2006: The Year the Web Explodes

Once I get past the annoyance at Google for dribbling out Googlebase in such a piecemeal fashion, I can see a much larger consequence than the simple issue of features within Googlebase itself. They have accelerated existing forces that will blow the web apart within the next 6 to 8 months. It is no coincidence that just as I'm thinking about Google's RSS reading database I'm also working to make my blogs able to deliver their content as customized RSS feeds on demand.

The explosion I am talking about is the shifting of a website's content from internal to external. Instead of a website being a "place" where data "is" and other sites "point" to, a website will be a source of data that is in many external databases, including Google. Why "go" to a website when all of its content has already been absorbed and remixed into the collective datastream.

So why the hyperbole? Haven't sites been publishing RSS feeds for years? Yes, but those feeds only included recent items. Google wants ALL of our data. If websites now start leaving all their content outside their internal database for anyone to collect, the data will propagate and then morph into a different web from what we have now.