I just finished listening to an interview of Tim Berners Lee on the Semantic Web (63min). Very insightful information on the future and development of the Web. The relation of web 2.0 and web 3.0, the technological development of the semantic web and privacy are some of his points, that I found mostly interesting.

He underlines the ability of the semantic web to connect data with metadata. A function, which will make our work easier, faster and therefore more productive.

It’s the connection from the data to the provenance of the data, and not just for the name of the document that it came from, but the actual properties of that - the licensing, what it’s supposed to be used for, what it’s appropriate to use it for, whether I got it because I’ve gone through an authentication process, and actually whether it’s private data, which I should not actually publish at all.

Tim Berners Lee already sees some of the most popular social networks taking advantage of semantics.

They haven’t just allowed you to tag something with somebody’s name, they’ve allowed you to capture the difference between somebody who took the photo and somebody who’s in the photo, so that the power of the reuse of the data has been much greater.

He also talks about the development level of the semantic web, saying that the technologies necessary are already there.

I think, really we’ve got all the pieces to be able to go ahead and do pretty much everything. I suppose, really you should be able to implement a huge amount of the dream, we should be able to get huge benefits from interoperability using what we’ve got. So, people are realizing it’s time to just go do it.

The only piece missing from the semantic puzzle is the actual implementation of these technologies to current systems. An effort, which - according to Tim Berners Lee - is easy and financially worthwhile.

But, the thing that’s holding us up is that, there’s data which the companies have got on this, sitting and going round and round on its disks. Or it’s in their SQL systems and needs to be exported in a way that we can get at it in linked RDF as a SPARQL. And then, that could be reused.

One more remark, that drew my attention was about privacy. Tim Berners Lee advocates for openness of data - at least in a company level. He supports exposure and integration; companies should give the ability to the people to do queries on their data. This can give them a great advantage against their competition.

If a company has got this feeling where people don’t want other people in the company to know what is going on, then, it has already got a problem, this just exposes the problem.

On a more individual level he argues, that users should get hold of their data. That’s where the semantic web really diverts from the web 2.0 model. The web 2.0 model incorporates sites, which have their data and they don’t share it. The Web 3.0 gives the power back to the user

Web 2.0 is a stovepipe system. It’s a set of stovepipes where each site has got its data and it’s not sharing it. What people are sometimes calling a Web 3.0 vision where you’ve got lots of different data out there on the Web and you’ve got lots of different applications, but they’re independent.

There are much more information to be collected in this interview. This were just the stuff I found most interesting. Marshall Kirkpatrick concentrates on other subjects.

So don’t be satisfied with any short summary, listen to the actual interview or read the transcript.

We are witnessing the commercialization, standardization of the web. Gradients, odd names, mirror effects and so on can be found everywhere online.

Although web 2.0 certainly brought an online revolution, the old times of cyberspace had also a flair of their own.

This is a list of “web 1.0″ sites. They are great sources of net art; some of them are full of theoretical essays, others are activist projects and there are even some who are extremely experimental.

You are warned, most of these sites are by no chance any eye-candy. If you are the visual type, who needs usability and simplicity to follow the concepts, turn around.

The net.art list

Vuk Cosic. One of the artists of the Ljubljana digital media lab. I really enjoy his stuff. Some of them are very ‘avant-garde’ but certainly worth your time.

Super Bad. If you like cats, kittys, Lolcats or whatever this might be a sight for you! I warn you though, it’s not THAT conventional.

etoy. This is probably my favourite. Just read what their new project is all about

an ultra long term project that allows pioneers of the information age to travel space and time forever…

One of their coolest projects was the digital hijack in 1996.

Brandon. That’s cool. You have to solve small puzzles to carry on. I really like it.

0100101110101101. Cyberpsace in its purest form. These two artists mostly devise hoaxes. They even spread a virus as a work of art. Thanks!

War.

borderXing guide. It took me some time to decode this site’s structure, form and principle, but it finally got me thinking.

Netzliteratur. I’m sorry to say, that this site is in german. It is full of net art projects and essays. start learning german?

This is certainly not a large list. But these sites contain so much information, that can keep you surfing, reading and browsing for hours. Handle with care.

Blogs are almost 10 years old. They are probably the first tool, that gave a voice to the wider public. The revolution they brought, started slowly but developed steadily. it hasn’t been long, that almost everyone has the power to express himself/herself and literally contribute to media production.

In these 10 years, blogs have also expanded in a variety of forms:

• Video/Photo- blogs: instead of writing copy, people have used their camera to express themselves.
• AudioBlogs: similarly, people express their thoughts verbally. The iGeneration, subscribes to podcasts and listens to discussions, interviews, books, ideas, disputes, etc.
• MicroBlogs: a relatively new way of blogging, which facilitates the wide use of mobile phones. People follow each other, to see what they can say in 140 characters.
• LiveBlogs: that’s the IRC version of blogging; anyone been online for 10-15 years can see the obvious similarities.

