A compelling visual no doubt – I think it’s a great way to describe to those who have not really thought about how their information is aggregated, redistributed and shared once they send it out. Shortly after he wrote about this illustrative analogy, he was informed that his own site was blocking crawlers via his robots.txt file. The irony was not lost on him:

A comment from Mark Middleton perfectly illustrates the point I was making the other day about visualizing your published surface area. I started this blog in December, and ever since I’ve been running with a robots.txt file that reads:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

In other words, no search engine crawlers allowed. Of course that’s not what I intended. I’d simply assumed that the default setting was to allow rather than to block crawlers, and it never occurred to me to check. In retrospect it makes sense. If you’re running a free service like WordPress.com, you might want to restrict crawling to only the blogs whose authors explicitly request it.

WordPress.com’s policy notwithstanding, the real issue here is that these complex information membranes we’re extruding into cyberspace are really hard to see and coherently manage.

We’re all learning and probing and figuring out this new medium, even 10-15 years on now. We’re struggling with the abundance of information, and concurrently, the distinct lack thereof. We can connect with people from anywhere, at anytime, assuming they’re connected and watching the same streams of information. And yet, we cannot see who’s watching, who’s aggregating and saving for later.

Thanks, Jon, for the nice analogy. I’ll use it myself, with a link back, of course – so you can sense it.

Only a dog will be a dog on the internet.

The network effects of distributing and verifying our identity will have dramatic implications on how we interact in our world (both online and offline). I think we’re headed to a time when “online” and “offline” will no longer be different, separable “places”. They’ll come together and just “be” your identity – they’ll be who you are.

Companies went through this roughly ten years ago. We started seeing URLs on television commercials and glossy brochures. They were at the bottom of the Nike commercials and the car commercials. IBM had one. Apple. Smith Barney. We stopped hearing phone numbers on radio spots – they started saying things like dot-com and dot-o-r-g at the end of their 30 seconds. The companies figured out that their public face was moving from their broadcast advertising campaigns and marketing documents to their website.

Consumers began talking about companies in a way that was recordable, searchable, findable, and devastating to those companies who had always existed at or near the edge of consumer ire. These companies lost when there was more feedback introduced into the system. A good thing, nearly everyone agrees in today’s “enlightened” internet world.

Likewise, those companies who played this new game well, had a website, fostered community, encouraged feedback and embraced the technology – many of them flourished. There was global reach available to so many more than before, both big and small. There were conversations that began to happen (cluetrain) and the concept of a difference between “online companies” and “offline companies” began to disappear about five years later. Nearly all companies larger than one or two person operations now have a web presence here in the US. People “get” how this works – they understand that they can research a company/product before purchase – they can shop around and read the reviews. This is empowering to the consumer and cheaper for the companies. The market spoke and ten years have passed. It’s just part of today’s reality. No big deal. It’s hard to imagine shopping without it.

Now, on to individuals.

We will begin to make the same realizations, personally, that the companies made about their own visibility and place in the world. We’ll be realizing our own face to the world, our own identities, are now a conversation, searchable, findable (you are what you post) – and that there are most definitely reviews out there that can be read and analyzed. It is a very flat place. It’s accessible and negligibly free, a powerful combination.

Now, there are great differences between companies and individuals, sure – culturally, financially, legally. The mechanics of how this will all go down will not be the same, but the end result – a consolidation and awareness of the “self” we project – will be identical to what business went through ten years ago. Your social networks will make sure that it’s really hard for you to have a persona online that’s any different from who you are in “real life”. In fact, what I’m saying is that “in real life (IRL)” will be a quaint colloquialism in just a few short years. We’ll look back and laugh at our simplicity of understanding and comprehension for where we were headed. In an always-on, well-connected world, our social dynamics will change a little bit – but not much. We’ve had too many years (all of them) of being social creatures to change much now. Our friends will be our friends and our enemies will be our enemies. No online or offline about it.

Think I’m wrong? Think we’ll be able to keep our groups of friends and affiliations separated from one another? Don’t think you’ll have reviews?

Tell me about it.