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Social Computing and Badger's Paws
An anonymous reader writes "When Yahoo!'s Jeremy Zawodny recently asked What the heck is Web 2.0 anyway? he received a set of responses reminiscent of those garnered by The Register back in 2005, which famously concluded, based on its readers' responses, that Web 2.0 was made up of 12% badger's paws, 6% JavaScript worms, and 26% nothing. Nonetheless, as Social Computing (SoC) widens and deepens its footprint, another Jeremy — Jeremy Geelan — has asked if we are witnessing the death of 'Personal' Computing. SoC, Geelan notes, has already become an academic field of study. But perhaps Social Computing too is just badger's paws?"
Everyone knows that badgers are strictly a web 1.0 phenomena. (it's been around since the web went from 0.9b4 to 1.0 RC1)
;-)
Oh - anyone who hasn't already seen the animation linked above, make sure you watch right to the end - the punch line is hilarious!
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
56% Slashdot.....
Badger's Paws?
"But perhaps Social Computing too is just badger's paws?""
Nah... It's just nothing (as in move along, nothing to see here).
http://www.strangehorizons.com/2004/20040405/badge r.shtml
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Don't leave out our furry friends!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
http://www.xkcd.com/c256.html
Slashdot wasn't even on this map!
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Dark matter?
there is no technology called web 2.0, just mindless drones repeating it.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I'd say 100% nothing, much like the Emperor's New Clothes.
Why yes I'll have an extra large helping of Fury Sex with my casino chips please! God that place sucks.
EGOTIST, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.
"Web 2.0" is just an other catch phrase for buzz word specialists, who cash in on selling wows, for the plebs.
"Web 2.0" is what will make you throw up, if someone mentions it one more time two years from now - or earlier.
Anyhow, I know where we are.
Be nice to my poor comp.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System-on-a-chip
Clearly "Social Computing" doesn't have much to do with, well... computing.
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
The shock! The horror! Say it ain't so.
Web 2.0 = Web 1.0 + marketing - page refreshes + dynamic content
So yeah, just do a little animation on your screen without the page refreshes, then hand it over to the marketing department and you'll be riding that next wave in no time all the way to the bank.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
MythTv is good. I flip over, flip back during the commercial and *know* you're just trying to torture us. Cheers!
Quack, quack.
What about Tim O'Reilly? He seems to take the whole "Web 2.0" buzzword he invented pretty seriously. Plus, as repeating it goes, I assume that having a Web 2.0 Summit (the next one is in October) would kinda qualify as repeating it.
Then again, he generally seems to take himself too seriously. What with the attempt to regulate blogosphere and all.
He's not the only one, though, since it wouldn't be much of a summit if only he was going there. There are a lot of people pining for the good ol' days of the 1.0 Bubble, and wanting to once again get big VC money for just having a web page and a sock puppet. Bubble 2.0 if you will. Cue trying to tell investors and each other that this time they're Web 2.0, see. Not the old failed Bubble 1.0, see. This time they have javascript and wikis and blogs and BitTorrent and whatnot, and a shiny happy everyone-participates model. _This_ time you'll get your money worth if you invest in them. Would they lie to you... again?
(And if that sounds stupid and made up, sadly it isn't made up. That's what makes Web 2.0 in Tim O'Reilly's own view and definition of it. See, it's 2.0, because now it has wikis, and blogs, and participation, and Google search, etc. And this time there's search engine optimization too, btw! And that all's _the_ recipe for not going bankrupt as a VC capital sink!)
Oh, wait... you meant perchance that nobody _sane_ is repeating it? Ok, in that case no objection.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Footprints deepening, badger's paws...I'm sensing a definite theme! And if my SoCs keep widening, how long before they won't fit in my SHoEs?
Karma police, arrest this man. He talks in math. He buzzes like a fridge. He's like a detuned radio.
I recommend these two, also by weebl. Magic.
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
Um, l-- look, i-- i-- if we built this large wooden badger--
(In case you haven't noticed.)
And if you have noticed, notice also that that's what all the HS and college folks entering right now will expect in terms of networkable social interaction. All content, across all devices, intelligently displayed, adapted to me.
I'm just waiting for Amazon.com to buy Facebook out.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Generally you got the right idea, but it's not just about marketting and not just dynamic content as such. If you read Tim O'Reilly's own explanations of it, since he invented and pushes the buzzword, it's more about techno-fetishism and the deep seated belief that a million monkeys on keyboards _can_ write Hamlet... if only they're on the Internet and have all the latest buzzwords.
