I’m believe in narratives, although I think in the future information will be more published in fragments. A good example for this is Twitter. A tweet by itself is often worthless information. Your personal narrative (al the tweets from a certain person you have read before) make the individual tweet valuable. This is personal (public) and fragmented storytelling.

Scoble is doing some public research into the future of blogs. He talks about problems that are very real to bloggers right now. How to implement widgets and other stuff into your weblog interface without creating information chaos. In other words how to build a personal aggregator.

http://www.kyte.tv/ch/6118-scobleizer-sponsored-by-seagate/48464-my-blog-of-th

Can’t wait for the linkdump :)

What’s so interesting is that the database logic (on the web) is replacing the narrative logic (in movies). However, the narrative logic is still embedded in blogs in their reverse chronological order.

I think we are finally seeing a break from this narrative logic in WordPress themes with the advent and popularity of Magazine-like and Photothemes that not necessarily put the most frequent topic on top.

Still thinking about your final question.

John Battelle really emphasized this in The Search.

The success of Google is the best proof that we are moving from push to pull. And pull means a different way of organizing your information as a provider. With every pull - you the provider - get new information about what your visitors want. I think we underestimate the value of this when designing new interfaces or interactive applications. We design from a push culture, how do we present all our information in this really small interface.

A database doesn’t push information it just sits there waiting for someone to pull something out of it. We disconnected the user from the database by building interfaces that connect to the database with certain rules and push the information back to you. We think from old media while using new media.

For example this website pulls this comment out of the database and pushes it in the place where you are reading it right now. This comment is also bound to the context of this particular entry and your comments above. Is this comment an object in itself or is it part of a narrative?

Do we need interfaces for narratives? Or can we just group large amounts of information in clusters that have connections but no preformed narratives? A bit like the internet, you jump from object to object and from interface to interface.

The weblog interface didn’t become this popular for no reason. The weblog interface is a timeline and narrative. It shows you the last messages ordered by time. And by reading more you get to know the author.

The weblog interface is ahead of other interfaces it is less structured, it is ordered by time, author or topic. It’s not completely free, but it’s more enhanced compared to the ‘traditional’ website. And you see how this works. The interface used for blogs is getting copied by ‘traditional’ companies to reform there ‘traditional’ website.

Right now bloggers are already struggling with ways to solve the problem that their content is in different formats in different databases, by building aggregators, feeds and widgets.

What do you think are elements that the next generation of web interfaces should have?

The medium of the blog is currently dictated by the database. Even though a database poses no structure on the content all blog themes follow pretty much the same structure. When this structure is changed or defied people raise the question whether that blog is still a blog.

This sentence also caught my eye: “What you store in a database and the amount of valuable information you can retrieve decides the value of the database.” This sums up perfectly why Google’s database is priceless. Google’s “Database of Intentions” is a goldmine.