Web 2.0 in under 5 minutes…
Feb 12th, 2007 by Simon
Slightly over-posting today, maybe, but I liked this video I just found…
Produced by Professor Michael Wesch (Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University.) on their shared blog/site.
If you go so far as to click on to see the blog, you’ll see that people are already responding – in 2.0 style of course…
Is your over-posting anything to do with the loss of the 3 account?!
Harsh, but not without some substance!
That was excellent – the history of the web in 5 minutes. Loved it.
It’s important to remember that Web 2.0 is a movement, not a technology – in fact it’s about finding new ways to use existing technology more flexibly.
HTML was created during the ’80s and even that was based on an older technology, SGML, which was itself based on a mark-up language created in the ’60s, GML. XML is also a descendant of GML and all we’re doing now is realiing the potential of these languages and their associated technologies. We’re reinventing the wheel.
Web 3.0 will take these re-inventions even further with an attempt to make the web self-indexing and self-linking through technologies similar to those in use on Wikipedia – this will be the Semantic Web. An author will never need to worry about finding content to link to any more, they’ll simply need to mark the content as linkable and hiden engines (possibly Yahoo!, Google, et al) will go and find the most relevant content to link to automatically.
The Semantic Web will be a real step forward in Internet use and will redefine how online authors and content providers contact an and interact with an audience, but even this is only one more step in how we provide and access data, not in how we act as a community (I’ve not found a way of demonstrating in Parliament Square from behind my keyboard yet!).
There are also issues over who decides how that content is defined as relelvant and selected for linking – this represents a whole new set of possibilities for marketeers and even malicious interception of this linking tecnology. Many people already invest their trust in the content of Wikipedia and yet there are those who set out to mislead the audience by perverting the content it holds.
Mind you, who says blog authors are ethical?
Web 2.0 may have a couple more years left in it, but with the growth of virtual environments and virtual economies such as Second Life there’s a possibility for the 2 dimensional data repositories that all websites are to take on new characteristics in virtual environments. Imagine accessing news archives: written articles could be represented as yellowing newspapers – the older a story is the more decayed the paper – or a video archive that adds more scratches and dust to the playback as the content ages. Who’ll need the real world?
Who knows, maybe the author William Gibson is a prophet and the world he describes in books like Mona Lisa Overdrive and Count Zero really are the future of the Internet …
Excuse, and what you think concerning forthcoming elections?
cool blog!
nice photos of this blog
[...] This film on the ‘Encyclopedia of Life‘ does it quite nicely – in a similar way to that Web 2.0 film that was going around a while back – posted here. [...]