Digitage Web 2.0 2012
January 4, 2012
Logos from Web 2.0 are caught in the web somewhere between, a NASA image of a nebula, a starry night, clouds, science fiction landscapes of our inner space, the synapses of the brain, the virtual space that is not abstract, imagined or really real.
Web 2.0, is a term coined by Tim O’Reilly in 2004 for a series of conferences on a revivified Internet. O’Reilly (2005) in what is now considered to be his seminal article claimed that, “If Netscape was the standard bearer for Web 1.0, Google is most certainly the standard bearer for Web 2.0 (O’Reilly 2005). He contrasted Web 1.0 with Web 2.0 by citing examples: DoubleClick vs Google AdSense, Ofoto vs Flickr, Britannica Online vs Wikipedia, personal websites vs blogging, domain name speculation vs search engine optimization, page views vs cost per click, publishing vs participation, content management systems vs wikis directories (taxonomy) vs tagging (“folksonomy”) and stickiness vs syndication. The conceptual map his team devised provides a sketch of Web 2.0 showing social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies.
Although some argue that it does not exist as anything more than geek jargon, for this new user, it is a promising and surprising paradigm shift in the Internet and in software development. I began blogging using Web 2.0 freeware in September 2006. Numerous users like myself have access to sophisticated, ever-improving software technologies since the cost of development is shared among enthusiastic nerds and geeks (in a good way). Freeware on Web 2.0 is not proprietary by nature but is capable of generating huge profits because of the viral way in which users share in the development, marketing and growth of the product while improving connectivity and in content in the process.
Web 2.0
- the network as platform
- not proprietary by nature
- spans all connected devices
- applications make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform
- deliver software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it (wikis: wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Amazon, ebay, craigslist, and all other other Web 2.0 superstar applications)
- consumes and remixes data from multiple sources, including individual users (users of images in Flickr, Picassa,
- provide own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others (Creative Commons)
- creating network effects through an architecture of participation
- tagging, folksonomies
- blogging, microblogging
- search engine optimization
- semantic web
- social networking sites: Facebook, Google +,
- social network sites: Facebook, myspace, bebo, friendster, hi5, orkut, perfspot, zorpia, netlog, habbo, Google +,
- microblogging: Twitter, Tumblr, posterous, Friendfeed, Plurk
- blog services: WordPress, TypePad, Squarespace, Blogger, MySpace, AOL Journals, Windows Live Spaces, Xanga, LiveJournal
- search engines: www.Google.com, http://www.Yahoo.com, http://www.Bing.com, http://www.Ask.com, http://www.Teoma.com, http://www.DuckDuckGo.com, http://www.Entireweb.com, http://www.blekko.com, http://www.ScrubTheWeb.com, www.Gigablast.com
- Web Browsers: Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari
- social bookmarking/discovery sites: CiteUlike, del.icio.us, digg, Google, Newsvine, reddit, StumbleUpon, Connotea, Squidoo, AddThis, ShareThis,
- free image hosting: Flickr, Picasa, Panoramio, TinyPic, WebShots, Imageshack, Photobucket, SeeHere, Snapfish, DeviantART,
- free video hosting: YouTube, Vimeo
- free PowerPoint hosting: SlideShare, Google Docs
- Creative Commons License
- Amazon, craigslist,
- wikis: wikipedia
- maps: Google Earth, Google Maps
- Storify, the Twitter and multi-media curation service
- Client-side development/web browser technologies: Rich and interactive portal web applications use a variety of technologies such as Ajax, JavaScript, JSON, and patterns such as REST. These technologies and patterns allow developers to create increasingly responsive and highly interactive web applications.
- Software Extensions: from server to platform: Adobe Reader, Adobe Flash player, Microsoft Silverlight, ActiveX, Oracle Java, Quicktime, Windows Media, etc.
- Feeds (Syndication technology): Googlereader, RSS, WordPress, notifies users of content changes.
