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.

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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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