(275) Russel's piece in Usability News is a look at the Purple stuff form another angle.
I think a sea-change is on the horizon - readers are becoming more powerful, and more importantly, integrated into websites, and screen scraping is becoming more advanced. This can lead, in a very short timescale, to web applications that allow people to construct their own websites containing fragments of anyone else's. Anyones, because we can quite easily scrape or make an RSS feed from any HTML page and so the originator does not need to have provided the feed for us.(279) This is important in two senses. Firstly, and most fundamentally, we have split the web atom - previously atomic units were web pages - once you'd got them you could analyse them into text and graphics, but you generally dealt in whole pages. Now our atomic unit is much smaller - we can construct things out of fragments of pages. And this makes a second difference - consumers can look only at what they want to, can miss adverts and poor material out; producers have to think smaller scale and making their stuff work on segmented as well as page levels. Copyright will become a big issue (and the law may well need altering), our shorter attention spans may be better catered for, and pretty layouts might take a backseat compared to content.
(283) It fits with my contention that the net is a tool, not a medium. The whole net is an information tool that does a whole lot of interesting things, most importantly, distributing information power; that is the power to produce and disseminate your own information and access, critique and publicise the critique of other people's information, but it also acts as a validator of information and perspective by community, however small or isolated.
(285) The very act of validation, by linking to another resource and sharing keywords with it, creates the necessary semantic connections that enable tools like Google to work at all. (On which topic, check The nature of meaning in the age of Google, I'm working through it, but it makes good sense so far.
(287) Russell's right about the copyright issue because once you put it on the net, you lose control of it and any attempt to get that control back is a waste of time and energy. If you don't want to lose the control, stay off the net.
(289) But the interesting part comes back to his suggestion that smaller chunks are what matters, and in doing so, he restates the Purple Numbers idea. Once these thing Start, you find them everywhere.
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