These genres are just a representative example of the possibilities of blogs. But purpose of this post is not to define these categories. Instead, I’m wondering if the blogosphere’s potential is actually exhausted.

Remediating

For anyone blogging actively and daily for more than a couple of months, probably understands what I’m implying.
Bertolt Brecht in the early 1930s was talking about the radio as a communication apparatus; a medium, which people can use not only to listen but also produce and communicate. His vision got realized in the cyberspace and blogging era.
The revolution of the blogosphere was 10 years ago, when it brought the production process to the public. Previously, we were witnessing few producers providing data to many readers; now every reader is a potential producer (what Inke Arns described as ‘small media production‘).

The technologies and genres developed after that explosion are not revolutionary anymore. They just apply the revolution to new fields (video, audio, mobile, etc.).
What audio-, video-, audio-, micro-, live-blogs in the end bring is the practices of old media to the immersive environment of the blogosphere. The similarities of blogs to newspapers, videoblogs to television, audioblogs to radio are more than obvious.

Are blogs really a new medium, which will change the way we perceive media production? I believe it is. The problem is again comfort and convention. Mass media production is so deeply embedded in our flesh, that we take it for granted and continue producing with the same old tactics.

Redefining

So is there a way to redefine the blogging process and take advantage of its full potential? In order to re-revolutionize the blogosphere, we should keep some important aspects in mind, aspects, that seem natural to us but we usually forget about them:

1. Communication. We don’t write content for passive users to read, but for active producers to discuss.
2. Connection. The six degrees theory is very insightful, but in the blogosphere people seem to be more connected than in any other network.
3. Combination. There are thousands of tools that can be implemented in a blog. It is our job to study their applications - and hopefully find new ones.
4. Exploration. We should not only explore the blogosphere for new, insightful voices, but also the topics. Blogging is a powerful tool, we shouldn’t use it only to write about making money online.

Conclusion

Redefining the blogosphere and providing something honest, intriguing and revolutionary is certainly not a simple process. I cannot provide a step-by-step guide on doing something radical with this medium; but instead of thinking about our next post, its content and its subject, we should also think about the medium.

Is it possible to use blogs in a completely new way? How can we expand the blogging experience?
I’m interested to see if you are using or thinking about using different tools to evolve your blog.

The way Robert Scoble used Twitter to get questions of the public and directly pose them in the Davos meeting is a great combination of the existing tools and an example we should all get inspired from.

The explosion of the social web has redefined the way we perceive social connections, our individual role in the social grid (may it be online or offline) and the importance of the collective intelligence. We, the user of the social web, take full advantage of this revolution by promoting our blogs, our work, our affiliates, our software. To an extent all our practices in the social web are working for our self-interest.

Social Connections

before the social web, we were dealing with the interesting, intriguing theory of the ‘six degrees of seperation‘. The main principle of the six degrees theory simply says that

everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet. The President of the United States, a gondolier in Venice, just fill in the names. I find it extremely comforting that we’re so close. I also find it like Chinese water torture, that we’re so close because you have to find the right six people to make the right connection… I am bound, you are bound, to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people.

Anyone who is deeply engaged in the social web, will argue that this theory underestimates the power of the web. Blogs, social networks, forums and communities enable interaction between two individuals in less than six steps; or at least that’s how it feels like.

The role of the individual

Sometimes when we analyze the tree, we lose sense of the forest. If we observe social networks from really high above, we will notice that they have reestablished our trust to democratic procedures. How many times have your heard people saying: “one vote never made a difference”.
It seems, that in the social web one vote does make a difference. That’s why we put a ‘thumbs up’ at StumbleUpon, or digg a submission, or cast our vote in Mixx. It is just one vote; but we trust that collectively this vote will bring a change.

The collective intelligence

A direct result of our trust to the individual is our belief in the collective intelligence. That’s why we firstly read the top news of all these news aggregators. Because we know, that these news are the most important/intriguing/thought provoking/interesting ones.

Machines were not made to sleep

So just our interaction and participation in the social web, actually proves that we believe that one vote, one individual, one voice, one computer can make a difference - can provide to the commons. In one way or another our participation in the social web is self-interested. We vote other submission, because we hope people will vote ours too; we comment on other blogs to learn more about a subject and hopefully receive a comment on our work; we use news aggregators so that we will not have to search for the most interesting news in this sea of data.

Maybe it’s time to do something completely altruistic, which will prove that we really believe in the big difference one individual can make.
The first step is to leave your computer on, when you are not using it (it isn’t energy waste if the computer actually works). After all, machines were not made to sleep.

