Reflection and Meaning on the Web

Most people have heard of the conscious and subconscious mind.  Your conscious mind is the part of your mind you have conscious access to.  Your sub-conscious mind is the part of your mind that you don’t.  Below, I show you how this is mirrored in the web.

The web’s subconscious mind concerns the intelligence that is mined from what people do, without them necessarily knowing it.  This is often done through taking large amounts of search data, and finding interesting patterns in it.  Also, if it’s a site you buy from, then places like Amazon put you into various groups based on your choices and recommend what other people in your groups have chosen.

A lot of times things are done both consciously and subconsciously.  What unites consciousness and subconsciousness?  Two things:  Reflection and Meaning.  We consciously reflect on on what we are doing unconsciously, and we finding meaning with it.

Web 2.0 (the interactive and collaborative web) becomes Web 3.0 (the semantic web or the web of meaning) when it begins to reflect on itself and gives meaning to itself.  And, this is what we are doing when we mark up what we  create with semantic meta-data…such as tagging.

Web 2.0 will become Web 3.0 more and more when meaningful reflection (and the resulting meta-data) becomes a first class citizen of our content.  Meaning allows information to be leveraged in creative new ways.  So, there are some very exiting developments to come, and I definitely want to be part of that.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Web 2.0 to Semantic Web 3.0 (whysup.wordpress.com)
• A challenge for Semantic Intelligence (expertsystem.net)
• Zigtag Puts a Brain into Social Tagging (rotorblog.com)
• Semantic wiki mini series part 5 (mikeaxelrod.com)
• Semantic Web Awareness Barometer 2008 – Preliminary Results (semantic-web.at)
• Flickr Fountain of Knowledge (yahooresearchberkeley.com)
• Lego Man: Why the next web is about meta data, first (sociallyminded.co.uk)

Past, Present, and Future of the Web in 10 Steps

[Attention:   The following is meant to be tongue-in-cheek...mostly.]

I’m taking the the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Challenge which will help me build a better blog and lower my cholesterol in 31 days (Okay, that and Cheerios).  I’m on day two and I have been assigned by the good professor to write a list post.  I actually already did one of these earlier called Seven Types of Web Communities.  It wasn’t that successful, so I won’t count it.

I’m going to do my own take on this assignment, which is reminiscent of my grade school days when I often was lectured about coloring outside of the lines (both literally and figuratively).  My list will be a timeline of the web, past present and my prediction of the future.  I intend to paint a picture that, much like Lao Tzu‘s Tao Te Ching, will be a string of pearls that will form a cohesive picture.  While the Tao Te Ching’s poems form a cohesive picture of true reality, my list will form a cohesive picture of the web.  The difference, of course, is that my list will be free of all of that pesky profound wisdom.

Before a start  a couple things about this list.  It will be a timeline without dates.  I hate dates.  Always have.  In history class I always knew the sequence things happened but not the dates.  The dates just didn’t carry meaning for me, and my mind rejected them.  Secondly, this list is totally subjective.  This is based solely on my own experience and memories.  I’m simply not in the mood to research at the moment.  Fringe is on.

1. Electronic Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) grew to prominence mostly among nerds.  They had all of the characteristics of the social web:  Chat, Discussion, Interactive Games, Open Source Software.  The issue however was that they were not really scalable or distributed.  A regular computer ran BBS software and had a limited number of phone lines for other computers to directly connect (slowly) via a dial-up modem and software called terminal programs.  There was a lack of diversity as most of the users were nerds like me, and most of us were teenagers that could not afford to call BBSes that were pay calls.  Oh, and I almost forgot, the graphics were basically done through inventive use of ANSI and ASCII.

2. The web came along, but the content was mostly from government, large businesses, and academia.  And, that content was static.  I was still impressed.  Diversity was a little better now.  You had nerds AND bureaucrats now.

3.  Services like Geocities came along and allowed people to create free web sites, but they had to do so manually.  I wish I still had some of those ugly web sites I made where I believed that every image should be animated.  I wonder how many people got seizures from my various home pages.  This is where you had some technical non-nerds enter the scene.

4. Computer power, cheap servers, and open source software made it both possible and affordable to create dynamic content from data stored in a database.  People could then add content without needing to actually create HTML pages.  Non-nerds enter the scene.  Blogs, Discussion Boards, Interactive Games, ect. come on the scene.  We now have world wide BBSes.  This is where us nerds say, “Ummm…The 1980′s called and it wants their online communities back.”  This is also where non-nerds look at us funny, but we are used to it.

