The Natural Upgrade: The Web’s Search for Meaning

The best things happen naturally.  The web has progressed in a way that I’m quite excited about and no one person, government, organization, or company decided the form that this progression would take. We did.

Grant it, when the web first came about it was mostly companies and universities using static HTML and images to share static information.  This is what is often called Web 1.0.  It was simple, and because it was simple it was flexible.  This flexibility ended up being the seed of its perpetual growth.

Web 2.0, the collaborative web, was the result of three things:

1. Most people were able to afford computers and the internet.
2. The servers and memory needed to support data-driven web sites with dynamically generated content became cheaper.
3. The tools to develop software were cheap, and in many cases free, allowing for inexpensive but powerful software infrastructures to be built.

Now, the web is people-powered.  And, they have online societies where they can share, communicate, learn, teach, and create.

The Semantic Web, also known as Web 3.0, is slowly taking form as a result of the following:

With so many people contributing to the web, the signal-to-noise ratio makes it difficult to find what is needed as well as filter out what is unneeded.  Applications like search engines see content, but don’t understand it.  The injection of meaning is needed, and who better to give content meaning than humans.  And, it’s very natural for us to want to do just that.

This is where meta-data comes into play, which is simply data about data (or data that describes data).  Humans decorate their content with meaning, and computers can use that meaning to help people find what and who they need.

This is often done through tagging and folksonomies, which are the seeds from which the semantic web will grow.  It’s simply the act of describing things, often using simple one or two word terms.  But, it can get more complicated once we start defined relationships between things.

Web 2.0 consisted of people collaboratively creating.  Web 3.0 started when people started to give meaning to what they created.

From web 1.0 to web 3.0, the web has gone from looking like a stack of papers to a powerful mind that is beginning to “understand” meaning.  The decision for this growth was not made by anyone.  It was made by everyone.  Each person searches for meaning, and it is as though the web is now searching for meaning.  And, we are giving it (and each other) just that.

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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.

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My Background – Part 2: Symposium…

I spent a great deal of the rest of my younger life in computers. I ran an electronic bulletin board system (BBS) called Symposium. Before the Internet became mainstream nerds would beg their parents for a second phone line, and run BBS software that monitored it. Then other nerds would use something called terminal programs to call these lines. The BBS software would pick up and allow the user to remotely use it. BBS software was an extremely customizable menu-driven environment that contained a lot of the things that the web contains today, such as: discussion boards, games, chat rooms, and polling.

Symposium was a BBS devoted to philosophy. I got the name from one of Plato‘s dialogs that I later found out contained a lot of sordid details that I guess were over my head at the time I read it. It was a relatively successful BBS, given that I lived in a rural location that was a pay call for most people. I had a great deal of fun with it, and it proved that teenagers are not lazy…they just aren’t challenged. Most of my users were teenagers and I was one of the few BBSes that didn’t have porn and pirated software to download. Users actually logged in for the philosophical discussions that I seeded with whatever questions that popped into my mind about spirituality, ethics, the mind, ect… Fortunately, since these types of topics are the ones that my mind goes to unbidden just about any time it can (even when it shouldn’t), I had no trouble coming up with topics. And, my users contributed qualitative content either on their own or as a response to what I wrote.

Incidentally, it should be stated that these BBSes were the first pieces of software to do the online collaborative user-generated content that is now attributed to Web 2.0 (but, which probably preceded Web 1.0).

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