dumplingfeed

Kim and I are revamping the website of Alicia Bay Laurel, the Grand Dame of the Back to the Land Movement. We are moving all of her content onto the engine, pushing new work into “channels” around her upcoming album and book. In the coming weeks you will see the creation of “planets” (gatherings of blog posts) by people who are living off the land, living off the grid, making a conscious choice to live green whereever it is fate may have placed them.

It is the perfect metaphor for the new paradigm that syndication presents: content in small, concise packages. Each one a single idea (human-readable) wrapped up in metadata (machine-readable) as standalone, selfcontained packets of information ready to be served up to the world.

Traditional publication favors large chunks: books, magazines, journals are all multipage collections which cover a wide range of topics, while the blogpost represents the ultimate in granularity. Its syndication offers better personalization, improved searching, and organization.

Get the dumplings you want, whe

Thinking a great deal lately about the diffusion of information, searching for the right abstraction lately to capture the essence of what is happening to the WWW, and how to foster this subtle revolution. E.M. Rogers' model of the diffusion of information seems to do the job.

Social systems can be characterized as either heterophilous or homophilous. heterophilous social systems (niche groups) are made up of people from different backgrounds, which indicates an inclination to be exposed to new ideas. In homophilous social systems, most interaction within them is between people from similar backgrounds; people and ideas that differ from the norm are seen as strange and undesirable.