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Tim Berners-Lee Announces Web Science Initiative
ReadWriteWeb writes "MIT and the University of Southampton in Britain have announced an initiative called Web Science. Tim Berners-Lee is leading the program, which is essentially about formalizing a new kind of scientific discipline. The goal is to understand the deeper structure of the social Web and how people are using it. But as well as studying the Web, they also hope to shape the future of the Web. In the conference call this morning, Tim Berners-Lee spoke about how Web Science will help build 'a new Web, a better Web, building things on top of the Web infrastructure.' He said they'll be 'developing new ways of analyzing things and we'll be building systems which have completely new properties'. But he made a point of saying that because the Web is about people, social aspects will be a very important part of it."
How useless. Is there really a need for this?
Semantic web 2.0?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
will help build 'a new Web, a better Web, building things on top of the Web infrastructure'.
Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the technology. We can make it stronger...
You have to wonder how long it will be before Web Science and Web 2.0 morph into another fancy catch word for a new and improved web user experience that doesn't really change anything. Sounds like a conspiracy to sell over-priced door stoppers that's recycling material and ideas that been around in previous book editions instead of coming up with something new under the sun.
Here's the problem with cut-scenes:
A 90-minute cut-scene (aka a movie) costs $7 to watch and $20 to own.
Why would I go to a computer store and pay $40 for it?
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
...considering that half the interesting stuff they would want to study (e.g. email, IM, RSS, etc.) has nothing to do with the "Web" (i.e., HTTP) anyway!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
From what I've read, this may qualify as a type of social science, though I don't understand why there isn't an interdisciplinary sociology / IT research area to cover this sort of thing already.
This should not be billed as either a natural or information science, however, as it is neither.
I'm sure Spider Man is standing by to lend his expert knowledge in to field of webology.
My sig can beat up your sig.
...I really don't like the web in it's current form. Even with all the Web 2.0 crap, it's still too slow, too restrictive from both a design and content angle and too mired in the original foundations of markup languages. What is needed is actually a new computing platform that is Internet-centric, but not bound by OS, or computer language limitations. Content design should be more of an intuitive and artistic/creative activity instead of mostly a technical one. Take Flash for example. Flash is not something that a kid can pick up and use to create content like they can with crayons and paper, or sitting down at a piano. Even though you can make some really nice looking things with Flash, it still highly restrictive in terms of point of entry for a non-technical person. And in all honesty the most creative and artistic people are not techincally inclined. Those who happen to be gifted with technical ability and true creativity are rare. And those who THINK they are creative or artistic but really aren't are all too common. However, I'm also a realist and know that the web is here to stay. This seems to have something to do with humans always going with the lowest quality products and services simply because of low cost. In this case the "low cost" is the familiarity of the web.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
The goal is to understand the deeper structure of the social Web and how people are using it.
Translation: Watching people watching porn.
Maybe Sir Tim could read E. O. Wilson's "Consilience" for a start so he can get a grip.
Seastead this.
developing new ways of analyzing things and we'll be building systems which have completely new properties
??
Analyzing things? Properties? I didn't think advances in AI had anything to do with networking, and I didn't know MIT wastes time like this. Big names are very nice, but what exactly is this thing?
Sounds like this is more a concentration of sociology than a new science. Furthermore I don't think this "science" is going to prove much we don't already know. The web is just another means of communication through which millions of different communities have been built upon.
Furthermore I think it's needlessly focused on "web". It should be "Internet" not "web". There are many more social networks in non-web environments like MMORPGs, or IRC, or newsgroups, etc..
To be honest this initiative comes off a little bit narrow.
Lee also said that afraid the Net could be used to spread "misinformation and "undemocratic forces".
'undemocratic'?? They very fact that it can send misinformation makes it very democratic. Look at politicians in a democracy for example...
Help a man when he is in trouble and he will remember you when he is in trouble again.
I wonder if Google people do not already know where they want it to go, and have begun doing it without creating committees or anything. Did not Winston Churchill say in his time that a camel was a horse designed by a committee ?
Signature omitted in order to save space. Thanks for your understanding.
Personally I expect to see something quite interesting to come out of this. Besides, Sir Tim was one of the major blokes behind the current WWW.
At least give him/them a chance....
Will this make the Net fun to explore again? It used to be interesting to surf around and see what weirdness or coolness you could find. Now it's kind of boring. Or am I the only one who feels this way?
