First thoughts on the Web of Flow …

The inexorable transition away from the Web of Pages — which blogging as we know it is part of — to the Web of Flow means that a new model of blogging will evolve to match the new principles of flow-first relationships on the web. Today’s transitional hybrid model creates serious dissonance: blog posts exist statically at a particular URL, while comments are increasingly experienced as a stream within dedicated flow tools.
Read more at www.stoweboyd.com

I read this blog post a bit a go but haven’t done anything about it (squirreled away as something Big to think about later).

Boyd writes of a big conceptual shift from the idea of the web being composed of pages to the new idea of the web being made up of flows (of microcontent - also see Alexander) constructed by particular tools.

Boyd sees us as caught up in the passing of one web era (static pages - exemplified by the blog) and another (liquid flows - exemplified by Twitter).

I wonder though if we won’t always be in this hybrid state? There are surely times when flow works best (following tweets from the ALT-C conference, crowd sourcing information on a forest fire) but other times when I want that static, someone-organising-the-chaos-of-disparate-voices, page-based web (reading a synopsis of ALT-C in a blog, or The Guardian online report of that forest fire).

We don’t move cleanly from one media era to another; pages and flows will coexist (as do analogue and digital texts).