Tim O’Reilly has an interesting article on Web 2.0. It was great reading even if most of it was over my head (that’s how ya learn, eh). Thanks to Chris Anderson at the Long Tail blog for the link
One section in Tim’s article really caught my eye:
In many ways, the combination of RSS and permalinks adds many of the features of NNTP, the Network News Protocol of the Usenet, onto HTTP, the web protocol. The “blogosphere” can be thought of as a new, peer-to-peer equivalent to Usenet and bulletin-boards, the conversational watering holes of the early internet. Not only can people subscribe to each others’ sites, and easily link to individual comments on a page, but also, via a mechanism known as trackbacks, they can see when anyone else links to their pages, and can respond, either with reciprocal links, or by adding comments.
I hadn’t made that connection quite that explicitly before. NNTP newsgroups taught me the little I know about computers and the internet. They also provided indispensible information about software tools. Later I added a few web-based bulletin boards as things moved off NNTP.
All those groups are/were a great place to pick brains and share what you could. Most of what I learned was kind of techie in nature, but this statement by Tim got me thinking: Blogs and RSS offer a way to find information and start conversations in a much wider way than NNTP or standard web-based bulletin boards.
With a few well chosen RSS feeds, I can keep up with current thinking about IT, journalism, left and right wing politics, science, and almost anything else I care to follow. And all that information arrives at my desktop automatically. I don’t have to hop all over the place to read it.
If I feel like exploring something further, all I have to do is take the link to a favorite site and check out the blogroll, or follow the in-text links for more information. There’s bound to be more links than I can handle on a subject from there.
Cool. Personalized media. Ahh, the concept is starting to gel for me.
donsca 