E.g., he sees personal web pages as soo Web 1.0, and replaced by wikis in Web 2.0. No, really.
I mean, seriously, it's sooo pase to just have your own resume on your own homepage. Make it a wiki so everyone can edit it! Surely reality works by consensus, and a million bored strangers who never heard of you before are more qualified than you to fill that content! Or, bah, corporate web sites are so dull. Make it a wiki, so random strangers can spice it up. (That was sarcasm, btw.)
E.g., ditto for sources of information. Having an authoritative source is soo Web 1.0, when you could just have a wiki instead. Wikis are the Web 2.0 way! And I don't even mean the sane way of using, say, Wikipedia as a starting point and following the links to the authoritative sources. No, no, no. He sees wikis as the _replacement_.
E.g., publishing content is soo Web 1.0. You should have everyone participate! Participation is the Web 2.0 way, don't you know?
So, yeah, forget about writing your own press releases and product manuals and FAQs. Let the community participate! Let perfect strangers and competitors spice it up. Imagine the possibilities! Imagine the excitement of checking each day to find out what perversions someone added to your company or product info! (Yep, you guessed, sarcasm.)
E.g., buying servers (e.g., from Akamai) to distribute your patches and executables is soo web 1.0. The Web 2.0 way is BitTorrent. Get on with the times.
I mean, hey, look at how excited WoW players were to get their ADSL's _outbound_ pipe stuffed up by a modified BitTorrent to download the patches. Not to mention at times being stuck with sucking a huge patch through a straw, from 1-2 other people's outbound pipe. Surely they'd barf if they could download the same patch in 5 minutes from a dedicated server without the hassle. (Sarcasm too, btw. It was actually a major gripe about WoW. See, for example, the Penny Arcade strip.)
Etc.
Now don't get me wrong, I can see some point in some of that stuff if it's an extra. Providing a forum for the users is pretty much expected anyway, and offering a torrent in _addition_ to the plain old download can't hurt at least. But presenting it as the _replacement_ to the boring old Web 1.0 stuff is... brain dead. It takes an unhealthy dose of techno-fetishism and techno-utopianism to see everything solvable by just more network buzzwords and a million networked monkeys writing reality by consensus.
It does fit with his other brain-damaged ideas, though, such as the call for censoring and regulating the blogosphere. The guy genuinely seems _that_ convinced that he can forge a whole utopian society on the Internet.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
No wonder web2 isn't going to last: http://www.verbumvanum.org/shirky/index.html
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
I'm going to sue you because of the terrible trauma you have given me!
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
.. It's a fancy name for sites that use AJAX and have glass icons.
God Be Gone
It's official - when you see SoC and the first thing you think of is a world of warcraft spell you've played too much :( Where's the number for MMORPG'ers anonymous?
Programming is an Art. I am an Artist. Does that mean I get to wear a daft hat?
We ensured a miserable meal at the Tollemache Arms recently. Our main courses took almost one hour to appear (the restaurant wasn't even full) and when they arrived it was an insult to cuisine. The vegetarian dishes was devoid of any taste. The Risotto resembled Batchelor's savoury rice, but overcooked. Another vegetarian dish consisted of a soggy upside-down mushroom with a pile of overcooked mixed vegetables just thrown on top. The Tollemache knot (a sausage dish) was tough, over cooked and served with raw red onion gravy and a lumpy mustard mash. The pheasant was as dry as the sahara desert and showed now cooking skill whatsoever. The one hour wait was probably due to the chef extracting any taste and texture out of the "food" that was presented to us. If there had been anywhere else in the village that evening we would have walked out. Avoid.
Why is Social Computing abbreviated as SoC? What's wrong with SC?
The Internet used to be a geek's refuge - a place where adults exchanged views about important matters, and whiny people with emotional itches were noticeable by their absence. Another activity that was pretty rigorously excluded was "business" - defined (by me) as the attempt to earn the largest pile of money in the shortest time with the minimum effort, without being heavily punished by the criminal justice system. This blissful state of affairs still held good (more or less) when the sainted TBL invented the Web and gave it to us all without let, hindrance, or vig.
Pretty soon the Web grew and grew, and attracted the attention of those who perch, vulture-like, incessantly scanning the horizon for signs of free meals. How could they extract industrial quantities of money from this popular, but apparently useless phenomenon? The hunt was on, and an early burst of enthusiasm (the Dot Com era) led to general disappointment (the Dot Bomb crash).
