Shifting the Online Paradigm – The Link, The Subscribe, and The Open Follow

Genious commentary. Be sure to click through to read more posts and the balance of this insightful post.

http://www.cloudave.com/link/the-link-the-subscribe-and-the-open-follow

The link: The mother of all internet opportunity is the link (hypertext). Conceptually, the link is like nothing before it – though I’m sure that if Johannes Guttenberg had been able to conceive of it, he would’ve loved it. The link brings a level of inter-connectedness to the pages, thinking, concepts, sites on the web that makes it foundational. There is no “internet community forming” without the link; it’d just be a huge compilation of separated writings.

The subscribe: I originally thought this might be called “the post” (with the advent of blogging tools), but conceptually, you could always “post” to the internet, it was just a matter of how high the technical hurdle was. The real conceptual addition was the subscribe. Suddenly, the internet went from static but interconnected pages to a semi-dynamic world wherein the “pages” came to you. The subscribe did not get us to “real-time,” but it did remove the necessity of “place” (ie, “go” to a web page).

The open follow: I first heard “the open follow” discussed by Mitch Kapor at Gluecon. That may not be the first time it was mentioned, and Twitter may not be the first place it happened, but that’s not the point. The concept of the “open follow” on Twitter — ie, that you can follow people you don’t know or that don’t follow you back is HUGELY important (I’d argue).