Richard Giles

Some times it’s hard to remember that we’re in the middle of a revolution. I often get stuck in the day to day routine, still posting to places to my blogs like Gadget Lounge, here, listening to Podcasts and speaking to fellow revolutionaries, and only sometimes does it hit me just how important all of this is.

Blogs, RSS, Podcasting and Broadcatching are all just the tip of the iceberg. Stick your head below the water and you’ll see things like Outline Processor Markup Language and attention.xml to get a taste of where this revolution is heading.

Admittedly these sound exceedingly boring. But so did Hyper Text Markup Language. Now the web infiltrates a huge population. It was all about building a network of content through linking. Now the net is all about building conversations, and tomorrow the net will be about a network of people. Not links, not sites, but real people. Their ideas, images, suggestions, what they bought, what they didn’t, who they know, etc. This might sound passé, but it means a lot. Companies who don’t consider that the net is about enabling individuals, not business, won’t survive online. It’s about 100% of us, not 20% (see The Long Tail for more of what I mean).

Look at Blogs and RSS feeds, or PubSub. Flickr, and the many applications popping up in support of it like 1001, and Mappr. My laptop is now a hub of information, constantly updated on a minute by minute basis of information about other people. I can listen to their music on last.fm, look at their photos on Flickr, and get an idea what everyone is talking about at Technorati. Soon this will be linked to their presence and there exact location.

We’ll be connected to their pocket via PDA or mobile phone. All this information that we can carry with us, and it’s all someone else’s information, not owned by corporations, but shared by real people. Open Source Living. Freely sharing what we experience, because it’s so easy, because we can, and it enriches the giver and the taker. Not a one way transaction. The more I share the more like data I’ll receive. If I don’t share my favourite tunes in iTunes, then I won’t find new tunes that others recommend based on what I’ve listened to. If I tag well in Flickr then I’ll see other photos that are similar.

Companies that interact with all this data are sure to be winners. Others won’t. But then the internet is not longer about companies is it. It’s about you and I.