- Folksonomies
- Education 2.0
- Goverment 2.0
- Enterprise 2.0
- Health 2.0
- Science 2.0
“Any web application is a cloud application in the sense that it resides in the cloud. Google, Amazon, Facebook, twitter, flickr, and virtually every other Web 2.0 application is a cloud application in this sense. However, it seems to me that people use the term “cloud” more specifically in describing web applications that were formerly delivered locally on a PC, like spreadsheets, word processing, databases, and even email. Thus even though they may reside on the same server farm, people tend to think of gmail or Google docs and spreadsheets as “cloud applications” in a way that they don’t think of Google search or Google maps.This common usage points up a meaningful difference: people tend to think differently about cloud applications when they host individual user data. The prospect of “my” data disappearing or being unavailable is far more alarming than, for example, the disappearance of a service that merely hosts an aggregated view of data that is available elsewhere (say Yahoo! search or Microsoft live maps.) And that, of course, points us squarely back into the center of the Web 2.0 proposition: that users add value to the application by their use of it. Take that away, and you’re a step back in the direction of commodity computing (O’Reilly 2008).”
A Timeline of Selected Events Related to Web 2.0
2011 Web 2.0 Summit
“Once each year, the Web 2.0 Summit brings together 1,000 senior executives from the worlds of technology, media, finance, telecommunications, entertainment, and the Internet. For 2011, our theme is “The Data Frame” – focusing on the impact of data in today’s networked economy. We live in a world clothed in data, and as we interact with it, we create more – data is not only the web’s core resource, it is at once both renewable and boundless.”
2007
“Web 2.0 Expo began eons ago in Internet Years – April of 2007 – in San Francisco. It was the first conference and tradeshow for the rapidly growing ranks of designers and developers, product managers, entrepreneurs, VCs, marketers, and business strategists who embraced the opportunities created by Web 2.0, a term coined at the birth of Web 2.0 Summit (formerly named Web 2.0 Conference), a joint venture between O’Reilly Media , UBM TechWeb, and Federated Media.” Pike, Kaitlin. 2011-12-01. “Long Goodbye to Web 2.0 Expo.”
Selected webliography
Alexander, Bryan. Levine, Alan. 2008. “Web 2.0 Storytelling: Emergence of a New Genre.” Educause.
Alexander and Levine (2008) identify two essential features that are useful in distinguishing Web 2.0 projects and platforms from the rest of the web: microcontent and social media.
Boulton, Clint. 2011-10-17. “Web 2.0 Summit: Salesforce.com’s Benioff Praises Oracle, Loves Facebook.” Enterprise Applications News.
“[C]ompanies must “beware the false cloud” Oracle and other virtualization software vendors offer as private clouds that come on disks. True cloud computing, he explained, is hosted, multi-tenant and lives on the Web—not on a disk.”
O’Reilly, Tim. 2007. “What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software.” O’Reilly Media. Communications and Strategies. No. 1, p. 17, First Quarter. Social Science Network Page.
Abstract: “This paper was the first initiative to try to define Web 2.0 and understand its implications for the next generation of software, looking at both design patterns and business modes. Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an architecture of participation, and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.”
Tim O’Reilly, 2005. “What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software”. Uploaded 09/30/2005. Accessed January 6, 2007.
Viewed 25, 070 times since December 5, 2006. Shared frequently through Creative Commons license. Updated 2012
planets in cyberspace, logos for Web 2.0 digitage, stars in virtual constellations, cells for mind maps, images to embed in mise-en-abyme, avatars, . . . interwoven, inextricably linked, inter-related,
“The stages that mark the wayfarer’s journey from the abode of dust to the heavenly homeland are said to be seven.
Some have called these Seven Valleys, and others, Seven Cities.
And they say that until the wayfarer taketh leave of self, and traverseth these stages, he shall never reach to the ocean of nearness and union, nor drink of the peerless wine.” *
And of the seven valleys the third valley is the valley of knowledge in which the His inner eyes will open and he will privily converse with his Beloved;
he will set ajar the gate of truth and piety, and shut the doors of vain imaginings.
He in this station is content with the decree of God, and seeth war as peace, and findeth in death the secrets of everlasting life.
With inward and outward eyes he witnesseth the mysteries of resurrection in the realms of creation and the souls of men, and with a pure heart apprehendeth the divine wisdom in the endless Manifestations of God.
