B. Mann Consulting

My friend James at AdHack introduced me to the concept of Archive vs. Flow:

The web works in two ’states’ (for lack of a better word): flow and archive.

• Flow: all the new content coming onto the web and its parsing, aggregation, recombination, etc. For short, consider this the new stuff. New blog posts. New Twitter tweets. New YouTube videos. Access is by RSS, browsing, email, IM, alerts.
• Archive: all the content that’s no longer new but is still accessible and indexed for retrieval. For short, this is the culmination of not-new stuff. Old stuff organized and accessed by tags, categories, searches and links.

Most folks only get the archive aspect of the web once they’ve used it and managed websites for a number of years. It’s a little counterintuitive and different from all other media types.

Flow is short-term candy to fire people up. Archive is long-term value that ages and improves over time.

Once I started thinking like this - about content and experiences as Archive or Flow (or a combination, of course, if done right), it has permeated my thinking.

More recently, I've been thinking about organizations and their activities using this same model. And how many traditional, broadcast media organizations are all flow. They don't even *think* about archive. And this is epitomized by what I think is the very basis for all web-based Archive concepts: the permalink. If your piece of content, your experience, does not have a permalink, there is precious little I can do with it (including find my way back to it).

Two examples of media organization that are pretty much all flow: TV and radio (especially the news and/or local versions). Neither have permalinks in their "native" format. Their companion websites are slowly evolving some archive functionality, but it's not very good. Even worse, their websites do a bad job of showcasing the inherent flow nature of the organization and the content they serve.

Hulu is an example of a TV-related website that is starting to provide a great archive functionality. More like this, please!

Other TV sites do have some clips after the fact, and ways to link to them, but these are divorced from the native medium. You have to remember to go back to the website, somehow find the piece of content you were watching, and even then you might not have a permalink (think hour long clips, mini clips, or mystery meat javascript navigation that doesn't let you link directly to items).

Radio is the example that I think is:

1. in the most dire need of showcasing the "flow" nature of their content on their companion website and
2. has done a terrible job of doing anything to grow an archive that, as James says, has "long-term value that ages and improves over time".

A counter example is actually CBC Radio - they're growing an archive at a furious rate for most of their shows in the form of podcasts and interactive shows like Spark that blur radio and web and interactivity. But, I think the local "news" radio doesn't do nearly as good a job of moving from flow to archive on the web, arguably where it is the most important. The produced "shows" just happen to currently be broadcast over the air - but they are discrete chunks of content that can probably be better delivered via the web.

Last.FM is an example of a site that is tangentially related to this discussion, at least as regards music. They turn your "flow" of music listening into your own personal archive. And it grows richer over time. Radio doesn't do this for you, even on their own website. You can't favourite a song, or share it, or tell other people to tune in to a particular frequency RIGHT NOW if they want to hear it. It probably should.

So, how do flow-based organizations grow an archive? I think the prime example of native flow tools on the web today are all based on microblogging: Twitter, Friendfeed, and Facebook status messages. By looking at these native flow tools, media organizations can do several things at the same time:

1. Leverage the flow based, real time nature of their content and business - every item from their native medium becomes the basis for a microblog post coming from their own brand.
   
2. Build interactivity around this web-based flow version. What if your radio or TV station tweeted back at you? What if it used hashtag #traffic? or #news? or #contest?
   
3. Use all of this activity to automatically create permalinks which can be shared, rated, commented and in general, grow value over time. Since every microblog has a permalink "for free", there's the basis of your archive. Layer on other tools to remix, analyze, mashup, and visualize the depth of your archive over time.

Oh, and you probably shouldn't cede all of this great archive content exclusively to Twitter or any other third party network. Like cross-posting to YouTube, you definitely want to reach the audience on Twitter (and Facebook, and so on), but you first want to post to your "own" microblog. How do you get your microblogging network? I'm glad you asked!

There are a number of tools evolving to support the Open Micro Blogging standard that will let a number of different sites all talk to each other. This means that platforms like Drupal or WordPress can easily support implementations of microblogging.

More simply, Laconi.ca is an open source project designed to be a turnkey microblogging platform. The biggest single example is the Identi.ca site, and a good example of a community using it is Leo Laporte's TWiT Army. Evan Prodromou of Laconi.ca / Identi.ca recently shared with me that he's also working on a fully hosted option. Watch status.net to keep up to date with that option.

Much of the growth of the web has come from its Archive nature, rooted in the permalink and being able to instantly get back to a single piece of content. Google and Wikipedia are two prime examples of this. Flow and real time are more recent entrants, but they are making the web grow even faster ^[1].

