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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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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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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A Slightly New Direction…

So far in my blog posts, I have either given you a tedious amount of background on me or went into relatively heavy theoretical stuff that I state as fact and don’t site references for (see The Components of Thought, The Origin of Thought, and Thought and the Environment as examples).

I think, moving forward I’m going to try to write more concrete posts that are more relevant to more people.  I’m not saying I won’t dabble in the theoretical.  I’ll just do less of it, and will better tie it to concrete applications.

My interest in computers is based primarly on interactions, such as the following:

• People interacting with themselves.
• People interacting with other people.
• People interacting in communities.
• People interacting with software.
• Software interacting with other software.
• And, lastly, people interacting with other people through software.

I think I got them all.  Anyway, the point is that there are lots of applications, particularly in the Web 2.0 community that are all about the above interactions.  Also, there are a lot of interesting ideas in both the design world and the software development world as well.  So, from now on I will try to hit these.

Eventually, I would also like to contribute software.  As I explore the landscape, I’ll better be able to formulate my ideas.

I think my next post will be about Twitter, as I’ve become a bit of an addict as of late.  My twitter id is @purecognition.  Give me a follow, if you like.

If you have been reading my blog, I thank you for your patience as I find my voice.  If you have an ideas for things I should look into, based on my previous posts, please feel free to comment.

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