Your Site: Fresher than a Mountain Stream?

There's a reason you don't see packaging like this.

If you’ve ever left been backcountry camping, you know that it’s always a bad idea to draw your drinking water from a static source. Sure, that pond may have water in it. But when you’re parched from a day of hiking, would you rather quench your thirst from the algae-covered (and probably bacteria-filled) stagnant pond, or from a swift-moving mountain stream? The choice should be obvious.

In the past, most websites were like the pond – static pools of water. They may have looked pretty at first, but they tended to stagnate quickly. As the content grew more and more outdated, the site became about as appealing as a drink from that algae-covered water. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that when it comes to browsing the web, people’s preferences are no different—they want their content fresh.

Some of the web’s leading thinkers and interactive marketing experts see the evolution of content ‘streams’ as the future of media consumption. Gone by the wayside, they predict, will be the notion of viewers making the online journey to visit a static site. Instead, our news thirst will be quenched by a series of content streams that the user may draw from at his or her leisure.

If you think this sounds like foolish dreaming about some future web utopia, you’d be wrong. This transformation has been going on right under your nose, and we’ve already begun to see this evolution in services Twitter, Facebook and Google Finance. And one of our own clients, the American Bar Association, has already been publishing stream-based content for almost a year on their ABANow site.

Have you observed a change in the way you consume web content?