The Chronological Web

Most of my writing goes in one of four places: Linux Journal, SuitWatch (some of which also runs in LJ), here in IT Garage, or my blog. So when I write something I want to find again, I'm not always sure where it ran.

This morning I wanted to find a piece where I quoted Terry Heaton about unbundling. That brought up a goose egg on Google. So did leaving my name out of the search. I got farther with Terry Heaton and Unbundled, but not to what I wrote about the subject.

So I looked around my hard drives and found a draft of the piece, with the phrase "This morning, fortuitously". The top result on Google got me to —

Doc Searls' IT Garage - 5:08am
This morning, fortuitously, he treats us to some important wisdom in 2006: The
Unbundled Awakening. Here are the core paragraphs: ...
itgarage.com/ - 28k - Cached - Similar pages - Remove result

Which was helpful, because I could read the cached page and then locate it in IT Garage.

But there was no direct link to the original piece.

Yahoo brought many more results, all around IT Garage, but nothing on the first page pointing sraight to the piece.

So I tried some Live Web engines.

While some of the engines found nothing, Blogpulse, Google Blogsearch and Technorati each found exactly what I was looking for.

These results highlight the differences between the Static Web and the Live Web (which I first wrote about in Searching the World Live Web, in Suitwatch and Linux Journal).

We conceive the Static Web as real estate. It has "sites" with "locations" and "addresses" that we "architect", "design" and "construct". We want to locate them on a "highway" where they get "traffic". Even the term "content" suggests the shipping, shelving and merchandising conventions of retailing and freight forwarding.

We conceive the Live Web as a publishing system. We "author", "write" and "post" works called "text" "essays", "stories", "entries" or "files" that might also be "photos" "graphics" or "videos" that can all be "browsed" through a "browser" or an "aggregator". So each piece works as "hypertext", each with a "permalink". Former posts "scroll" off the "page" to an "archive". Time is a primary essence. Posts are dated and often time-stamped. Every post is "syndicated" through a "feed".

The Static Web is about sites and content. The Live Web is about people and time. The World Wide Web includes both. As engines that search the World Live Web, Google and Yahoo do include the Live Web, and often find what we're looking for there.

But the Live Web Engines — including Google's own — are better at it.

The Static Web and The Live Web are both branches of the Wide Web. But the latter is growing and changing much faster than the former. It's doing that because it is comprised and driven by individuals. Looking for power curves among those individuals (as we do with "the long tail") tends to dismiss the unique and inherent genius of each one.

There will be natural groupings by topic. That's why almost all the feeds in my aggregators these days are from keyword searches (e.g. Goleta posta or vc segal winer) at Live Web engines, rather than from individual blogs.

At this point, the time to index at the better Live Web search engines is down to minutes, if not seconds.

It's interesting that the Web was born without a directory, or even a form or organization, beyond DNS (which covers what goes between // and /) and the Unix file path (the series of "folders" flanked by slashes, the last of which contains a file). There are only a few ways to organize things: chronologically, alphabetically (or numerically), categorically, geographically (or spacially), hierarchically. The absence of an organizing framework, and a directory, has left the Web a vast haystack. Finding needles there required the enormous kluges we call search engines. Think about it. It takes Google and Yahoo hundreds of thousands of servers, and spiders crawling through the Web's haystack, indexing everything, to allow us to find the needles we're looking for.

Meanwhile, the Live Web is defined by syndication. Syndicated files are chronological. Hence the Live Web has an implicit chronological organization: domainname/year/month/date/post, the last of which we call a permalink. Lately we've also added tagging to the Live Web, implying an ad hoc categorical organization as well.

Again, there is a branching going on here. But it's critical that we understand the real differences.

This helps, for example, when we talk to civilians who are new to the Web and want to "put up a website". Very often what they really need is a blog. Especially if what they're doing is timely. Think of schools, churches, civic organizations. Updating a "site" is a chore. Worse, it usually turns into an art (architecture, design, construction...) project that costs hundreds or thousands of dollars and can't be altered or updated by the very organization that it's created for. Blogs are written, not constructed. Updating them can be as easy as writing an email. Yet there's nothing about a blog that excludes static pages. You can still have an "about" page, or any number of other pages that are permanent fixtures.

This essay is a message to friends of mine that fit the description in the last paragraph. Those include the good folks at the World Space Center. They've done a great job building a site, starting a magazine, and organizing "content". But they also have lots of new information that needs to flow through the site. And the best way to do that is with a blog. I want them to see they've only got the Static Web covered. They need to work the Live Web too. Fortunately, it's easy. Especially if any of ya'll are in the Triangle area of North Carolina, and want to volunteer helping the World Space Center folks out.

Also, feel free to volunteer to help with OneWebDay, which just went up. OneWebDay will celebrate both the Static and the Live parts of the World Wide Web. But supporting it, will be, I am sure, a Live Web job.

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* Though the system isn't perfect. I'm adding this footnote 1.2 hours after I first posted this essay, when a search on Technorati for "Chronological Web" fails to find this piece, or my blog post pointing to it, but does find this post pointing to it. Checking all the Live Web search engines, only Google Blogsearch finds something: the pointer on my blog, not this post. That may not be an error, either; but rather a result of the way IT Garage and my blog are syndicated. I'll have to check on that.