How Feed Grazing fits into Web 3.0

Danny Ayers is really grokking the idea of Feed Grazing and I love the del.icio.us mashup he's done to produce a dynamic OPML Reading List. The next step is to produce dynamic OPML hierarchies and we'll be well on our way to Web 3.0 (Ok,  ok, maybe just 2.5 ;-)

After Danny and Richard MacManus took up the meme of Feed Grazing yesterday I received a few emails asking me to expand on my views. In order to do so I have to first clarify my own mental map of where we are. My own definition of Web 2.0 doesn't depend on AJAX. Although AJAX is a hugely important development I think Web 2.0 is more about behaviours than interfaces. In fact I'd roughly equate Web 2.0 with Doc Searls' World Live Web.

Based on that perception, see the table below for my draft view of where Feed Grazing fits into Web 3.0.  It should be noted that I don't see Grazing as replacing Aggregation, but I do think it will become the dominant method of access to feed information - especially in an RSS-everywhere world.



I'm well aware that there's little new thinking here but I just needed to clarify where I see Grazing fitting in. And it should be noted that there are plenty people, like Mark Wilson, who think we'll go in the opposite direction to Grazing by investing more and more in subscriptions through social bookmarking.

Comments

[Danny]

Thanks for the link-love and encouragement of the "grazing" meme - I do think this is an important development.

However I'd like to add something to your Web 2.0/3.0 features lists. HTML pages and feeds are primarily about human-readable content. Web 1.0 is essentially a huge document repository. But it is possible to work with other forms of data in this environment. And computers are very good at working with data.

As a example, consider calendaring. I could put my schedule online in HTML, you could do the same with yours. A human looking at those might see "they're both going to be in London in June, maybe they could meet". But if this information was made available as machine-readable data, a computer could make that inference and tell us both.

Feed lists (including hierarchical) offer simple data structures, but there's a lot more possible. Immediate possibilities in the syndication space include metadata about content (like tags) but can also make use of first-class data like human relationship data, geo information, event calendaring etc. All of these can be represented in a consistent *machine-readable* form using Semantic Web technologies.

IMHO the near-future of the web is going to be a generalisation from a Web of Documents to a Web of Data (which includes human-readable documents). Architecturally the easiest route is to use the Web as Platform, to remove friction between services and make data maximally available. I think this is a natural tendency, the stuff around Reading Lists being an example.

But the very same techniques used for the distribution of content can be applied to data, so I personally think the developments around syndication are likely to be useful way beyond current expectations.

[Danny]

[oops, better add this]
...But the very same techniques used for the distribution of content can be applied to data, so I personally think the developments around syndication are likely to be useful way beyond current expectations.

[Danny]

[Oops 2] - sorry, my browser gave me this a bit wonky, I though it had cut the last paragraph. Please feel free to delete this and the last chunk.

[Michiel]

I'll hold out until webXP with SP2.

Seriously (if snarky), Web 2.0 = Web 1.1 (if that), and calling this Web 3.0 is a delusion of grandeur.

This whole versioning nonsense is
a) deluding ourselves with non-progress or small progress
b) completely irrelevant to John & Jane Doe, who are still happily surfing the web with an old internet explorer, and who have the vaguest notion of blogs and none of feeds/RSS/atom/whatever. These people are 99.9% of the web.

Still, feed grazing sounds nice as a meme and I'm sure it'll catch on. But will it deliver?

[Danny]

Michiel, you've probably got a point with a), but I don't think b) is significant. So John & Jane Doe surf with IE4. 20 years ago John & Jane (or their parents ;-) didn't surf because there was no web, they almost certainly didn't own a computer. Things change, often rapidly.

[Danny]

PS. Why not try making your own del.icio.us-fed reading list? The instructions are all there, you don't need anything except a regular del.icio.us account.