haven't seen you in ages…
great to see you on CNBC-

damon

The largest publisher/subscriber broadcast streaming ecosystem is television. USENET, feed readers, and Twitter all follow the beauty of televisions' asymmetrical sharing of information where on-demand consumption values urgency over comprehensiveness.

I too am glad to see you write about diversity within the real-time stream. However, you've approached the conversation with a huge assumption regarding bit.ly – that all of the encodes/decodes represent real-time activity which I believe is false. A bit.ly encode doesn't define a real-time action or even real-time intentionality – the channels where the shortened URLs are shared and clicked does. I would imagine that a growing number of bit.ly encodes are merely for URL tracking through traditional channels or just the condensed URL footprint, hence, we should be very careful about what bit.ly data approximates.

- Is there a more accurate consumption breakdown of the channels today?
- How has channel consumption changed over time? (growth, momentum, moving average, etc.)
- What channels outside of real-time channels have seen growth? (Email, RSS, forums, blogs, etc.)
- What type of directionality is there for cross-channel sharing? (Virality from channel to channel)

I believe that a little more transparency regarding diversity would not only provide people with insight into channel growth and usage, but also inspiration for valuable new businesses to innovate upon the bit.ly stack.

I was thinking about this after reading your post, and I believe that Twitter has actually taught me how to use Google Reader. I used to think of Google Reader like my email inbox, because there are read/unread statuses with each article. The overwhelming number of messages on twitter and lack of read / unread status, however, made me realize that you cannot consume entire streams like you would do with email. You just jump in, browse around the recent stuff, and jump back out. Streams are reminding us just how much data is flowing through our lives everyday and that attention is a choice given only to some bits of data.

I imagine we'll become acclimated, again, to deferring more attention choices to editors / curators of content as we become dissatisfied with just turning on the stream and seeing what's at the top–we're going to need some way to filter/reduce the flow of these streams to something that fits the finite bits of time we devote to these floods of data passing by us.