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The new conversation about bits
Apr 12, 2006
Have you noticed the new trend in technology?
I don't mean the latest acronym - RSS, API, AJAX, XML, GPS - though these all play a part in the trend. Instead, I mean the major strategic shift, the new conversation, about how digital technology is changing our lives.
The conversation is about thousands of new bitstreams and tools that create and categorize those bits. It's the age of the bit.
Here are a few places I've seen it recently:
1. Events (O'Reilly ETech, New York Tech Meetup, and others) are full of the conversation about tools creating and categorizing bits: I've heard pitches for tools that, in part or exclusively,...
- categorize pictures, music, and other files
- organize files
- archive podcasts
- categorize calendar listings and project-management items
- record and organize personal stories from years past
2. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal recently redesigned, and the strategic focus of each was how to cut through the clutter of the online news experience while still allowing for the serendipitous encounter of a section or article that the customer didn't know to look for. The key issue is balancing the number of bits, as described well in Steve Johnson's Chicago Tribune piece (I'm quoted saying as much): Link
3. Bob Tedeschi's most recent New York Times column on Seth Godin's Squidoo, which promises to cut through the clutter by helping people see the Web through "lenses" on particular topics: Link
4. The Trendwatching report on "Infolust", which advises, "forget information overload: this desire for relevant information is insatiable, and will soon move from the online world to the 'real' world to achieve true ubiquity." Examples include consumer-reviews sites, mashups of different services, mobile applications like audio recognition, and barcodes and tags in (what used to be called) the offline world. Link
5. And of course add in the cover story from Newsweek a few weeks back, which featured Flickr founders Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake... Flickr, of course, tags and archives digital photos. Add to this item all the other major news outlets talking about similar tools (Squidoo, del.icio.us, Technorati, and many others).
Do you see the pattern? More to the point, do you see how different this is? From five to eight years ago, in the dotcom boom, everyone talked about e-commerce - and online community - and user interfaces and standards and plumbing and all sorts of foundational issues as we set up the Web. (I wrote my first bit literacy essay in 2000... but much of my focus was on the other topics, too.)
Today it's about the bits.
My last question: how much of the conversation you see above is about creating and consuming more bits, and how much is about letting the bits go?
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P.S. One other common thread to note: what else do Scott Heiferman, Bob Tedeschi, Seth Godin, Stewart Butterfield, and Caterina Fake have in common? They've all been to the Gel conference. You should be there, too, next month: Gel 2006
re: (I wrote my first bit literacy essay in 2000... but much of my focus was on the other topics, too.)
All designers were acutely aware of the bits. The majority talked about it, but the focus is always on what new technology can be implemented to generate the dollars and the traffic.
Even if we all grasp that less is more, it is to decide what and how to take bits out, and/or to organize it, that leave some unclear on what to do with it all.
This conversation about letting bits go is taking place in some offline media as well. One of the most prominent reasons that folks are dropping subscriptions to print newspapers is that they don't like how much unread newsprint is left lying around their houses after they consume the relative few articles they have time to read each day.