In the ocean he findeth a drop, in a drop he beholdeth the secrets of the sea.*
Split the atom’s heart, and lo!
Within it thou wilt find a sun.
[Persian Mystic Poem]*
Arctic Adventurer: We Feel Fine
November 13, 2009
Arctic Adventurer: We Feel Fine,
originally uploaded by ocean.flynn.
DRAFT
Photos of Iqaluit cemetery taken October 2002; Uploaded to Flickr, Trawled by wefeelfine, Linked to wordpress, wefeelfine.org
American artist, Jonathan Harris describes his work on his website:
“I make (mostly) online projects that reimagine how we relate to our machines and to each other. I use computer science, statistics, storytelling, and visual art as tools. I believe in technology, but I think we need to make it more human. I believe that the Internet is becoming a planetary meta-organism, but that it is up to us to guide its evolution, and to shape it into a space we actually want to inhabit—one that can understand and honor both the individual human and the human collective, just like real life does (Harris).”
“Sep Kamvar is a consulting professor of Computational Mathematics at Stanford University. His research focuses on data mining and information retrieval in large-scale networks. He also is interested in using large amounts of data and accessible media in the study of human nature through art. [Among his other areas of interest he includes] probabilistic models for classification where there is little labeled data (Sep Kamvar’s blog profile).”
Glossary of Terms
Nonlinearity: “At the beginning of Chapter 5 in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim finds himself in jail on the planet of Tralfamadore. Billys captors give him some Tralfamadorian books to pass the time, and while Billy can’t read Tralfamadorian, he does notice that the books are laid out in brief clumps of text, separated by stars. “Each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message — discribing a situation, a scene,” explained one of his captors. “We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn’t any relationship between all the mssages, except that the author has chosen then carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.” Harris and Kamvar aimed to write Almanac of Human Emotions in the telegraphic, schizophrenic manner of tales from Tralfamadore, where the flying saucers are.”
Open Platforms: “The power of open platforms in enabling the easy generation of consumable content has been demonstrated repeatedly on the internet, not only with the web itself, but also with sub-platforms like Facebook, Flickr, Google Gadgets, among others. I am interested in platforms that easily enable high-quality content creation for developers and provide a straightforward content consumption and navigation experience for users.”
Open Sub-platforms Open Sub-platforms like Facebook, Flickr, Google Gadgets, among others, facilitate the generation-creation of high-quality consumable content while providing easier access and consumption for users.
Timeline
Webliography and Bibliography
Wikinomics: Four Principles
October 5, 2008
The four principles of wikinomics are openness, peering, sharing and acting globally (Tapscot and Williams 2008:270).
I disagree with blogger James Madigan in his review of Wikinomics in which he accused the authors of hyperbole and oversell. Madigan, www.jmadigan.net, was underwhelmed by Tapscot and Williams’ ‘evangelical’ enthusiasm of potential benefits of the specific collaborative techniques that wikinomics offer. Madigan acknowledged that outsourcing, open source software and Creative Commons licensing helped the company he once worked for, GameSpy. But he argued that Tapscot and Williams underplay the dark side of wikinomics.
Tapscot and Williams do not advocate that Web 2.0 Enterprises adopt the missionary position. They need to maintain solid internal goals before investing resources. However these principles are complementary to proprietary approaches with companies maintaining their core intellectual properties (Tapscot and Williams 2008:312-3).
They cite the Swiss drug maker Novartis as Tapscot and Williams consider the Novartis initiative as encapsulating wikinomics principles of openness, peering, sharing and acting globally (2008:288).” Novartis provided free Internet access without restrictions to all its raw data on its multi-million dollar research to unlock the genetic basis for type 2 diabetes.
In his book entitled The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture, (2007) Andrew Keen cautions against the inaccuracy of information shared on the Internet which he considers to be lacking in the more reliable and legitimate vetting processes where expert gatekeepers protect quality. Keen argued that the unintended consequence of Web 2.0 and the democratization of media results in democratization of talent and the flattening of culture by the masses who assert uninformed opinions, lack aesthetic judgment and are incapable of evaluating quality content. According to his arguments a democratized media would never have produced Mozarts, Hemingways, Universals or the Warner Brothers (Tapscot and Williams 2008:272).
