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So let me officially refer to this insightful article authored by Common Craft’s Lee Lefever.

Common Craft Blog
Introduction to Stocks and Flows in Online Communication (parts 1, 2, 3)
By Lee Lefever

http://www.commoncraft.com/archives/000593.html

http://www.commoncraft.com/archives/000599.html

http://www.commoncraft.com/archives/000601.html

Probably the most interesting aspect to the discussion of the real-time web is not speed of human consumption but rather speed of machine consumption. Correction. This is not necessarily true. People are filters too. Very good filters! In fact, I once started a blog called SpreadTheMedia.org in 06 and the core idea was “Spreading Human Filtered Content”. I valued the human touch that would bubble up content for others to consume. What I meant to point out was the difference between the speed of consumption and the speed of filtration. Machines equipped with smart algorithmic tech will do much of the real-time filtering…. Google, Bing and the other usual suspects as well as new entries to the market. These engines will need to do anti-spam, relevancy, source ranking etc. And in mere seconds so that the intended consumers can get their filtered data.

Rapid Failure, Rapid Intelligence
In a recent post here – http://vocal.ly/p4l – I touched on this stuff a bit.
The notion of rapid failure came to mind as a way to compare how content and content sources need to go through some checks and balances and if their is a rapid failure log recorded, then the filter becomes more efficient and therefor more intelligent. It was not a perfect analogy but the point is clear… Nobody wants to get spam, worms, hoaxes, rumors or any inaccurate data. Nobody wants to spend time fact-checking. The system should handle this for us. And when it does, it will have a nice ripple effect on the infosphere. This doesn’t come without some issues that will breed skepticism and controversy, however.

Trust Analytics
It’s going to be important to rely on the intelligence of the real-time data crunching machines as well as people who act as filters themselves. But in both cases, their will be flaws and corruption contaminating results. It is probably inevitable that their will be stocks formed from the flows that are biased info repositories that will cater to certain minded folks. Many people are set in their ways and like to believe what they want to believe. What i’m getting at here is…. Their will always be layers of filtration and many networks of real-time streams. No different than TV, really. Some will watch Fox, some will watch CNN. I see that i’ve narrowed this down to news gathering. Suppose that makes good sense though. “News” makes up much of the real-time stream. Even if accompanied by a comment, it’s mostly a link and a headline.
So how do look at this filtering point? How does it not become any different than the faulty filters we have already in place on current mediums like TV, Radio? I am reminded of the recent US Presidential Elections and the CPD that make the Debates nearly impossible to qualify for if you are a 3rd party candidate. To me, that is a filter that does us no good. Or the fact that the MSM also does not give fair airtime to candidates unless they are the front-runners, thus maintaining the front-runners status for the duration of the elections. That is a filter that does us no good. Or how about subtle changes to bills that are not reported on so that they can slip through without an outcry? These are just a few examples of bad filters that exist in the world.

Will the web’s real-time filters be an improvement? How many filters will there be? How will we look at these filters? How will they compare to traditional streams of content? Will the Flows be more important than the Stocks or vise versa? At the end of the day, does the landscape change at all? Does The Real-Time Web bring us more noise or can it bring us more signal?

It will be interesting to watch this play out.

And to clarify, The Real-Time Web will be more of an umbrella term as it bleeds into more things. The popularity of Microblogging (Twitter) brought Real-Time content to the forefront, even though twitter isn’t really any more real-time than email or RSS set to poll the server every minute. But it’s the micro chunk data that caught on and the illusion of real-time that got people talking more about it.

Twitter as a service is people powered. People often post links to new pages on the web… news articles, blog posts etc. These people are probably first alerted of this new content via RSS or Email. Someone inevitably is first to re-post content to twitter alerting their followers and anyone who re-posts… the gossip propagates quickly. This is what some will refer to as Real-Time Web. And that’s acceptable.

Other’s will point out that Real-Time Web is how content from one service immediately flows to other services. A great example is Twitter data instantly hitting Friendfeed.com. Twitter does have a data “Firehose” that they let some partners tap into. Usually the technology involved in capturing the data is called long-polling or http streaming. So Twitter is involved with Real-Time technology but it only truly is exposed via the Firehose, not the consumer side where people are using twitter clients to monitor their streams (thats just like email or rss readers).

