Sunday, December 16, 2007

Begin

So this is it, the inaugural post of yet another other further different blog. I'm doing this in part because I believe in the participatory web, and it bugs me the way consumer ISPs try to treat web browsing like television, with features like terms of service which prohibit clients from running servers, and (if the rumors are true) interfering with peer-to-peer traffic, and generally treating their customers like criminals at worst and mindless content consumers at best.
On the other hand, the participatory web raises the "aggregator problem" -- there are too many feeds for anyone to follow, so people have to trust aggregators, which means that gatekeepers emerge, and the gatekeepers who attract the most eyeballs get the most ad revenue, which encourages them to reach out to broad audiences, which means watering things down, which takes us back to the television model, exemplified by a quote which I may have made up or may have heard, namely, that any sufficiently commercial technology is indistinguishable from telelvsion.
If I have to choose, I'd rather be part of the problem of too much content being generated than be part of the problem of too many people passively viewing content.

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