Keen’s arguments resonate with those of Robert Hutchins (1936) and Allan Bloom (1987) who argued that mass movements threaten educational standards and eventually modern democracy. Tapscot and Williams liken Keen’s defense of the “old model” with its gatekeepers to saying that “democracy is bad for the average citizen because the average individual is a poor judge of his or her own interests (2008:272).
The most wide-spread pedagogical model in Canadian public education systems in 2008 is based on active, participatory teaching, learning and research methods and theories in many ways similar to those proposed by John Dewey in the 1930s. Dewey promoted an educational model of active, participatory learning to prepare citizens who would be “informed participants in a well-functioning democracy, resisting threats to democratic freedoms posed by political and corporate monopolies, aware of the importance of intellectual independence and individual rights, but also understanding that rights engender responsibilities to the community at large (Gonshak 1997).”
In a Calgary school, for example, Grade Five students “research” the Arctic regions online with much of the material based on wikipedia entries. They compile the information using PowerPoint and paper posters presented to the rest of the class. Grade Seven students “research” specific historical topics such as the fur trade in a debate format again using online sources to produce their arguments. The goal is not to memorize truth claims about historical events. It is a more sophisticated form of memory work. Students learn how to think critically and to investigate truth claims using a variety of sources. In the end it is meant to lead to the individual investigation of truth. By junior high, if not before, these students are already aware that wikipedia is written in a collaborative, organic fashion and that not all entries can be fully trusted. By highschool they will hopefully have a fairly balanced picture of the risks and benefits of Lawrence Lessig’s Creative Commons and William Gibson’s cyberworld.
This is a 180 degree turn about from the ontological certitude of the 1950s and it is probably the knowledge industry nightmare that Hutchins and Bloom feared.
This generation of students will continue to refine and reshape wikinomics. While winning companies like Wikipedia successfully benefitted from mass collaboration, they also provided open access to information.
“Winning companies today have open and porous boundaries and compete by reaching outside their walls to harness external knowledge, resources and capabilities. They’re like a hub for innovation and a magnet for uniquely qualified minds. They focus their internal staff on value integration and orchestration, and treat the world as their R & D department. All of this adds up to a new kind of collaborative enterprise- an Enterprise 2.0 that is completely shaping and reshaping clusters of knowledge and capabilities to compete on a global basis [. . .] Leaders must prepare their collaborative environments. Capabilities to develop new kinds of relationships, sense important developments, add value, and turn nascent networked knowledge into compelling value are becoming the bread and butter of wealth creation and success (Tapscot and Williams 2008:315).”
Selected Timeline of Critical Events in Wikinomics
1936 Robert Hutchins wrote The Higher Education in America in which he argued that the the goals of education was to provide an elite group of intellectually superior students destined for positions as future decision-makers, with truths of Western culture. Mortimer Adler and Hutchins created the Great Books program at the University of Chicago, a program which later included conservative academics like Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom. In John Dewey’s scathing review of The Higher Education in America he argued that Hutchins’ traditional pedagogy was a process of passive transmission in which teachers were reduced to being a mere conduit and students, inert receptors. Dewey promoted an educational model of active, participatory learning to prepare citizens who would be “informed participants in a well-functioning democracy, resisting threats to democratic freedoms posed by political and corporate monopolies, aware of the importance of intellectual independence and individual rights, but also understanding that rights engender responsibilities to the community at large (Gonshak 1997).”
