We call the Internet a place. We go to sites. Marketing people talk about destinations.

But that’s rubbish. The Internet is with me, and increasingly with most people, all of the time. It follows us as we go to other places. Increasingly, it helps us to navigate those places. You have probably seen it already, but if you haven’t, check this video of the tube-finder iPhone app.

This is the way we’re going. Digital isn’t something you can only do at your screen any more. It’s in your pocket, at your fingertips. You don’t go online any more – you simply shift between different-shaped terminals. We are already android. And your experience of digital isn’t something you do sat at a computer any more. It’s on your billboards, in your pub, driving your telly and your travel. It’s all around you all the time. Augmented reality. It’s projected in 64-bit colour at your retina (oops – no, sorry — that’s next year). It’s not about screens, either, it’s fountains and traffic lights and fridges. We don’t live our lives online or offline, but inline. (That’s an expression I stole from Timo Veikkola, strategist at The Future Laboratory who spoke for us last year).

Virtual Reality used to require a massive pair of goggles and gloves; now it is in your pocket.

So where am I going? The language of places and spaces, and sites and destinations, is outdated. Maybe it always was – a hand-me-down from broadcast TV and media that required physical outlets — like newspapers — that we took on board because we didn’t have any other words.

Stowe Boyd talks about us living in a state of flow instead. I get the idea, but am not quite comfortable with it. There’s something there (like ‘river of news’) that suggests being sat under a shower all day. And I also have uneasy feelings around the idea of ‘going with the flow’, which is all too true of a lot of online activity. (Green Twitter badges for Iran? eh?) This is something we work with not absorb.

We’re screaming for better metaphors about our on inline lives. Maybe we shouldn’t be searching for them. Maybe this is just too new and the next stage of evolution – we’ll work out the metaphors in retrospect.

Forgive me a quick plug. But. This is what the i-Design Conference is about on September 24.

Here’s the US site:

And here’s the new Danish version:

As Ernst Poulsen points out, in the new design stories are simply ordered chronologically like a blog; each is presented in the same style, no matter what their relative importance, like a blog; they are all tagged, like a blog; there’s minimal navigation and any user can contribute, like err… a social network.

True, this isn’t a million miles away from the appearance of the front page of The Register (est’d 1994), though its stance on user-generated stuff seems to indicate that it’s unlikely that readers will be writing on the homepage any time soon. Perhaps more adventurously, ZDNet.co.uk has recently relaunched with user communities and blogs, some of which are on the front page, albeit beneath the fold.

Poulsen is concerned that computerworld.dk is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Traditional news website design aids communication by drawing attention to the most important stories. Giving every story the same weighting and sorting them by time-stamp won’t help a busy reader with two minutes to spare digest the day’s key stories very well.

I think I agree. However, the old model of users’ interaction with an online publication relegated to a forum on a distant page, far away from the journalists’ stories, has clearly had its day. The half-way house between traditional editorial models and social media mayhem offered by ZDNet.co.uk doesn’t fall between stools, as you might expect, but combines some of the benefits of both approaches. It remains to be seen, of course, whether the enterprise IT types that the site aims at will embrace the read/write web.

[disclosure: my wife works for ZDNet UK]

Update: Very interesting riposte on the Poynter website to Ernst Poulsen by Claus Solvsteen, who worked on the Danish design. He says the design allows for quick scanning and that other display options will be made available in the future.