Distributed Computation

There are several scientifical, mathematical, ecological, biological, astrological projects out there, which could use the power of your computer for their research. You can actually use the idle time on your computer (any computer, any OS) to cure diseases, study global warming, discover life in other plants, etc. These projects are based on the ideals of volunteer computing and grid computing.

The projects are numerous, but here is a list of the ones I use:

• World Community Grid: humanitarian research on new and infectious disease, natural disasters and hunger.

• Rosetta@home: determine the 3-dimensional shapes of proteins in research that may ultimately lead to finding cures for some major human diseases.

• SETI@home: saying that we are alone in the universe is the most selfish thought I’ve ever heard. SETI’s goal is to detect intelligent life outside Earth.

A detailed list of the projects and their description can be found at boinc projects. This list doesn’t have all distributed computed projects; if your aware of any other, please let me know.

The process of participating in these projects is simple 3 step process:

1. You choose the project(s) you would like to participate and register.
2. You go to the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) site and dowload the software.
3. The software has an easy wizard to incorporate any project in it.

Both images taken from BOINC.

A couple of days ago I finished writing my Master Thesis. The subject was Attention and Participation in the Social Web. You can read and edit the theoretical approach on the wiki of the Thesis.

1. The first part of the work was a theoretical model, explaining how the attention economy works on social networks. It combined a variety of disciplines from sociology, mass psychology to network theory and emergence.
2. The second part was, actually, the blog you are currently reading. For almost 2 months I have been trying to apply the theoretical model I constructed on this blog. A couple of days ago, I finished writing the analysis of the results.

Read/Download the results

This analysis is posted in an extensive post called “Bending the Web” at superbloggingtips. It consists of:

• my approach on specific subjects (new content, perfection, participation, etc.)
• the results of my attempts on these subjects
• all kinds of statistics of the blog (comments, pageviews, unique visitors, subscribers, social networks, participation, etc.)
• my remarks on the attention economy of the blogosphere

You can also download the complete master thesis on social networks [pdf] (the theory and the analysis).

Your role on my Thesis

As I note in my conclusion of the article, your assistance is now of utmost importance to complete my research.

In an individual level the statistical results of the blog might seem encouraging; but I don’t have any comparison with any other blogs. Would the statistics seem so interesting if they were compared to other 2-month-old blogs? How was your traffic during the first months of your blog?  

If you have been following the news lately, the web is undergoing a transformation. This transformation is a good thing; it simplifies the communication between man and machine, it breaks the rules of distance and introduces software which bring the cyberspace to unknown pathways. Surely, that is a good thing.
But there is a problem behind this transformation. It is not actually a transformation, it is “transformations”. Three different movements are striving to bring the web into its new phase and revolutionize it.

The semantic web

The semantic web has been online for quite some time now. We hear it, some even see it, but in the end it still isn’ t there. The semantic web will give the tools to the machines to understand and learn the semantic language of humans. It will be based on openness and it will bring software, which will work in a traditional emergent manner.
The semantic web (or web 3.0 or Giant Global Graph - GGG) is

about letting it be connected to data from peer sites. It is about letting it be joined to data from other applications.

The Data Portability project, OpenId and even google’s new social graph are certainly steps towards this direction.

Web of Data

Then we have the Web of Data. Something I first read about yesterday at Richard MacManus’ post. Richard writes about a speech Tom Coates gave, talking among other about the world of tomorrow. According to Coates’ vision the cyberspace will invade real life:

1. A physical object responds to or visualizes data from the network.
2. Interacting with a physical object allows people to change data stored in the network.
3. A physical object acts as a sensor that writes to the web of data.

This is surely an enlightening view of the future, a view we have probably only seen in science fiction movies. Still Tom Coates brings examples of software already succeeding in the field of web-real life interaction.

Revolutionary Software

Finally, Robert Scoble wrote yesterday about a new software currently under development in Microsoft, which will change the digital world. NetMeeting, Netscape and Photoshop were such software. Now Microsoft works on something similarly radical. We all have to wait unti the 27th of September for more information, but Scoble sounds fascinated already.

Decentralization of objectives

All these - and probably more projects that we’ve not heard of yet - are encouraging efforts to develop and evolve the web. I eagerly wait to see how things online will develop. But I also see a small problem here: decentralization.
I’ve already written, that I’m an advocate of decentralization. Many different agents working on a goal, without any central control. But here we are not seeing decentralization of work, but decentralization of goals.
Every institute is trying to change the web on its own way, without collaborating with others. I have the feeling they all have the same upper goal (revolutionizing the web), but different means to achieve it. Decentralization of objectives usually brings confound, disorientation and certainly failure.

Competition is always a parameter of evolution in any market. But if we see the development of the web’s next generation as a race, then we also agree on its commercialization.

