Over on ZDNet, Dion Hinchcliffe offers another of his insightful posts into the changing nature of the web.

“The other hot trend … [is] the increasing dissolution of clear boundaries between sites, content, and even functionality on the Web. Sometimes referred to as the ‘atomization’ of the Internet, I prefer to call it the syndication of everything — software and information alike — via simple Web technologies and ad hoc techniques.

Part of the cooperate, don’t control mindset of Web 2.0, the advent of widespread Web parts and services such as widgets and badges and open APIs is an attempt to take advantage of an important concept that has only recently been adequately appreciated, sometimes known as Jakob’s Law. This law states that online products and services are best designed when they take advantage of the fact the users spend most of their time on sites other than yours. This realization isn’t new and is one important reason that online content syndication through things such as RSS and ATOM has grown so important.

But syndication of content is only the first step in fully exploiting the intrinsic power of the Web as a networked application platform. Access to a site’s functionality, either via a Web services/open API as well as widgets and badges that make it easy to others to take portions of a site’s capabilities and host them where they wish are the next logical step in this progression. Being everywhere on the Web — instead of just on your site — has been a brilliant strategy for sites like Google who realized that to build the largest possible business, you had to scale your products to the size of the Web and their AdWords widget is arguably far and away the most potent example of exploiting Jakob’s Law yet created. Not to mention that it has a money making business model built deeply into it.

It’s this last part, ensuring that you have a business model baked into your site’s open platform strategy that is as important as anything. I recently had a discussion with John Musser, whose ProgrammableWeb.com site is probably the best way to see what’s actually happening out there today in terms of mashups and APIs, where he indicated his research strongly suggests that making sure your company’s business model is woven deeply into an API is how to best make it commercially successful.

Of course, that’s not to say that consumer won’t be using Web parts and services (primarily syndication via RSS/ATOM of course) by the millions for their own reasons, and are doing so already. But giving them a good reason to help spread the parts of your site far and wide can be important for them picking your site’s widgets and badges over others.

But this is the Web parts story in the large; making a play to be as much of the foundation or the ornament of as many other sites as possible. On the other site of the story is the mashup story, which got some especially good coverage by IBM at the Web 2.0 Expo and about the same at the Web 2.0 Kongress.

I’ve discussed this story before in numerous posts here on this blog, but I continue to be encouraged by the enormous amount of effort that many are putting into filling the wide divide that currently exists between the simple model of copy-and-paste widgets and badges we have today primarily for consumers and the detailed programmatic wiring currently required of those with programming skills to connect them together into real software.

Even though this latter part is getting easier all the time — and radical ease-of-consumption seems to be required to get significant widget uptake at all – the nirvana continues to be to enable a whole new generation of power users to literally create the software that they need on the fly, akin to the way people use spreadsheets and personal database software to create the solution they need now in the desktop software world.

But the hallmark of all of these trends is emergent techniques and methods that have been proven by success on the consumer Web. Google’s Adwords widget and YouTube video badge are just two big examples of this working successfully and I’ve covered in the past how sites like WidgetBox are making it easy to find what you need to host them in your blog and wiki or create whole new sites from the great Web parts elsewhere on the Internet. Furthermore, I’m very encouraged by products such as QEDWiki and Itensil in particular for applying existing Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 platforms, wikis in particular, as an effective and easy-to-use end-user development platform.”

Exactly. Dion’s thesis in this post, though, amalgamates a number of quite different trends, each of which has significant implications for the ‘source’, and for those sites and services consuming the offerings of that source. The visible web part or widget, provided by Site ‘A’ for inclusion on Site ‘B’ in order to permit visitors to Site ‘B’ to search some content on Site ‘A’ only gets you so far. The true capability offered by Dion’s “syndication of everything” is in enabling Site ‘B’ to recombine the offerings of Sites ‘A’, ‘C’ and ‘D’ in ways that none of the source sites can do on their own.

Enabling true recombination of all this content requires a step change beyond the publishing and consuming of web feeds; it requires a Platform of data management, querying and orchestration capabilities, and some more detailed thinking around the implications of truly open data. It requires content owners, content providers and content consumers to think very differently about ‘their’ data and the things they do with it, and it will lead to quite unexpected outcomes if those making use of the result are sufficiently empowered to understand the risks inherent in combining data from different sources.

Dion’s orginal post includes links out to some of his earlier thoughts in this area, and I look forward to watching the thinking evolve even further…

Today’s Creative Commons licensed picture from Flickr is by timekin.

Technorati Tags: open data, Platforms, Dion Hinchcliffe, Talis, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, web services