How is your flow based organization going to participate in both?

…cake. Sort of. John Ounpuu made an interesting comment the other day that I re-tweeted:

Social is not a new type of icing. It's a new way of thinking about your cake.

I then got a number of good responses. From Travis:

Actually, social is a new way of deciding what to make -- as Marie Antoinette found, the people might not want to eat cake.

And then from Justin:

Social is a cake fight. Everyone has a cake, and they're all throwing it at each other and trying to dodge.

Fun stuff, and a good excuse to make a summary blog post.

First off, I need to apologize to @webchick for being called away from the Drupal BoF at Open Web Vancouver last night. It was great to have her here to do a run through with @chx1975 of where we're at with Drupal 7. I was around just long enough to once again raise the issue of what the default install profile will do.

We've come quite far in major core improvements, but we don't have a story for what Drupal is when you do a default install. What should Drupal do "out of the box"?

There is a placeholder issue for this now: #483987 Decide on direction for default install profile. As I've seen the UX process continue, I still see us focusing on building and constructing. The changes there have been excellent, but I think we're missing an opportunity to have a truly great out of the box experience. My codename for this is "drupaloob".

The first step is deciding the story for this. WordPress is a blog. We are not a blog. We are a multi user system. Can we turn on a minimal OOB experience that showcases some of our multi user and other strengths? In the words of President Obama, "Yes We Can!"

My personal opinion and outline for this is that we should ship with a "Community in a Box". I've documented it on groups.drupal.org. Regardless of the details of comments on or off, promoted by default, and other finer points, here is my user story for this Community in a Box:

A community site with front page articles, a community blogging section, discussion forums, and shared image galleries.

Anyone is welcome to sign up for an account and participate in the forums. After some time in the forums, users are invited to become contributors, and can post blog posts and photos, as well as submit unpublished articles.

The blogging functionality is a community multi user blog. It is not meant as one users blog, but rather a large community that can post quick thoughts responding to each other and sharing their ideas. (Note: this is in here because people get confused about "blog" functionality -- this is meant to highlight that having a community blog is not the same as a single user blog, so don't expect to be able to change titles and designs etc. -- your blog posts are in a shared, community space)

Editors are around and police the forums, as well as reviewing and publishing articles and other material for the front page.

The photo galleries are shared galleries: like the forum and the community blogs, users upload them to share, rather than in their own space. There are weekly suggestions for new gallery categories, and users can also tag photos with whatever they like to mix and match how the photos are grouped.

While I'm piling wishes on top of dreams, I'd even like to use the wizard that has been in core since Drupal 6 to make several parts of this OOB experience optional. That is, right at the beginning, users would have two options.

One would be to do an "express install" that would install everything with the defaults as I've outlined above.

The second would be to engage the wizard and answer a series of questions and options:

Do you want forums? yes/no
Do you want a community blog for contributors? yes/no
Do you want a community photo gallery? yes/no etc.

What do you think? What would you want people to experience when they first install Drupal 7? Edit the wiki, leave comments, or create some patches against default.profile.

Back in September 2008 I got contacted by Backbone Magazine to answer a couple of questions about, well, corporate websites and business usage of the web in general. I forgot all about it, until my friend Laura in Ottawa was reading it and saw my name. It's apparently in the current issue (which I haven't seen the print version of). It's on the site as "Fixing a stale web site", by Andrew Rideout. Below are the original questions and my answers. I've added a few notes in parentheses and added links to things.

I got notice this weekend that my talk submission to Open Web Vancouver 2009 got accepted.

Open Web Vancouver runs June 11th and 12th and the brand new Vancouver Convention Center, and registration is now open.

Here's the blurb from the registration page:

This year's conference promises to be at least as exciting as last year's. So far we have an exciting speaker roster confirmed, including keynote sessions with Rickard Falvinge, leader of Sweden's Pirate Party, and Angela 'webchick' Byron, Drupal 7 co-maintainer and Lullabot. Other confirmed speakers include:

• Chris Messina ( OAuth / Citizen Agency )
• Jacob Applebaum ( Tor )
• David Ascher ( Mozilla Messenging )
• Evan Prodromou ( identi.ca )

(BTW Open Web Van peeps - I'm tagging this #owv09, please post this somewhere as the "official" tag)

I posted my talk submission to the Open Restaurants wiki. What's Open Restaurants? Well, it's the namespace for that Semantic Web Community Barn Raising that I blogged about a while back. We had our breakfast meeting, 8 people came, and we've got a great cross section of Drupal devs, Freebase / semweb schema nerds, open data policy enthusiasts, and NLP experts that want to use Twitter posts to create Skynet :P