Being supportive and being skeptical

Forgive me for being biased on this one, but I tend to trust more the vision of the semantic web for 3 reasons:

1. It is supported by the World Wide Web Consortium, an institution which constantly proves its belief in openness and innovation.
2. It is the only vision of the next Web, that we know so many about and therefore proves its openness.
3. It gives the tools for better commercial interactions, but it doesn’t make the web commercial.

Why I’m skeptical about the other innovations.

1. Tom Coates talks about the importance of openness of data (weblogs, RSS), but he directs his remarks to marketing: being open will drive people to your service, people will pay for it, make your service more attractive, etc.
2. Microsoft is a universal colossus based on providing software to the market and doing its best to keep them on top. I acknowledge Microsoft’s contribution to the web and digitalization in general, but I’m very skeptical on any software it provides. The United States vs. Microsoft case proves my skepticism.

I point out here, that the nature of the other visions (a presentation I didn’t attend to and a software not yet published) does not allow me to be subjective. My skepticism is based on prior experience and not on the current projects. So please any oppositions, feedback, additional information will be appreciated.

For everyone widely using social media, RSS Feeds are a blessing. They have revolutionized the way we gather information and expand our knowledge and interests. We comfortably let data come to us; an attribute of utmost importance, when we imagine what vast constellations of data are inhabiting the streams of cyberspace. All we have to do, is to decide the sources, that will send us these information. So RSS Feeds are a very comfortable service, indeed.

Mainly due to my master thesis research, I have been using RSS Feeds extensively and have enjoyed its assistance. I have mentioned before, that I have been following almost 100 blogs and news sites; and I wasn’t just scanning the information coming, I really read them - and I still do. I don’t think the curse of RSS Feeds lies on the fact, that it provides too much information. I actually don’t believe there is such thing as too much information.

The Curse

No, the problem lies somewhere else. RSS Feeds are too comfortable. What does this mean?
Depending on our time and engagement, we settle down with 50, 70, 100 or more subscriptions. We read the news daily and get enough input and inspiration for our next blog posts. We also participate in most of the communities we are involved in and we have in a way succeeded in making our presence felt and even established a connection with the fellow bloggers.

But then the curse emerges, a curse we actually do not realize.
We stop worrying about other blogs, we stop worrying about new subscriptions, we have developed our nice, warm environment and we are satisfied with it.
This is bad for 3 reasons:

1. We forget the strength of weak ties

Strong ties are our close friends, while weak ties are mostly people we are acquainted with. Mark Granovetter’s research on people looking for a new job in 1973 concluded, that 27,8% of them found on from their weak ties, while 16,7 % from their strong ties. He didn’t disregard the value of strong ties, but he pointed out the importance of weak ones.
Having a steady, well established network of subscriptions constitutes a well founded, strong base, but it also makes us forget the value of weak ties.
How many of these subscriptions are actually well established connections of yours?

2. We lose the sense of a challenge

The fact that we are mostly participating in the blogs we are subscribed to, establishes our prestige in these communities. The author knows who we are and other regular commentators are also aware of our positions. But this evolves in a routine behavior: reading the same blogs, writing comments, starting an interesting discussion with (almost) always the same people.
The challenge of writing a great comment, of saying something really insightful is lost. These people know you, you don’t have to prove yourself. You are allowed to say something silly or not well researched; they will understand.

3. We disregard diversity

People have a natural tendency to start relationships with like-minded people. That is absolutely logical and understandable. But online diversity plays a fundamental role. It brings new voices into the discussion and helps in the correct aggregation of information.
When we constantly find ourselves in the same circles of discussion, we tend to associate with a biased group. That is not necessarily wrong, but it might not be that thought provoking.

Removing the curse

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the RSS curse. I’m very satisfied with the small network I have developed in the past months and definitely don’t want to lose it.
But when I remember on the first times I was blogging, things were much more intriguing. I was searching for new cool blogs, trying to decode the bloggers. I was cautious of my comments and remarks.
Now things are much more comfortable.
So I thought, that it is time to make things more interesting; to get ride of the RSS curse.

• I will start doing guest posts on blogs I like and of course am also opening my blog for guest posts. I’m already preparing an article for superbloggingtips and if you have any writings on your shelf you want to show to another public, contact me.
• I will delete all my subscriptions; by all I mean most of them. I can’t unsubscribe from my strong ties, I like their stuff and I like their feedback.
• Consequence of the above is that I will start searching for new blogs. This will expand my network and pose a challenge to me.

The RSS curse is like smoking. You get it out of your system for a month, but in the end you get hooked up again.
So I’m still thinking on new ways to use RSS in its full potential without getting stuck with its negatives.

As always I’m open for suggestions, feedback and from now on your articles.