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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."
Semantic web 2.0?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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
...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.
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.
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.