This is now a real-time blog

Exciting news. This is now a real time blog, which means you can receive new posts the instant they are published, thanks to a plugin (rssCloud) that has been enabled for WordPress blogs, of which this is one.

All you have to do is install a feed reader, such as River2, or sign up to LazyFeed, both of which can apparently read from the rssCloud. As a test, I’m sending the link for this blog to Twitter at the same time as publishing this entry. So what came first, the blog or the tweet? Feel free to let us know.

All we have to do is publish blogs that justify instant attention. Easy!

Despite the immediate drawbacks, I believe the real-time Web is likely to be transformational. You can find out more about the impact in an update summary from ReadWriteWeb.

Twitter might be considered the leading realtime service. It is currently the source of choice for many realtime news search services, but other social Web services offer instant communication. What’s new is the effort to apply this intrinsically to the Web rather than to particular services. Then we will see the full effect.

Google is also developing a protocol to deliver real-time feeds, PubSubHubbub, but the key question is when Google Reader will be enabled for such feeds. Lets hope this is not used as a wedge between Google’s Blogger and WordPress that balkanises blog access.

Finally, you may have spotted an irony that a blog concerned with digital preservation over extended periods of time should be interested in the first second after publication. It’s all part of the same digital lifecycle. It could be argued that the start of the lifecycle is the critical moment and we need to understand that as much as anything that happens later.