Mark Greenfield

Conceptually, most people think of the web as a collection of sites with each site containing individual pages. The page is the atom of the web, the smallest unit of the web. Sites and pages are connected by creating hyperlinks between pages. This basic paradigm has been evolving over the past few years.

Syndication - sharing content across multiple web sites - has been around for a long time. It offers many benefits including:

• Improved efficiency because content is only being produced once
• Better version control because all sites are updated simultaneously
• Mitigate the risk of inaccurate content

RSS has made syndication simple. It provides an easy way to share content and this sharing is not done at the page level, but at an even smaller level. Related sites can now be connected through syndicated RSS feeds rather than links.

RSS has enabled the growth of the read/write web. For content creators, it provides a simple standard to free your content. For content consumers, it provides an easy way to keep up with dynamic content.

A new paradigm is required that moves beyond the page. Web analytics can no longer rely on the “page view” as a basic web metric. Assistive technology needs to adapt to AJAX and other technologies that break the page paradigm. Syndication and micro-content is the future. In the words of Adam Green -

“Web content is external rather than internal. Instead of a website being a “place” where data “is” and other sites “link to”, a site is a source of data to be remixed collectively both internal and external to a given “site””.

Related Links

• Home Alone? How Content Aggregators Change Navigation and Control of Content (by Joshua Porter - from Digital Web Magazine)
• Content in Motion: What iTunes Can Teach Us About Managing Web Content
• Is Home Page Design Relevant Anymore?
• The Copyright Debate & RSS

Previous Top 10 Web Trends

• Web Trend #10 - The End of Print
• Web Trend #9 - Everyware
• Web Trend #8 - Virtual Reality
• Web Trend #7 - The Web as Platform

I’m off to Vermont to give the keynote speech at the annual meeting of the Vermont Student Assistance Corporation. I’ll be talking about the future of the web and using a David Letterman style top 10 list as the framework.

So what do you think is the top trend in web development?  I’ll give you my answer after my speech. (I don’t want to spoil the suspense for my friends in Vermont )

A common refrain at HighEdWebDev2007 and other conferences I’ve attended recently has been the frustration many of us feel when trying to convince management that “radical transparency” is a good idea, that allowing students to blog without editorial oversight about what it’s really like to attend our institutions won’t be the end of civilization as we know it.

In Rochester, my colleague Jim Leous from Penn State provided more ammunition for making our point. The cover story in the April 2007 edition of Wired magazine was called The See-Through CEO and provided great examples of how the business world is coming to understand the power of the read/write web. As the inside cover says - “smart companies are sharing secrets with rivals, blogging about products in their pipeline, and even admitting their failures.” Here are some more outtakes from the article:

• Not long ago, the only public statements a company ever made were professionally written press releases and the rare, stage-managed speech by the CEO. Now firms spill information in torrents, posting internal memos and strategy goals, letting everyone from the top dog to shop-floor workers blog publicly about what their firm is doing right - and wrong.
• Power comes not from your Rolodex but from how many bloggers link to you.
• Transparency is a judo move. Your customers are going to poke around in your business anyway, and your workers are going to blab about internal info - so why not make it work for you by turning everyone into a partner in the process and inviting them to do so?
• A generation has grown up blogging, posting a daily phonecam picture on Flickr and listing its geographic position in real time on Dodgeball and Google Maps. For them, authenticity comes from online exposure. It’s hard to trust anyone who doesn’t list their dreams and fears on Facebook.
• Google is not a search engine. Google is a reputation-management system.
• A single Google search determines more about how (companies) are perceived than a multimillion-dollar ad campaign.

It’s time higher education embraced radical transparency. Our communications goal should be dialogue, not monologue. Research has shown that the more you let your constituents talk amongst themselves, the more likely they are to listen to you. They will feel their voices are being heard which builds trust which in turn builds relationships.

I’ve been a fan of MeeboMe for quite some time. (See my earlier post on MeeBoMe). Now Meebo has launched a new service called Meebo Rooms for group chats.  While chat is nothing new, there are a number of interesting features including a focus on sharing video.  For further reading:

• Meebe Rooms
• Meebo Rooms Launched - “like a very very rich widget” (from Read/Write Web)
• Meebo’s Nifty Multimedia Chat Rooms (from PCWorld)