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June 21, 2010
The Vertical Web
The periodic media campaigning for Web 2.0, 3G, Web 3.0, 4G and the rest are testimonials to the waves of functional innovation that break across the public-use digital information networks. These successive "versionings" represent a willingness on the part of network operators to try to provide relatively unprecedented capabilities with continuous -- if yet tenuous -- availability.
Although corporations are in a better position to maximally exploit new web environments, the common verification of web evolution is most strongly felt at the individual user's level, where over time the following distinctive progressions have occurred as "status quo" of reasonable expectations and the baseline expectation of using the web. In the original stage, digitization supported broadcasting; then in the next stage browsing supported the read/write web; and bandwidth pulled up the third stage. In that representation, key bundles of capability reached a critical minimal maturity at each stage and together set operational expectations.
Tracking such progressions always raises the question of "what next?" -- and in this case the most important next stage will find enough overall functionalities and interoperabilities such that an entire system -- and ecosystem -- for a given subject domain can be affordably traversed on the web by the individual user. This "vertical integration" means that the web will cease to be an undifferentiated "superhighway" and a series of outlets or malls, and instead become the virtual world of rich, semantically inter-activated media in which lifelike simulation will become comprehensive daily personal production: not just an internetwork of information but an internetwork of targeted special interest.
Typically, marketers have been working in the space to create systemic connections of interest to parties in the role of "producers" (meaning, those whose primary function is to make something from being informed, or being supplied with content); and this has been layered atop the older presence of operations by "reporters" (meaning, those whose primary function is to present information). In the next "default" iteration of the web, personal production will be attended by agents and partners, to the same degree that marketers currently scrutinize and manipulate experiences. This additional attendance will "close the loop" between an individual's internally directed (presumed) and externally directed (assumed) personae in the web environment. At that point, specialization of interest domains -- that is, channels -- will become routine and convenient as the typical organization of the web.
Text and images copyright 2010 Malcolm Ryder / Archestra
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at June 21, 2010 11:52 PM