Read/Write Web writes of a survey which asks the question "What will be the next big thing on the Web?", one participant hits the nail on the head:
Paradigm shift: you will not search the Web for information. You will define what you want, and the Web will collect it for you.This reminds me of what Thomas Vander Wal calls the "come to me web". The idea is not new (first time I heard of it was when push technology was all the rage). However, I think the key thing that will be different this time round is that you will not "define what you want" by selecting items in a hierarchy or even by searching with keywords. This is still the I-go-get paradigm albeit with a different delivery technology.
The paradigm shift of the come-to-me web is that the content will actually come to you, intelligently routed by software agents who know what content you want.
These agents (known as recommenders) need data to do their work, this is where attention data comes in. Attention data (the logs of what we purchase, read, consume, who we interact with etc) is the oil that lubricates the come-to-me web's cogs.
I predicted at the start of the year* that this year would be the year of attention, it doesn't look to have happened yet. I think the main problem is that the kind of social change required for a true paradigm shift to occur, is much slower than the pace of technology. Also there needs to be a critical mass of useful attention data and a way of aggregating it, thankfully these foundations are being laid as we speak by the current breed of web technologies.
* None of my predictions have happened.