The Real-Time Web is also effectively now related to RSS and Atom feeds with the advent of rssCloud and PuSHb. Now we can be notified faster when sites with Real-Time RSS feeds are updated. How Stocks and Flows will apply to this will be seen in the next breed of RSS Readers where you can organize your subscriptions more intelligently using filters and groupings etc. These types of features already exist but will become more important with Real-Time Feeds.

I’ll stop this here since i’m sure this is getting a bit unfocused. Check out Common Craft articles and Chris Messina’s Dog analogy!

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No wars here. It’s all good. If the Open Web benefits, then everyone wins. Well, except for those who want to control the Massive Rapid Data moving in the cloud. That is to say… they won’t benefit unless they choose to benefit. And they can and they should. And they will?

I’m glad that i’ve supported rssCloud since earlier this summer (http://nudg.es) when Dave Winer started to reboot the concept, especially after PubSubHubBub came about. It inspired me to take a close historical look at the origins of RSS and related technologies. I’ve used RSS since it’s inception and more so back in 2004 when I helped to launch ourmedia.org which had deep emphasis on RSS for video and audio blogs and making use of the enclosure element (podcasting). We early adopted the new Media RSS spec that was lead by Yahoo to provide more enhanced feeds. And the videoblogging movement really latched onto the concept of RSS and I was at the heart of those pioneering days. So RSS is very familiar and very awesome. I love it.

In the past year+ I have been very interested in the topic of Scaling Twitter. It was the result of Twitter’s technical problems that Open MicroBlogging became a focus of technologists/developers/students. An OpenMicroBlogging protocol was introduced and a twitter clone built on that protocol was launched (identi.ca/status.net). Other proposed protocols and ideas started sprouting as students and professionals weighed in.

Point being… The incredible growth of Twitter put much needed focus back on balancing data control. By that I mean…. Not putting all our eggs in one basket. Not having centralized services at the heart of the web. Not getting drunk on the hype of these new social net brands and their features. Getting back to basics, and back to our blogs. Dusting off some old tech and upgrading the de-centralized web. Speeding up RSS with rssCloud is an important step in this direction.

It’s great that we have our Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, and Apple. But the Open Web needs to evolve too and cannot be mostly dismissed by a small group of Tech Giants who re-invent the wheel, disgard standards and limit their open data policies. Their services are ours to leverage, not to sell our souls to. Obviously, this speaks more to content creators than it does to those who are primarily content consumers. But it benefits everyone. Because at any point, someone can decide to become a more serious content creator, setup a website and a blog and off you go. To have a strong and stable Open Web to go to that competes and coexists with any proprietary offerings with terms & conditions is critical.

So what’s so important about The Real-Time Web? That’s another blog post. But the quick reply is… If you like getting Email in timely manner, then you will like The Real-Time Web.

Here are some of today’s blog posts on the news of rssCloud + WordPress.com integration:

http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/09/07/teaseTeaseTease.html

http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/09/07/anyWordPressBlogCanBeCloud.html

http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2009/09/07/rss-in-the-clouds/

http://staynalive.com/articles/2009/09/07/dave-winer-to-bring-realtime-rss-to-millions-via-wordpress-com/

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wordpress_just_made_millions_of_blogs_real-time_wi.php

http://blog.lazyfeed.com/2009/09/lazyfeed-will-integrate-rsscloud-and.html

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/07/wordpress-enables-rsscloud-in-post-feeds/

http://mashable.com/2009/09/07/rsscloud/

Oh and maybe you’de be curious to know how I found out about todays news?
I actually had hopped into the FIRST rssCLoud enabled aggregator/publisher that was not properly mentioned in any of the above posts The service I speak of is at http://MyStatusCloud.com and is being developed by Jeremy Felt (@jeremyfelt). His blog is at http://www.educer.org/2009/09/07/its-all-happening/.
He has been in 5th gear playing around with the concept of rssCloud and I think he has done a great job implementing it. Take a look and try it out yourself!

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