I'm still typing this blog comment on my laptop, but both blogs as well as laptops are "old school" again. Just read a remarkable article from Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff. According to him we are just transitioning to the "Cloud 2" and the iPad, on sale this weekend, is the most obvious manifestation.From Pull to Push: "Pulling" information from databases and newspapers is declining, our friends and trusted sources push the news to us instead. Information appears in streams and feeds. The prevailing tools are Twitter, Facebook and Youtube.
I'm currently receiving three different information feeds, a "paywall" feed, that I'm getting via Factiva, a blog/web feed on Google Reader and a Twitter feed, where I directly follow thought leaders of the areas I'm interested in. With this I feel prepared for the era of the Cloud 2. Just need to upgrade my hardware...
Update: In the same context, Jeff Jarvis is commenting on one of Benioff's postulates, the move from creation to consumption. It is nothing else than a strategy of the media companies to regain control about the democratised social media space. The iPad "does not include a simple (fucking) USB port, which means that I can’t bring in and take out content easily."
From this angle, apps are also appearing in a negative light:
"This shift to apps is a move in precisely the opposite direction. Apps are more closed, contained, controlling. That, again, is why media companies like them. But they don’t interoperate — they don’t play well — with other apps and with the web itself; they are hostile to links and search."
The iPad is the Trojan Horse that lures us into the paywall castle, with the gates firmly shut down.
