As we colonize the cloud we'll need to acquire some other basic concepts too, writes Jon Udell. The one he is focusing on in the elmcity project is syndication. It’s a broad concept that unites all the principles Jon discuss in Seven ways to think like the web:

  1. Be the authoritative source for your own data
  2. Pass by reference not by value
  3. Know the difference between structured and unstructured data
  4. Create and adopt disciplined naming conventions
  5. Push your data to the widest appropriate scope
  7. Reuse components and services

He writes:

I’m exploring these principles in the context of calendar syndication, but they apply in many other realms too. In Goodbye Fax, Hello Personal Cloud, for example, I imagined a world in which we syndicate health information to and from insurers and care providers. Why don’t things work that way yet? Sure, our systems aren’t ready. But neither are we.

Syndication, at its core, means that when you want to give me something, you don’t have to send me a copy. You can instead grant me access to your original. Like the decoding of symbolic representations, like monetary inflation, like asymmetric cryptography, this is not a possibility that millions of years of evolution prepared us for. It’s not hardwired. It’s not something we easily and naturally learn. It’s why we so often still abuse email with attachments instead of connecting our shared spaces in the cloud.

In the realm of public calendars, the free flow of information flow is largely thwarted by what I call the Submit Your Event Antipattern. “Got events for the public calendar? Send them to us.” Which makes sense because for millions of years that’s how you gave stuff to people: you handed it over. It’s only in the last 15 years that a radically different possibility emerged. “Got events for the public calendar? Give us access to your feed.”

"Why can’t Johnny syndicate? He’ll learn, but it will take a while, and the right kind of education will help," Jon writes.

Have a read of the full post on Cloudline and weigh in in this forum: What makes it so hard to live up to the web's potential? If PGP never happened, will syndication? Will people ever think like the web?

Tags: cloud, jon, personal, syndication, the, udell

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Hey, maybe when my brain connects with the cloud (per Kurzweil -- see post), I'll get rewired to think like the web.

I agree that this is as much an information technology problem as it is a human problem, but the human problem might be solvable with better IT. We humans often take the simpler approach to sharing information rather than the one that might be correct for the system we're using.

For example, which solution is easier:

1. Open a new e-mail message. Click the attach button. Browse to the file I want to send. Attach. Send.

2. Upload the file I want to send to a cloud service which enables sharing of documents. Obtain the public URL. Open a new e-mail message. Paste the URL. Send.

I may know which method I'd *rather* use (cloud sharing), but if I am unsure of the technical capabilities of the recipient, I may opt to perpetuate the 'tried and true' method and attach the file -- version control, efficiency of messaging and utilization of resources be damned.

In the future, we need systems which make the kinds of information that we want to share more easily sharable than traditional methods. And we need to balance the convenience of sharing with the risks of over-sharing. If my private calendars were made public, for instance, I may open up my private life to more scrutiny than I'd normally prefer. And if the system to control over-sharing were too complex, I'd probably opt-out of the entire system all together (re: PGP).

It seems like it's just a change of what process is followed.  As these technologies become more prevalent sharing feeds in order to synchronize data rather than sharing individual files or appointments will become more and more common place.




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