1987 Allan Bloom (1930-1992) published his bestseller The Closing of the American Mind in which criticized American higher education. Bloom argued that American political and intellectual life in the 1980s cure was in desperate need of a cure of the malady of the times by reintegrating the Great Books of Western Thought as a source of wisdom in prestige universities to restore seriousness to education and to open students to a philosophic experience. Bloom was shaken by his first hand experiences as professor at Cornell University during the 1960s mass movements and student uprisings that shook the foundations of academia. He equated the violence and political uprising on academic campuses in the 1960s with a general social malaise. (Bloom’s mentor was Leo Strauss who was critical of the way that universities gave way under the pressure of mass movements in Europe in the 1930’s.) The university “epitomizes the very spirit of free inquiry, which in turn is at the root of a free society, he concludes that ”a crisis in the university, the home of reason, is perhaps the profoundest crisis” for a modern democratic nation (Kimball 1987). Roger Kimball, managing editor of the conservative New Criterion, anticipated that The Closing of the American Mind would have many critics and it did because of its,
avowedly traditional vision of what it means to be an educated person. And no doubt many will object that this portrait of liberal education is in many ways a caricature or an exaggeration. Certainly, there are exceptions to the rule of mediocrity and ideological posing that Mr. Bloom anatomizes in these pages (Kimball 1987).”
Kimball (2005) re-iterated Bloom’s question on the role of higher education,
“The chief issue is this: Should our institutions of higher education be devoted primarily to the education of citizens–or should they be laboratories for social and political experimentation? Traditionally, a liberal arts education involved both character formation and learning. The goal was to produce men and women who (as Allan Bloom put it) had reflected thoughtfully on the question ” ‘What is man?’ in relation to his highest aspirations as opposed to his low and common needs (Kimball 2005).”
2003 Flickr started as an online multiplayer game in which the photo-trading feature was almost an afterthought. Hundreds of thousands of Flickr users social community unexpectedly changed the direction of the company by uploading, tagging and describing their own photos and commenting, rating (favouriting) and awarding those of other Flickr users (Tapscot and Williams 2008:310).”
2005 Roger Kimball, managing editor of the conservative New Criterion praised ”the rise of conservative talk radio, the popularity of Fox News . . . and the spread of interest in the Internet with its many right-of-center populist Web logs” as ”heartening signs” that conservatives are becoming ”a widespread counter to the counterculture” of universities.
2007 Swiss drug maker Novartis provided free Internet access without restrictions to all its raw data on its multi-million dollar research to unlock the genetic basis for type 2 diabetes. Tapscot and Williams consider the Novartis initiative as encapsulating wikinomics principles of openness, peering, sharing and acting globally (2008:288).”
2007 Andrew Keen’s book entitled The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture, was published in which he cautions against the inaccuracy of information shared on the Internet which he considers to be lacking in the more reliable and legitimate vetting processes where expert gatekeepers protect quality. Keen argued that the unintended consequence of Web 2.0 and the democratization of media results in democratization of talent and the flattening of culture by the masses who assert uninformed opinions, lack aesthetic judgment and are incapable of evaluating quality content. According to his arguments a democratized media would never have produced Mozarts, Hemingways, Universals or the Warner Brothers.
2008 The most wide-spread pedagogical model in Canadian public education systems are based on active, participatory teaching, learning and research methods and theories in many ways similar to those proposed by John Dewey in the 1930s. For example, Grade Five students “research” the Arctic regions online with much of the material based on wikipedia entries. They compile the information using PowerPoint and paper posters presented to the rest of the class. Grade Seven students “research” specific historical topics such as the fur trade in a debate format again using online sources to produce their arguments.
Folksonomy: Internet:social aspects, Internet:economic aspects, Information society, social change, self-publishing,
Webliography and Bibliography
Bloom, Allan. 1987. The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students. Foreword by Saul Bellow. 392 pp. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Gonshak, Henry. 1997. “Review of Ryan, Alan. 1995. John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Kimball, Roger. 1987 “The Groves of Ignorance.” New York Times.
Kimball, Roger. 2005-05. “Retaking the University: a Battle Plan.” New Criterion.
Keen, Andrew. 2007. The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture. New York: Doubleday.
Madigan, James. 2008-08-15. “Book Review: Wikinomics.” 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008.
Ryan, Alan. 1995. John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Sleeper, Jim. 2005-09-04. “Allan Bloom and Conservative Mind.” New York Times.
Tapscot, Don; Williams, Anthony D. 2008 [2006]. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. Penguin Group: New York/Toronto/London.
Tapscot, Don; Williams, Anthony D. Wikinomics: the blog
Speechless 