittering there and posting photos everywhere we’ll throw our life cache into our uniFeed and have our satellite apps render the relevant items.
Merging the two ideas - I like this analogy of your content as the water pipe (your uniFeed) into the shower, before the shower-head (filter) splits it up into relevant feeds; Topics, Comments, Photos, Posts, etc…
This seems a while off I thought - quite a major re-engineering of things. I also wonder - is a centralised pipe the ‘way of the internet’. Should we be looking for a ‘distributed method’ where we cross reference our content in a feed, pointing at it in the different location rather than distributing it from a single source.
This is where the shower analogy struck a home run, the plug hole. The plug hole is where all those individual feeds of water from the shower-head come back together again. It’s the perfect capture point to see what’s happened to the content of those feeds, who else has referenced them. Even better - not all the water has to go down the plug-hole and be read, some of it can vaporise as steam (your private posts) and some is splashed out of the shower basin (opting out of inclusion for an individual item)!
I’ve the basics of a prototype Firefox plug-in (worked out in my head) that I’d like to implement. It takes small steps to greater things - especially to realise something as huge as a working implementation of the uniFeed. For starters, the plug-in would look out for all <textarea> html tags and automatically add a small ‘include in my uniFeed’ checkbox beside all the submit buttons (default: on). The plug-in would publish an excerpt and link to your contribution in your uniFeed. The plug hole is realised.
Between me thinking of this walking home from Mile End Climbing Wall (Monday) and getting around to posting it (Tuesday) Sam Sethi has managed to squeeze out a post today before me of a very similar concept over on Vecosys and calls it a LifeStream.
1 Comment
Excellent thoughts Robin - you’ve grokked this better than I have myself! :)
“I also wonder - is a centralised pipe the ‘way of the internet’. Should we be looking for a ‘distributed method’ where we cross reference our content in a feed, pointing at it in the different location rather than distributing it from a single source.”
This is a question I struggled with for a while myself - I’m a strong believer in the ’small pieces, loosely joined’ philosophy. But what I came to realize is that there is no contradiction here because the web is being effectively being turned inside out. The old model was of a distributed audience browsing to centralized portals/pages. So new model is of distributed apps browsing (centralized) people. This model recognizes the pre-eminence of the individual and the very nature of what makes social software work.
The old web, the ‘wide’ web was a library, a static reference to ‘dead’ (archived) words. The new web, the ‘live’ web is a nervous system for the global mind. And human beings are the nodes.
