Crossing the stream.

Crossing the stream.

Or, some thoughts about the decline of finishability, and what it (maybe) means for news.

It is the first century AD.

This guy rules Western Europe.

"Ye maids who toiled so faithful at the mill,
Now cease your work, and from those toils be still
For what your hands performed so long and true,
Ceres has charged the water-nymphs to do."

Antipater, a poet of Syria, 60 BC

In a corner of France...

In a corner of France...

"The greatest concentration of mechanical power anywhere in the Western world."

And...a baking sensation.

Why start with the world's first water mill?

1. Streams have always been a source of enormous transformative power.

2. The stream has emerged as the dominant metaphor of news distribution in our time.

Streams are everywhere.

200,000,000

Tweets sent per day (Source: Twitter, June 2011)

They come in all sizes.

They come in all sizes.

Lots of people build clients.

They're frictionless.

They cross.

News sites try them.

News sites try them.

But mostly they don't.

Mobile changed things.

Mobile changed things.

For some, anyway.

What is a stream?

1. Frequent updates, multiple sources

2. Sequenced

3. Refresh-able

3. Refresh-able

4. Unfinish-able

A state of 'constant consumption'.

An analog in platform games?

An analog in the OS?

=~ Information display

Some reference points.

Newspapers were a mix.

News sites, generally.

Re-invoking sequence.

Social networks.

Everything since.

What are today's mills?

Aggregation.

Real-time.

Contextualisation.

What's in the stream matters too.

Thank you.

@jonnyrichards

Credits: accla.org, Apple maps, arles-guide.com, Columbia Pictures, funnyimages.biz,