In 1989 I was a young computer programmer and the only way to keep myself updated with latest technology news was to buy electronics and computer magazines. Therefore, each time I found an interesting article I photocopied it and took it to my friends and colleagues.
The information had a very slow spread process, very few of my colleagues would had the opportunity to deepen the topics covered in those articles or to discuss them with their computer technicians colleagues.
I would also like to underline the enormous waste of paper that took place in the past.
In fact, the innovation in those years was, both in terms of hardware and software, high-growth, even if the computer technicians didn’t have enough tools to follow and share the technological evolution.
Computer technology ran at 100 kilometers per hour, but the information ”stumbled” a lot, incapable of moving at the same speed of innovation.
Everything has changed today, in no time everyone can spread an article on line, not only technicians and experts, but anyone can send it toward collaborators, friends, industry experts. It doesn’t matter if the item is with fee or a free-of-charge one.
The action of spreading we are talking about is called “post”, it is the publication of a comment and one or more hypertext links that catapults the reader / friend / colleague directly on information. The information can be sent in a few moments and in a targeted manner to hundreds or thousands of people, these people can easily access to what is reported and even comment on it, or “post” it to other people.
The “post” is free, immediate, but above all is an “active alarm,” or rather, it reaches the targeted audience as fast as a ringing of a telephone. The “post” is the great grandson of the citation, bibliographic tool, with the big difference that, by posting, the information is immediately available with a simple click. But the “post” is also the natural heir of the “pub’s chat”, its simplicity allows you to quickly and easily bring in any kind of comment.
There is another technical term that can explain how the flow of communication is much more complex today than in the past, and that is “referer”. This term indicates the source address of the post sent.
On web it’s popular indicating as “referer” the site or the person who performs the role of amplifier, therefore of a “family agent”.
In summary, the information circulates now in a much faster and far-reaching way as before, and it can also be covered retroactively.
BLOG writers know very well the term “PingBack“, this is a kind of notice citation. When one of my articles is quoted, it gets “posted” on the network from another website and I receive an immediate notification related to the page that has decided to quote me.
The act of online contents diffusion can be carried out completely automatically and free-of-charge. The activation of a service RSS feed allows interested users to receive on their browser or on feed aggregator all the latest news: a feed for each new article in a blog or in an online newspaper, for each new recipe published on their favorite site, for each type of announcement published on net, and so on. Particularly interesting is the role of the icon that represents the feed service, easily recognizable it allows user to perceive immediately the possibility to subscribe updates from Website / Portal / Blog he is reading. The RSS feed is also an example of how the standard rules application, coherently organized from the informatics point of view (XML), has facilitated the service spread.
Do not forget about Twitter, the best social network. Twitter is a combination of speed, practicality, diffusion. With Twitter you can implement both “post” actions manual and automatic. When this article will be published, a tweet will be automatically sent to my followers’ mobile smart phone, tablet or personal computer.
In the last ten years, even less, the spread of information has outpaced the time and space constraints, no more copies hand-delivered to a few friends. New patterns have emerged, simpler, automatic, faster and immediate.
The author can monitor the use of his information on network, he can counter the quote received, he even may respond to comments and requests. The user can spread what he wants, to anyone he wants, enriching it with quotes and personal suggestions.
All these changes and the passage of time, faded away the memory of me who once made photocopies.
WorldTwoDotZero 