There’s a lot of stuff available online — too much, really — but I’m going to focus on two biggies that everybody will have to adopt within a few years or else get left behind. These are roughly at the stage email was at 10 to 15 years ago.
The first is syndicated feeds. Almost any site has a feed available (usually called RSS, Atom, or XML) as a free subscription, so updates can be published around the web and delivered onto your own desktop, instantly. This site has one you can subscribe to. If you click on the little orange square, either near the top right of the page or up in your browser somewhere, you will go to my feed.
It won’t look like anything special, just a really stripped-down version of all the content I publish here. But in that stripped-down form it can be picked up by other sites or read in other environments (such as on your mobile phone).
You can either subscribe to get updates right in your browser or you can sign up for something like Google Reader, which is kind of like an email account – “a personalized inbox for the entire web” – which I am totally freakin’ addicted to.
I personally don’t know anyone else who uses RSS, and I didn’t start myself until a few months ago, but I regret waiting so long. It was a painless adjustment that seemed bothersome beforehand but later I wondered how I got along without it.
Everything should be available instantly as a feed. Go to your favourite newspaper’s or TV network’s site and you’ll find that little orange square or just ‘RSS’ (probably at the very bottom). Click on it and it’ll take you to their feed — or feeds (for example, The Globe and Mail has 16 for sports and 26 for business alone).
Your favourite band or singer will have a feed, your favourite hockey team will have a feed, your favourite journalists and commentators will have feeds, some of your friends will have feeds, if you leave a comment on this post you can subscribe to a feed that will notify you the moment someone responds, a lot of businesses and stores will have feeds to let you know exactly when new offers come out, and if you maybe missed anything you can simply scroll back through the archives to find it.
Once you’ve subscribed, you’ll receive updates (on your computer or mobile phone) a split-second after something new is published. It saves you the trouble of going around checking this-and-that all the time, digging around, trying to navigate past ads and diversions, wasting a lot of time and probably missing out on a lot anyways.
The web is getting very big and complex; without using feeds to stay updated about you care about, you’ll miss most of what you need to know. It’ll be like not having a TV — back before the web made TV obsolete.
The second biggie that everyone will soon need is a permanent, custom URL, or home domain, like I have with brianfrank.ca. This is something else needed to cope with the web’s immensity: the more things change, the more we need permanent points of reference.
With an online address, people will always know where to find you, yet you don’t have to always be personally accessible. People can show up at any time of the day or night, from anywhere, to contact you or just to see what you’ve been doing lately (or at least what you want them to see).
With just an email address you have no presence online. People can’t go towhere you are, they can only shoot messages out into the unknown abyss. With services like Facebook you have a presence but you don’t really ‘own’ it. Facebook can take it away from you whenever it suits them, and they’re in control of who can reach you and how.
Once you set up your home domain, you can start publishing your own feed — maybe using WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, Twitter, FriendFeed, etc – to keep the rest of the world updated about what you think about events that are happening and what you’re doing about what you think.
I’d love to know — I’ll be your first subscriber.
[Further reading: Towards a New Media Model 1 and 2]
