The Path of Learning 2.0
We are writing and talking about Learning 2.0 as the focus of our new work. In a series of posts, I'd like to describe in detail what we mean by Learning 2.0 and how it will unfold and evolve. It now looks like there have been three dominant modes in how we have navigated the Internet. They are Browse, Search, and Subscribe. I began browsing in 1995 when all traffic on the web was flowing through Netscape's portal site. I have been trying to remember when I first started using Google. I think it was in the late 90s. Certainly by 2000, I was deeply in search mode. And I started using an aggregator in early 2004. Now I use my aggregator almost as much as I use search. And I use search inside my aggregator and persistent search, where I create an RSS feed from a search result that then is updated in my aggregator, through google, pub sub, and msn.
Charles Fitzgerald at Microsoft nicely articulated the benefits of subscription in his article, From Browse to Search to Subscribe:
But when you subscribe, software does things on your behalf. It automatically grabs stuff you’ve expressed an interest in (and in the future software smarts probably will do a pretty good job of finding things you might have an interest in). Discovery and navigation disappear once you’ve found something worthy of ongoing attention. Software bridges delivery with the consumption experience and lets you interact on your terms. With RSS, instead of having to visit a wide range of web sites in order to read blogs, people can subscribe using newsreader software that will retrieve and present those data feeds. You can read them at your convenience. They are available offline so you can catch up any time. You can sort or search them. Most newsreader software is pretty simple today as blogs are designed to be read by people. But newsreaders will get smarter and enhance the consumption experience….There are all kinds of interesting feeds that might be consumed by software, which then does something for us. Software updates and patches. Event calendars. Business data. Traffic flows. Search queries. Stock prices. All can be subscribed to as feeds and then software can party on that information to our benefit – personalize, analyze, visualize, manipulate, aggregate, synopsize, prioritize, etc. The subscribe model promises people a more valuable experience with much less effort. The old rallying cry of Information At Your Fingertips is no longer a dream. We all have access to more information than we could ever possibly process. The challenge now is sifting through oceans of information to get the right stuff and, equally important, then be able to take the appropriate action and do something with the information.
In the article, Fitzgerald references Tivo as another subscription model. When I talk about aggregation and subscription, I like to use the analogy of Tivo, but for your desktop:
In his very good podcasts about aggregators on our Learning 2.0 tip-of-the-week podcast series, Glen Mohr explains how subscription can replace email and search. I think the subscription model is going to overtake the desktop and become the dominant mode for the foreseeable future. It appears that a war is brewing over the desk top real estate, as the desktop becomes an aggregator or the aggregator takes over the desktop. Google and Sun are teaming up on one side to offer a set of services to compete with Microsoft. Microsoft with its new office live is also starting to compete on the service side. And the name they have chosen for the new operating system, “Vista,” is an indication that they too see the desktop as aggregator. Windows looked down into the computer. Vista looks out to the horizon.
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