It seems like a small thing, but day after day I can’t help thinking that there is a distinct pattern to the business model of things such as the Associated Press going more and more down the route of using open syndication rather than traditional distribution partners.
Wikipedia vs. Brittanica
Writer Branded Blogs vs. Media Brands
Tags vs. Taxonomies
Slashdot vs. Peer Review
Metacritic vs. Critic
What all these things do is place ordinary people or individual nuggets of information as nodes in a non-hierarchical web rather than a series of disconnected pyramid hierarchies.
The way the web looks to the end user, the way it looks to publishers and the way it works in terms of money flow are starting to look the same as the underlying technology – a non hierarchical web.
And the really interesting thing about webs, is that is how the real word works – things that look like hierarchies, like species taxonomies are in fact snapshot renderings of a non-hierarchical web.
For years, people thought that the hierarchical taxonomy of species reflected the way things are, a legacy of a 19th century view of the word. This world view is a metaphor.
It turns out that the definition of a species is not whether two organisms can reproduce with fertile offspring – but whether they normally do so in the wild. I.E. the nodes in the hierarchy are not absolute.
Secondly, although most higher organisms that have evolved as separate species never mutate in such a way as to be able to reproduce with parent species, this sometimes happens with small organisms such as bacteria. As microbiology increases the resolution of biological investigation, this is more apparent. I.E. the hierarchy is in fact a web that tends to look hierarchical at low resolution.
Even the taxonomy of species, the quintessential, immutable hierarchy, is an ever changing web.