I have a feeling that I’ve written about this before but I can’t be bothered to look back through my archives so I’ll just risk repeating myself. I use a lot of Google services. I use gmail, reader, picasa, documents, bookmarks, blogger, calendar, groups, books, igoogle, finance and youtube. The social side of all these services is currently fairly limited. In fact, each one asks you to recreate your contacts list. Dataportability would allow Google to truly unite all its services by tying them into a single user ID and contact list. I suspect there are some big brains over in Mountain View currently working out how to do this as seemlessly as possible. How long before we start seeing websites wearing the dataportability logo as a badge of honour?
Sarah Boxer on blogs
I have just been trying out the feeds on libprs, one of which is the New York review of books. This morning I read an interesting article by Sarah Boxer about blogs. It’s a really well written article. It won’t contain many surprises for people who know a bit about the blogosphere but it’s a very succinct, well-written, balanced overview of the blogging world. In particular she describes the difficulty of reprinting blogs in print:
With such riches to choose from, you might think it would be a snap to put a bunch of blogs into a book and call it an anthology. And you would be wrong. The trouble? Links—those bits of highlighted text that you click on to be transported to another blog or another Web site. (Links are the Web equivalent of footnotes, except that they take you directly to the source.) It’s not only that the links are hard to transpose into print. It’s that the whole culture of linking—composing on the fly, grabbing and posting whatever you like, making weird, unexplained connections and references— doesn’t sit happily in a book.
Hyperlinking is ultimately what sets html apart from from print. It is one of the founding features of the world wide web and also one of its most enduring….
…which, for some reason, reminds of the Choose your own Adventure series of children books. Wouldn’t game books like this work really well in the hyperlinked world?
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