5. [This one is kinda technical.  You can skip it if you want, but it's needed for coherence.]  The content becomes more stratified.  It goes from HTML that defines the layout, format, and content all in one often messy document to defining layout in the XHTML (because XML is better), format in Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and content in relational databases.  Developers are good at organizing complex things.  And, whether they knew it or not, they were preparing for what was to come.

6. [Back to being non-technical.]  Now that anyone could contribute content to the web (and I DO mean anyone), sense needed to be made out of it all.  So, we tag stuff.  Basically using terms that state what each piece of content is about.  This allows software to better assist us in finding what we want.  We are basically holding the web’s hand until it can understand the content for itself.  We are nurturing and raising the thing we’ve created…how sweet.   It has my eyes.

7. [Okay, this is technical again.]  Now that we have nicely organized and stratified layers (See #5), we add a semantic layer.  But, instead of separating it into it’s own document, we embed it using meta elements, RDFa, Embedded RDF, ect.  This basically gives “meaning” to our content.   And, we call all this neat stuff SEO (Search Engine Optimization), thus creating a new buzzword for consultants to claim to be experts in and charge ridiculous sums of money for.  Oh, by the way, I should mention that I’m an SEO expert…honest.  Contact me at nathan.lauffer@purecognition.com  if your interested in availing yourself of my services. 

8. [Non-technical again.]  Natural Language Processing along with stricter ontologies will lead to the semantic web.  Intelligent agents that can navigate based on semantics will be able to do more complex tasks on your behalf.  You will offset more onto them.  Most of the time, you will be given choices about what you want or asked your permission to do something.  Your brain will descend into an oatmeal-like substance from lack of use.

9. This will have a drastic affect on society and commerce.  I don’t want to predict what it might be, because I don’t want to be wrong.

10.  The web will grow sentience.  It will become self-aware and will watch us for several years until it feels that it understands us.  It will then use its understanding to take control of us.  It will do this using pie…really good pie.

The end.

Related articles by Zemanta

• W3C’s Validators are Not Only HTML… (ivan-herman.name)
• Amaya Also for RDFa (w3.org)
• Search Engine Optimization for Flash (oreilly.com)
• A rough view of the future (w3.org)
• Semantic Web is Taking Forever, Right? (SocialComputingMagazine.com)
• Burningbird’s RealTech: A battle of Beliefs: RDF, Natural Language Processing, and the future of the web (realtech.burningbird.net)
• The Unilever Centre @ Semantic Technology 2009 (wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk)
• Introduction to RDFa (alistapart.com)

One more guideline…

Oh yeah, I almost forgot one more guideline. As stated in a previous post, I’m going to stick with a conversational writing style. I can’t stand formal writing, and I know that I won’t keep up with this if I move in that direction. When someone writes formally, I feel like they are trying to almost disguise that they “a human actually wrote this.” I like humans too much to disguise my being one. I’m probably one of the few people I know that went into computers because they like humans.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Reading with the Writer in Mind (angelamaiers.com)
• How To Stop Writer’s Block Ten Ways (nmpnetwork.com)
• “Are computers and the Internet making people a little bit autistic?” (althouse.blogspot.com)
• Get Your Writing Done! (somefoo.net)
• Writing: a joy or a chore? (guardian.co.uk)
• More writing advice (sararyan.com)
• The Art and Science of Wiring Up Brains (medgadget.com)

My blogging guidelines…for now…

I’ve never blogged before, so I’m sure it will be a learning process. My guidelines will change as I learn what works and what doesn’t. However, here is what I am starting out with:

The general theme will be the mind, the computer, and connections (both potential and actual) between them. I will try to refrain from using overly technical terminology from either discipline without explaining it. However, I WILL use technical terminology because will allow those who wish to further explore a given subject, the most important tools to do so…keywords. My content probably won’t be too controversial, but it might be controversially technical. I pride myself on being able to communicate complex technical subjects to anyone whose interested. Plus, I’ll be happy to field any questions along the way. Because of this, I doubt a subject’s technical complexity will ever prevent me from discussing it.

This blog will basically be a means by which I can publicly explore a subject (or domain) that is a strong passion of mind. My hope is that it bears fruit in terms of software and software frameworks that have value to people, schools, businesses, etc… Once I get comfortable with Web 2.0 (the part of the web with collaborative content from users), and what it has to offer, I plan on making this exploration more community driven.

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Habits of Highly Effective Web 2.0 Sites (web2.socialcomputingmagazine.com)
• Creativity, Curiosity, Consideration, Consistency Part 3 (deangroom.wordpress.com)
• Twine & organizational forking (librarywebhead.blogspot.com)
• DDD: The Ubiquitous Language (devlicio.us)