In adapting new mediums, there is always a period where the shape of the old form is mirrored in the new form’s space. For example, an early television ad looked like this. Radio had simply repositioned itself in front of a camera. It took years for advertisers to fully realize what could be achieved on the small screen. Nearly half a century later, the highly polished 30 second spot that those early sponsor announcements had evolved into would make the jump online with little change –aside from a taking advantage of more lenient regulations– when internet video came of age. Even today, the “best” viral ads still follow the tried and true format.

In a similar pattern, the online newspaper has always adapted the traditional layout of its printed cousin. The better rags have introduced interactive components and with the onset of blogging, there has been, for better or worse , the ability for reader comments. But the overall structure has remained intact. Meanwhile, sites such as Facebook, Friend Feed, Twitter and, of course, the all-powerful RSS feed have turned our mode of consuming information from categorized columns into a constantly updating flow.

Today, the New York Times, in what is being heralded by the likes of Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) and Dave Winer (@davewiner) as a watershed moment, introduces the Times Wire, an at-a-glance view of the paper’s latest content, in reverse chronological order without any other weighting or sorting. As Winer states, “They’re now presenting their news flow as a flow. Gone is the pretense that news on the Internet works like news on paper. Welcome to the NY Times river of news”.

RSS has been with us for 10 years now. And unlike a number of other trends and technologies, it has survived and thrived and essentially become the backbone for the current information revolution. After a decade, one might ask of the NY Times shift in format “So what?” or “Why did it take so long?”. Or, to the more discerning observer, it is a moment to make note: of both the validation of the new form and the prevailing relevance of one of the older forms’ greatest champions.

“In the form of cached Web sites, evacuated blogs, forgotten MySpace pages and abandoned Flickr feeds, ghosts frolic, beeping and flashing on autopilot. The jolly online zombies look the way they did the day they died, but the light left their eyes the last day their souls logged in.”
–Virginia Hefferman, The Medium

“ok so this is my page for me and all the spooky things that happen to me don’t think Iam crazy and don’t think that I am makenig things up but for the true believers you can find alot of things here that you might find reasoureful of what not.so if your ready you can read my page and chill out…feel free to look around and have fun. “
–first and last entry on iamaloser.blogspot.com, June 18, 2002

“If you like a certain blog, make friends with the blogger, and then later they abandon their blog, and do not respond to emails, should you be worried? Contact the police? Make a missing persons report? Google their name and search for an obituary? What are you ethically obligated to do in this situation?”
from Dropping out of the blogosphere

“Most of these screenshots (many of which are annotated) were collected during the dotcom bust of 1999-2001, but I continue to add new victims to the rolls as they succomb to the forces of cyber-entropy.”
– Steve Baldwin, The Museum of Interactive Failure

“What would cause people to leave such a beautiful place?”
– WebUrbanists.com’s Urban Abandonments Parts I & II