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John Gruber’s Daring Fireball debuted in 2002. The “linked list”, his version of the linklog, did not appear until 2004. It was a separate page and an RSS feed intended as a perk for his paid subscribers. At some point in 2005, it shifted to the main column of the site along with the regular posts.

Top-down emphasizes the collection rather than the item, allowing items into the collection only by blessing from on high, rather than by their own action. It thus inhibits individual contributions and funnels decision making through a single point, often introducing delay and compromising immediacy. Top down favors the static over the dynamic, wanting each piece to be fixed in its assigned place in the hierarchy. It inhibits spontaneous addition, editing, and deletion, for fear of compromising the structure of the top-down edifice.

In many ways the Stream is best seen through the lens of Bakhtin’s idea of the utterance. Bakhtin saw the utterance, the conversational turn of speech, as inextricably tied to context. To understand a statement you must go back to things before, you must find out what it was replying to, you must know the person who wrote it and their speech context. To understand your statement I must reconstruct your entire stream. And of course since I can’t do that for random utterances, I mostly just stay in the streams I know. To use a post-modern turn of phrase, the Stream is “inhospitable to strangers.”  If the Garden is exposition, the stream is conversation and rhetoric, for better and worse.

I am going to make the argument that the predominant form of the social web — that amalgam of blogging, Twitter, Facebook, forums, Reddit, Instagram — is an impoverished model for learning and research and that our survival as a species depends on us getting past the sweet, salty fat of “the web as conversation” and on to something more timeless, integrative, iterative, something less personal and less self-assertive, something more solitary yet more connected