What’s new about social media?

According to dweinberger:

I’m on a panel about “What’s Next in Social Media?” at the National Archives tonight , moderated by Alex Howard, the Government 2.0 Correspondent for O’Reilly Media, and with fellow panelists Sarah Bernard, Deputy Director, White House Office of Digital Strategy; Pamela S. Wright, Chief Digital Access Strategist at the National Archives. It’s at 7pm, with a “social media fair” beginning at 5:30pm.

I don’t know if we’re going to be asked to give brief opening statements. I suspect not. But, if so I’m thinking of talking about the context, because I don’t know what social media will be:

1. The Internet began as an open “address space” that enabled networks to be created within it. So, we got the Web, which networked pages. We got social networks, which networked people. We are well on our way to networking data, through the Semantic Web and Linked Open Data. We are getting an Internet of Things. The DPLA will, I hope, help create a network of cultural objects.

2. The Internet and the Web have always been social, but the rise of networks particularly tuned to social needs is of vast importance because the social determines all the rest. Indeed, the Internet is a medium only because we are in fact that through which messages pass. We pass them along because they matter to us, and we stake a bit of selves on them. We are the medium.

3. Of all of the major and transformative networks that have emerged, only the social networks are closed and owned. I don’t know how or if we will get open social networks, but it is a danger that as of now we do not have them.

Literates and illiterates

Websites that use the spoken word will empower the illiterate.

THE internet, wonderful though it is, reinforces one of life’s fundamental divisions: that between the literate and the illiterate. Most websites, even those heavy with video content, rely on their users being able to read and—if interactive—write. Building your own site certainly does.
Guruduth Banavar, the director of IBM’s India Research Laboratory, wanted to allow people who struggle with literacy to create websites. So he and his colleagues have devised a system based on what is known as “voice extensible markup language”, a cousin of the hypertext markup language used on conventional websites, that allows a website to be built and operated more or less by voice alone.

The “spoken web” Dr Banavar hopes to conjure into existence will be based on mobile phones, which are already proving an effective alternative to computers for obtaining information online in poor countries. As well as making voice calls, people can text one another and, if their phones are up to the job, get access to the web. Across the developing world there are a number of successful banking and money-transfer services that rely on mobile phones rather than computers.

Dr Banavar, however, thinks mobiles could be made to work much harder. His voice sites are hosted on standard computer servers and behave much like conventional websites. At their most basic they are designed for local use, acting as portals through which people can find out such things as when the mobile hospital will next visit their village, the price of rice in the local market and which wells they should use for irrigation. Instead of typing in a web address, the user rings the website up. Then, with a combination of voice commands and key presses, he navigates through a spoken list of topics and listens to subjects of interest.

That is useful, but not startlingly different from the sort of call-centre hell familiar to anyone who has tried to get information out of a large company by telephone. What makes Dr Banavar’s approach different is that, by selecting an appropriate option with the handset, the user can add content to a voice site by recording a comment that is then made available to others. This can then be accessed as one of the “latest additions” or “most listened to” items in a spoken sub-menu. More important still, though, is that people can use a mobile phone to build their own voice sites—a process that, in trials conducted by the laboratory, even a non-expert could learn in as little as ten minutes.

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Web today under the spell of what?

Stephanie Strickland :

Of the nine system-processes that characterize both life and knowledge in the 21st century - I refer to feedback, hierarchy, bounds, network interaction, scale, cycles, symmetries, evolution, and equilibrium - it is this last that does not characterize the Internet and does not characterize Web-specific literary works.

If the last half of the 20th century fell under the spell of linguistics and genetics, I suggest that the spatial understanding of both, "genome as book," must give way to an understanding that is inherently dynamic, inextricably statistical, and informationally multimedial in its forms of analysis; an understanding that is less about structure and more about resonance, about the ongoing fitting of moving mind to moving world through moving medium.

My thesis is that Web-specific art and literature is where this understanding is being developed. I hope to demonstrate this with regard to works by several renowned Web artists, but to contextualize my discussion I need to explain scale and level. A sense of scale is key to understanding dynamics, the kind of scaling represented by conventional powers of ten, or some other repeated.

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PHONEREADER Library - - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Browser

Today's Web sites are another matter, however. Gone are the static pages and limited graphics of 15 years ago. In their place are lush, highly interactive experiences, as visually rich as any desktop application. The Web has become the preferred platform for enterprise application delivery, to say nothing of online entertainment and social software. In response, new kinds of online experiences have begun to emerge, challenging old notions of what it means to browse the Web.

Take Twhirl, a desktop client for the Twitter online service. Double-click its icon and the application launches in seconds. Its window is small and stylized, with an attractive, irregular border and configurable color schemes. What few controls it has are convenient and easy to use. It's sleek, fast, and unobtrusive. In short, it's everything that navigating to the Twitter Web site with a browser is not.

But don't be fooled. Although it looks and feels like an ordinary desktop application, Twhirl's UI is rendered with HTML, CSS, Flash, and ActionScript. Essentially, it's a Web app.

Twhirl is built on Adobe AIR, which has a lightweight client library that allows Web developers to use familiar tools and languages to build first-class desktop applications. Software created with AIR is fully interactive and network-enabled, with a rich UI. But unlike traditional Web applications, AIR apps gain the immediacy and user engagement that come from running outside the browser window.

[ For an in-depth look at rich Web frameworks, see our reviews of Adobe AIR, Microsoft Silverlight, Curl, WaveMaker Visual Ajax, open source AJAX toolkits, and other rich Web development tools. ]

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Content no more

Is The Web Still The Web?

