While watching my dogs play in the park this morning I was thinking about Napoleon in "Animal Farm" and the way the phrase "All animals are equal" morphed into the scary and ominous, "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others." (One of my dogs is quite clever and very strong and she invariably gets all the best toys to chew and chase.)
Unlike the hierarchical canine world and most political constructs, the 'net is a place where equality does seem to work. Proprietary networks such as the original AOL and MSN gave way to open standards and HTML. And the rise of blogging and RSS feeds into news readers is becoming a way of 'net life. Push technology comes to mind. It was supposed to be the future and desktops were lousy with PointCast and other 'push' clients. After millions of downloads, PointCast sent their final 'push' in February 2000.
Was that the end of targeted and focused delivery of information to desktops? Not at all, it was only the beginning. Next generation news readers and RSS feeds deliver exactly what people want to see when they ask for it. And anyone with access to the 'net can set up a blog and an RSS feed for little or no money. Everyone can join in and consumers have the final say over what information they see.
And the normalization makes every headline feed look the same. My friend's posts come into my reader in the same format as CNet's and The New York Times. Readers chose what to click on for more details based on the quality of the information, not the flashiness of the delivery. In some ways, with push some were more equal than others- with RSS, all 'bloggers' are equal.
Posted by Diana at May 10, 2003 10:55 AM