This blog post can be read on this blog, through an RSS reader or perhaps even through somebody’s Facebook profile. If another blog writes about the same subject and links to this post it will be visible through that blogs RSS feed, somebody else’s profile and in hundreds of other RSS readers. Somebody comments this post. Someone else comments the same thing but on another blog that writes about the same thing. Content and conversation are being spread out in several places.
A VC writes about how content is no longer connected to a specific location but rather distributed through numerous different channels on the internet. Not only the content, but the whole of the conversation is available in other places than the comment field of the blog itself. Why shouldn’t it be possible to comment on a blog post directly in the RSS reader which then gets synchronized with the other comments?
We need to think of content as bits that can be created, assembled, re-assembled, anywhere at any time. Because that is, in fact, what digital content is. I am slowly but surely breaking the content I create up into parts and creating them in different places and then re-assembling them in various ways. The posts I write and the comments you and I create don’t have to be housed in the same system and they aren’t anymore.
Steve Rubel has similar thoughts: we need to stop thinking about web pages and start thinking about web services where everything is portable, like a big cut-and-paste table where you can assemble your favorite services in any way you see fit. What matters today are widgets; web site traffic has therefore lost some of it’s relevance.
Don’t wait. Start now to make everything on your website embeddable. Traffic is becoming something that happens elsewhere, not just on your site.