TBL is a great guy and all, but his "invention" is now way too large with too many involved for its "inventor" to remain relevant. I doubt that anything he says or does now can matter much. He needs to let go of this altruistic visionary role. I wish he had cashed out somehow. Maybe had he learnt PHP and made a popular website.
Here's this scientist with a lot of credibility among the most technically minded of politicians, essentially saying "the free exchange of ideas is dangerous" -- I wonder who Sir Tim sees as the arbiter between what is "disinformation" and what is fact, and between what is dissent and "undemocratic forces." I, for one, do NOT welcome our new MiniTruth overlords.
No thanks, Mr Lee. I want my Internet free from ANY censorship. Good intentions be damned; I don't trust you any more the GWB.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
I love wikipedia and get alot of useful information from it. This morning while reading about an intel folks using a wiki for classified info, brought me the idea of wiki-rumor-pedia. I said that it's just a matter of time till some one does it. An AC posted a comment that CIC in SnowCrash would fit my description. I had to look that up since I've not read SnowCrash yet. The CIC seems a bit more evolved than what I'm thinking. It's like the 3rd or 4th big evolution after wikis.
We need an active science wiki that can do most of our present science journal things cheaper, easier and more widespread. You'd need to have every step of all our current science processes involved in this. Esp. getting writing or submitted papers, abstracts and raw data as requirements for governmental funding. It needs to be scalable so that everyone from professors, grad students, lab techs, junior high science teachers, and students from K-PH level can search active science projects, attempt to repeat a science project as part of a class assignment, areas for teacher/professor grading with comments, peer review from others of the same educational/age level. Basically make one place where those of every branch of knowledge dump and review their knowledge and for our students to review it and learn from it.
This blog entry from yesterday includes links to Berners-Lee's past writings on the subject, as well as a summary from an '05 meeting of the minds in London at which this effort was apparently first kicked around.
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http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/910
LOL - a right nobody, check it out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee
So by Monday, the Univ of Phoenix will have the PhD degree ready for me to print out?
I propose a Web PRON initiative.
Funds required for subscriptions and lots of lube.
It'll be a long hard research project, but I'm not afraid to get my hands dirty. I'll be pulling as much data as possible and putting it all out there for everyone.
Send your contributions in a plain brown bag to behind the water pipe - men's room - Grand Central Station, NYC. Thank you.
This phrase has been used before to develop information and methods that helped interest groups, big capital, governments to manipulate and dominate public.
it always go with the bait "better" word.
In this context it will provide an understanding of how the web is, so that some can manipulate the web to their own profit.
NOONE needs anyone to build a 'better' web. THE WEB builds itself, it is an entity... and its free.
Read radical news here
It's time for Dr Franken-Lee to fess up: his Rocky Horror Web experiment was a monstrous mistake!
Unleash the hidden self-destruct code in HTML 1.0 and let your billion zombies reclaim their lives... before we march on W3C with flaming torches!
When questioned about the specifics of his study, Mr. Berners-Lee stated, "Are we off the record? For a first phase, what we're actually trying to measure is the average effect on unsuspecting volunteers when we confine them for several hours in a room with a projector displaying various web experiences." The list of "web experiences", according to MIT, is not yet finalized, but is rumored to contain hamsterdance.com, neuticles, and, of course, MySpace. "The walls of the room are well padded," Mr. Berners-Lee went on to comment, with a slight chuckle.
the Web Porn initiative has worked out amazingly well. Good to see him moving on to new challenges.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
The EU taxpayers have been bankrolling his supercolliding scientific ass since the nineties, but oh no, Mr Lee had to invent the interweb first and produced no science to speak of. About damn time he did something useful with his fancy-pancy Ph.D., then.
I don't clearly understand what Tim Berners-Lee is up to yet I know what's missing in the standards and that's database tags. Most pages in the web currently either use static content (texts, images, etc) or dynamic content loaded from a database. While static content can easily be formulate with HTML dynamic content can't. There's always the need for either PHP, Perl, Python, etc together with Java script. Yet most database access is simply retrieving (SELECT, FETCH) some content from a database or change (INSERT, UPDATE) some content in a database. In 95% there's no need for more functionality, so if theses simple statements were available as HTML tags there would be no need for scripts.
O. Wyss
See http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html
How long until TBL changes his name to "The Mule"? :-)
If you thought, the whole "Web 2.0" was just a marketing ploy, check out this item: http://www.ekkehardmorgenstern.de/web3.0.txt What if there was an all-integrating OS that would allow seamless interoperability across networks?