Signal to Noise

What is COMMUNICATION?

The exchange of CONTENT.

What is CONTENT?

CONTENT is the evidence, or record, of natural behavior. This could mean anything from a report on the current affairs of Brad Pitt to a study on the aptitude of mice for planet design. It could mean pictures from my northern Michigan camping vacation. Or, it could mean a daily Bible study outline, a song produced by a bluegrass band, or a  list of your nephew’s favorite movies. The movies themselves, are content, too. So are the lines spoken in those movies, and words uttered around the northern Michigan campfire. All content. All products of natural behavior. We’re all producers and consumers of content.
Stick with me.

RSS is a very simple solution to a basic query: How do we share each other’s  content in a fashion that benefits all producers and consumers of it? By fashioning a simple index of the record of that content for consumers of it–right? That’s what RSS does. It facilitates a simple, ongoing index.  The patterns of consumption of the content are reciprocal human behavior, and this great network allows a new fashion of governing and organizing the flow of content production, consumption, and content, forming an organic cycle.  The web was an earlier expression of this cycle, and RSS is one notch in the chain that leads to interop of all the network-connected consumers and producers.

Obviously, RSS is one tiny but very enabling sprocket in the machine that keeps the cycle going: it works for textual or photographic content, anyway. I can use a Technorati feed to see who is visiting my site, what they’ve written about my posts, and so on. I immediately become not only a producer of content, but also a consumer. Reciprocation occurs, and understanding increases.
Voice systems are avenues for content: conversations between people, records of human behavior that have mutual consumers and producers, and a macro-organic cycle that benefits society. The more interoperable the exchange of content is, the more understanding exists between people, and the more people as a whole benefit.

This is sort of a natural law argument in favor of vendor-interopability for voice systems and services (and, obliquely, a call for network standards adherence).  When voice systems don’t interop, the whole content exchange cycle experiences a ritard, and inorganic measures must be taken to maintain the same functional level of content exchange. A blatant case of this is Skype.  Now, we’re dealing on a geek-level of 11 here, but let’s face it: Skype doesn’t permit for interop with other networks, and this breaks the natural law. If Skype was the way everybody desired to voice each other, then we’d not have an issue. But the consequences of human behavior (ie., the design of other, arguably superior, methods of providing voice connectivity) demand that Skype open its doors to a commonly accepted standard.

SIP. Session Initiation Protocol. No, Skype doesn’t have to adopt such a standard within its own network, but the connectedness of people would increase if SIP was placed at the EDGE of the Skype network: SkypeIN and SkypeOUT.

Too esoteric? Too transcendental? Too fundamental?

Maybe. But success is bread by open doors, frequent communication with others, and openness to the content of others. The success of Web 2.0 is attributable to this idea. So is the success of Google, and, arguably, the success of the Internet itself. SIP would go a long way towards helping Skype achieve the same calibre of acceptance and utilization. Skype, don’t forget what your program does: facilitate the exchange of CONTENT. The more you achieve this, the more successful you’ll be.