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.

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Our Story: Distributed Identity in Web 2.0

Often we think of our online identities in terms of our logins, passwords, and various other ids.  Identity Theft is theft of these things.  But, in terms of the collaborative web, there is a great deal more…our story.

Our identity can me measured by our story and our story is made up of what we do.

In terms of Web 2.0, what we do is:

• Write articles
• Comment on articles
• Modify wiki articles
• Upload media such as pictures and video
• Decorate content with metadata such as tags
• Blog
• Micro-blog
• Contribute to open source

When you join an online community and begin interacting, your story can be told in two directions inward and outward.  The former tells the members of the community who you are by telling them what you have been up to outside of the community.  The latter tells people outside of the community what you’ve done inside the community.  You, I assume, are interested in both directions…I am.  Below is how these directions work in practice:

Inward Identity Sharing

Importing what you do at other sites is usually done by importing from those sites.  You usually do this by giving the community links to feeds and/or profiles from these other sites.  The community can then keep track of what you are doing elsewhere.

Outward Identity Sharing

Exporting from the community is done by giving addresses of your feeds and/or profiles from a given site to other sites.  These other sites can then keep tabs on what you are doing in that community.

Sites like FriendFeed and FaceBook actually do both directions rather well.  Other applications don’t.  FriendFeed , in particular, even broadcasts both directions…acting as a thirdparty broadcaster.

Personally, I think that this is an important dimension to judge an online community.  By honoring your users’ story, you honor them.  This respect won’t go unrewarded.  Users want this because they want their story told…everywhere.

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