23 - 003 Idea - Digital Platforms and BLOB's

So here is a bit of Digital Creative Thinking brought about in an internet “broadband” outage. So today which happens to be Friday 13^th my internet connection is not working. So this has oddly enough lead me to write this particular blog entry which is really focussed upon technology dependencies. Or what you just take for granted until it fails to work. But at 2.00 am this morning everything was working fine. So this night time adventure lead me to think about the Digital Development strategy for DMB Publishing my creative channel which has taken over from the closed down ZigZag Digital Associates.

So in the middle of the night I was internet exploring like you do. But unfortunately something really made me sad. Many of my social media posts still had their links in them to the many web sites that my company ZigZag Digital Associates had developed and hosted. These included www.eflow.xyz (expired) and www.adcard.xyz (expired) . As you can see they no longer exist. When my business partner George Szubinski died in April 2020 I had to decide what to do with these sites. The decision was made to pull the plug on all of them. They cost money and effort to run whilst I could not see me creating eFlow diagrams nor Adcards. Both were exciting innovations but I needed to narrow my focus on to the growth on DMB Publishing. But the point I want to make here is it leaves such an empty feeling when these sites that have always been there for you are no longer running. Their presence and growth formed part of a significant 3 years of my life. I could always sit in a pub and run them up to remind me of how they had been created. So is there a lesson here for you the reader?

Well yes there is a lesson. We had decided to host these on an Internet Service Provider (ISP) site essentially a web hosting site. This allowed us to have our own domain names which we registered. But most significantly they also allowed us to support an infinite number of sub-domains like admag.adcard.xyz  where “admag” is a sub domain. The power of these sites lay in their sub-domains. Sub-domains give a website real commercial muscle since each customer’s work can have their own unique web URL. We had mastered exploiting this power but it did have associated costs and maintenance effort. So once we stopped paying for them they just disappeared.

Now in some cases we had built some internet resources using the sub-domain capabilities of other internet website content developers. (eg WordPress, Blogspot). We also used “posts” into social media providers (eg Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) in particular linking these back into what we referred to as our “digital hubs” called eFlow and Adcard. Now what is really surreal is these components remain scattered across the internet whilst unfortunately the hubs that integrated them together have been deleted from the internet. So the decision is to with the growth of DMB Publishing to exploit within what I term each “cloud platform architecture” the capabilities to support writing and publishing. The platform architectures will be Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon. DMB Publishing will exist as an entity within each of the cloud architectures whilst also cross linking between then to support the objectives of DMB Publishing. Subject to these businesses not failing then I should never again have the experience of losing my hard work. This blog will in the future explore the detail of how these cloud architectures will be developed and used. But there is even something more significant.

So today I have no “landline” internet due to a line fault in the BT network. But I can use the 4G network. Now with the 5G (and then 6G) networks being put into place the way we interact with the internet is going to radically change. Don’t ask me why but I have always had a fascination for BLOB’s. Yes you are reading it right. They are Binary Large OBjects. They can be very large collections of binary data stored as a single entity in a database management system. This can be text, pictures, sound and video in fact anything digital. Now if these are stored in a “block chain” ( think Bitcoin) way you have the potential to have your whole life experiences stored in one file that can instantly be transmitted over the internet and stored on your own personal device. Blockchain can also be used to control the authenticity of this file protecting it just like a digital currency. This was part of the ZigZag Digital Associates myStories project. So what is the architecture within a BLOB well this could be achieved using the EPUB open systems book design architecture although it has not got a block chain component within it at present nor has it an object control mechanism at a higher level.

Later in future blogs we will explore more in respect of digital platforms and the use of digital BLOB’s. With faster networks and endless storage capabilities then very large datasets called BLOB’s will become the normal way of working on the internet.