But now there are more and more practical ways to make money from the Web, and those who find money more fascinating than technology, universal communication, planetary groupthink, etc., need a label to denote the Web in its capacity as a revenue stream. That is the essential meaning of "Web 2.0".
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Fury sex?
Now that sounds like an anger management technique I can ascribe to...
So, "Web 2.0" is finally explained in an article that concludes by quoting a bumper sticker. Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?
I think the main reason "Web 2.0" has taken hold as a buzzword is the crash of 2000. There was a huge ramp-up in internet hype all the way from 1994 to around 2000 or so, driven largely (in the popular consciousness) by Netscape. Then came the stock market crash, and along with it came down all the dot-coms. Then we had a nuclear winter, where online advertising was officially dead, and nobody could get a job, and there was no startup funding for anything "fun" any more.
Then the new phase gradually started, with Google leading the way toward cool AJAX applications that actually worked (Google Maps being the prime example, for me anyway, that made me go "wow! cool!"). AJAX basically enabled more interactive applications where you could click on something and something would happen without a whole new page being loaded. So stuff like rating posts and moving maps became much easier and more desktop-like.
Basically, Web 2.0 is an expression of the first big wave (1990's) followed by the crash, followed by the second wave. I don't think it's really about any particular technology or social networking (we had that before, just in slightly more basic form); it's more about the second wind, the second chance, the second go around the hype machine. So now we again start to have companies that have lots of users, but no revenue to speak of, being bought for billions of dollars. And so it goes.
Web 3.0 will not come until there has been another crash, and another nuclear winter, and another resurgance on the back of some new, apparently minor tweak that makes people go "wow! cool!" all over again.
zombo.com told me so
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Andrew's a reliably grumpy columnist for El Reg, a Brit based in San Francisco. Occasionally it's hard to tell whether phrases like "badger's paws" are dialectical things I'm not familiar with or whether they're just made up at random for the occasion, and I still don't know, but he does make the obligatory cultural reference to "Badger Badger Badger"...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Why?
Because there is a complete mismatch between present web technology and social dynamics. We're like trying to reach the moon by building a rocket with LEGO blocks. No wonder there is so much vaporware behind the concept of web 2.0.
Current web technology, in the way it works and in the way it is presented to the user, is still tied to the network topology. The user is very much aware of crossing boundaries between machines connected to the internet. However the network architecture and topology is completely out of touch with the reality of social networks and communities. The velocity at which the social network evolves (links between people, groups of people, and their resources) is an order of magnitude higher than the speed at which the computer network evolves, so it's quite limiting for the former to piggy back its evolution to the latter. When it comes to bringing people together into a common virtual space the most successful initiatives are found when the user model does not depend on the computer network topology: network games, Second Life, Skype, etc. All these provide "spaces" that, once entered, no longer rely on the network topology to provide meaning.
So in order to realize the SoC vision I believe we first need an architecture where the network topology is completely transparent, and I would even say, irrelevant. The user should no longer feel like navigating a set of interconnected machines and have to bother with stuff like server names, ports, who owns the server, etc. Instead, what the user should be aware of when navigating the social web are communities, their members, their boundaries, their resources, their connections, and so on. In other words we're talking about a whole layer on top of the internet with a distributed and common object model. What a user understands as 'community' or 'network' should have a clear representative on the net regardless of the computer resources involved. Right now the concept of community does not even have a real representation on the web. All we have are sets of users of certain web sites or web resources. But where do we capture the fact that an individual is part of multiple communities? How do we specify a community by aggregation of other communities (e.g. neighborhoods aggregate into a whole city)? How do we manage communities with "moving" boundaries, e.g. those that work or have worked at a certain company? Unless we develop a new social layer based on a common object model on top of the web, the social computing ideals will be dead in the water because there is a complete disconnection between the computer network model and the social network reality.
In order for SoC to become reality we need major building blocks such as identity (for both individuals and groups), reputation services, directories, ontologies, etc. For all this to work together I don't think it's enough to be plucking low hanging fruits by developing protocols This and That. For SoC to really exists I believe we should think in terms of a new OS for the web. I expect more to come out from croquet (http://www.croquetproject.org/) than from RDF and usual web 3.0 contenders.
Ascribe to?
Now that sounds like a vocabulary error I can subscribe to...