Linked by David Adams on Sat 5th Jul 2008 04:57 UTC, submitted by snydeq

Neil McAllister raises questions regarding the Web now that it no longer resembles Tim Berners-Lee's early vision: Is the Web still the Web if you can't navigate directly to specific content? If the content can't be indexed and searched? If you can't view source? In other words, McAllister writes, if today's RIAs no longer resemble the 'Web,' then should we be shoehorning them into the Web's infrastructure, or is the problem that the client platforms simply aren't evolving fast enough to meet our needs.

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Internet is not WWW

Internet and World Wide Web – are they the same thing?

The Internet and the World Wide Web are not one and the same. The Internet is a collection of interconnected computer networks linked by copper wires, fiber-optic cables, wireless connections, etc.

In contrast, the Web is a collection of interconnected documents and other resources, linked by hyperlinks and URLs. The World Wide Web is one of the services accessible via the Internet, along with various others including e-mail, file sharing, online gaming, etc.
However, for all practical purposes and in everyday conversation, they are considered one and the same. In fact, dictionaries and thesauruses often fail to make any distinction.

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McDonald's English

The concept of cyberspace, moreover, with its fathomless resource of information, has revolutionised the way we work, shop and play. Without Sir Tim Berners-Lee there would be no Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook or MySpace. It is no exaggeration to call his invention the most significant since the printing press.

But it has also helped gamblers bankrupt themselves, fraudsters prey on the gullible, and pornographers sell their virtual wares; and, of course, it has created a sinister new breed of paedophile. That's partly what I mean by characterising Sir Tim as a Dr Frankenstein. His monster could prove to be a force for good or bad. The jury is still out.

"I had the idea for it. I defined how it would work. But it was actually created by people," he says. "So when you refer to the web as a monster, well, yes, it has all these arms and legs but the arms and legs are humanity. The technology allows humanity to express itself and interact. If you are frightened of it, then you are frightened of what humanity can do.

"One fear is that, because of the web, we will all end up speaking McDonald's English across the globe and end up with a vocabulary of 2,000 words. It might make everything too bland.

"The other is the opposite of this: that it will lead to cults and cultural potholes. But there are few global things on the web. There is no one newspaper read all over the globe because, actually, the web is composed of a tangled mess of groups of different sizes. They all interconnect, so you don't have one mushy group. That is the middle path. Interconnected communities. That is how the world can survive."


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Semantic web

Sir Bernard Berners-Lee recently discussed how the 'semantic web' will form the next stage of the web's evolution - essentially allowing users to collect data together whether it's part of the world wide web or not.

He gave the example of combining online bank statements and photos with a desktop calendar, allowing people to work out what they were doing when they took a particular photo.
Summing up the development of the web, Berners-Lee said: "A small number of ideas have a disproportionate impact."
Berners-Lee proposed the world wide web in 1989 while working as a software engineer at the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland.
The global project created a web of connections to information on the internet using hypertext documents. During the early 1990s Berners-Lee worked to develop the web, specifying the URL, HTTP and HTML standards.

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Jay David Bolter and new genres and forms

Roy Christopher: The web has provided an environment for the high-speed spread and exchange of information. Do you think it has evolved in the best possible manner? What could we be doing better on and with the internet’s power?

Jay David Bolter: The World Wide Web is an extraordinary achievement. It isn’t just about the exchange of information, narrowly conceived as bytes of data. It has already spawned a whole set of new media genres and forms: news and information sites, personal home pages, corporate sites for marketing and sales, entertainment sites, gambling and pornography sites, and the sometimes tedious, sometimes amazing webcams. The Web is now suffused with the influence of global capitalism, and for that reason alone it has become an object of critique for many in media studies. The Web has also disappointed the relatively small, but dedicated community of writers who were creating standalone or small networked hypertexts in the 1980s and early 1990s. Many of their systems were more sophisticated than the Web in the sense that they offered better linking protocols and more possibilities for author/reader interaction. Nevertheless, the Web succeeded in capturing the imagination of our culture where these earlier systems did not. We could certainly propose a more powerful global hypertext system, but the genius of the Web lay in its (originally) simple link structure and its distributed architecture. Everyone could understand how the Web worked - how you traveled from page to page - and anyone with access to a server could create her own Web pages. As soon as inline graphics were added in 1993, the Web had everything it needed to become a cultural and economic phenomenon.
The Web is changing, developing richer forms of interaction. But as everyone who uses the Web is aware, the most important trend is toward increasing use of multimedia forms. Tim Berners-Lee originally conceived of the Web principally as a textual medium. The development of the Mosaic browser in 1993 gave us the Web as a new space for graphic design—the combination of text and static graphics. Now we see animation, digitized video, and sound playing a greater role. This trend will surely continue, even if we don’t see the ultimate ‘convergence’ of television and the computer that some have predicted.

Web services

The old perception is that closed data is a competitive advantage.

The new reality is that open data is a competitive advantage. The likely solution then is to stop worrying about protecting information and instead start charging for it, by offering an API. Having a small fee per API call (think Amazon Web Services) is likely to be acceptable, since the cost for any given subscriber of the service is not going to be high. But there is a big opportunity to make money on volume. This is what Amazon is betting on with their Web Services strategy and it is probably a good bet.

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See the journal French Metablog with today different posts

What is the Implicite Web?

The basic concept of the Implicit Web is simple. As we touch information, we vote. When we come across an article we like, we spend time reading. When we like a movie, we recommend it to our friends and family. And if a piece of music resonates with us, we listen to it over and over again. We do this automatically, subconsciously or implicitly. But the consequences of our behavior are important. The things that we are paying attention to have great value to us, because we like them.

Written by Alex Iskold

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See that post with different algorithms in metabole

See the journal French Metablog with today different posts