No Man’s Blog

So streams are the new darling. So says Twitter.

There is something very seductive in the evolution of streams as well as the evolution of the discourse around streams. It’s fallacy is the usual early-adopters twitter-centric outlook that tends to categorically ditch the old world and embrace the new but if you read through the hyperbole there is definitely something worth watching closer.

Of all articles I find Jeff Jarvis’s the most interesting (I forgive him for the overly simplistic outlook of Stephen Fry as the future of media)

The next phase of media, I’ve been thinking, will be after the page and after the site. Media can’t expect us to go to it all the time. Media has to come to us. Media must insinuate itself into our streams.

and…

So imagine this future without pages and sites, this future that’s all built on process over product. If you’re what used to be a content-creation – if you’re Stephen Fry, post-media – you’re all about insinuating yourself into that stream. If you’re about content curation – formerly known as editing – then you’re all about prioritizing streams for people; that’s how you add value now.

This is a fascinating evolution. But, as I said, I think that Jarvis is falling to the fallacy trap of new X is killing the old Y. He ignores the simple fact that old things are not being replaced with new stuff, they add to them. Sometimes they compete and sometime co-habit and complementary and together they evolve and we evolve.

There is no future with no pages and sites – there can’t be a future with no pages and sites. Content will never be reduced to 140 characters, it has to live somewhere. News, reviews, TED, blog posts, recipes and whatnot still have to live somewhere (and be funded somehow but that’s not the point of this post). Neil was absolutely spot on when he wrote:

Websites used to be everything. I think their role now is more akin to a kind of content hub supporting a more distributed presence. Designing for platforms and streams enables an exponentially larger reach for content than could ever be acheived through a destination model, so in this way scale comes through connection. With decent content acheiving scale is relatively easy, but scale without connection is one-dimensional. Because connection builds permission: “the understanding that the real asset most organisations can build isn’t an amorphous brand but is in fact the privilege of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who want to get them.”

The sea-change and therefore the focus is on changing consumption behaviours. The idea that our consumption of ‘stuff’ will be channeled through The Stream increasingly resonates with my daily experience.

There are 3 general ways in which I (we) consume content and ‘stuff’ online:

1. The websites I like
This is old-school bookmarking. Whether my home page or all the other stuff organised on my browser tabs which I visit occasionally

2. The RSS feed(s)
This is all the stuff I found interesting and decided to subscribe to over the years, currently 150 feeds through Google Reader

3. My stream(s)
All the stuff that my network (read: Twitter and Facebook, Emails and IM etc) is sharing and spreading.

Recently it seems that the first two are in decline and the Streams are on the up. The reason I find streams so fascinating is that in being anti-context they somehow prove to be hyper-personal-meta-context. Unlike the relatively organised bookmarking and RSS the streams suffer from lack of context (unless you have 16 columns on your twitterdeck). If Twitter is the future, or more accurately, if Twitter represents the future of how we will consume content than as Jarvis pointed out streams are full of life!

My Twitter (and Facebook) streams are essentially a hodgepode of friends’ blurbs, news and very few artists and brands I chose to invite to my stream. All in one place. Intuitively this mishmash of context doesn’t make sense but it does when you understand the natural selection of interestingness from an individual as well as from a societal perspectives.

So to test this new-age idea that if the news is that important it will find me or that if something isn’t in my inbox it’s not viral. I decided to live the rest of the year totally reliant on my stream(s) to know my way in the world.

I won’t access actively and directly any website, webblog, web page or other destination of content – content will have to find me. No RSS, no home page, NOTHING. Just me and my stream. I will occasionally report on my experience of “living ON the stream” through twitter and write a summary post at the end of the year.

Anyone care to join me?