The Golden Time of World Wide Web is coming

I have justed read a great post by Drake Bennett at Boston.com, which is titled "Depression 2009: What would it look like?" Despite of this inevitable modern depression, this post actually delivers an implicit message that the author himself might have overlooked. The golden time of World Wide Web is coming!

The Boston.com post is unquestionably excellent and everybody should read it carefully, more than once at least. There is, however, a regretful flaw in the article. Despite of the many differences between this "21st-century depression" and the old Great Depression at 1930s compared by the author, he forgot to mention the most critical and fundamental invention that distinguishes the two depressions---World Wide Web. Astonishingly, even Tim O'Reilly missed this distinction too in his post of recommendation.

In the post, Bennett repeated emphasizing that people who lose their jobs are going to stay at home watching TV for "free time is one thing a 21st-century depression would create in abundance." But wait a minute! Why not the people staying with computers and killing time on the Web in contrast to watching dumb TV shows? This distinction is incredibly crucial. By watching TV these jobless people could hardly produce any substantial value to the society. On the contrary, Web 2.0 has allowed people making substantial contribution to the world even if they are "jobless."

Before this 21st-century depression, most of the regular Web-2.0 content creators are either the less-experienced young generation (who have much free time to kill) or the few computer geeks (who are passionate on the Web). Due to this 21st-century depression, however, the Web is going to welcome a great force of new Web content generators who are more experienced in real life and with much greater diversity on the professional background. From the positive aspect, these people are freed from their previous labor work so that now they can be more actively participating into the creation of a new world. A truly blooming age of the Web is coming.

In this time of depression, the last thing we need is another depressive news. By contrast, we need to seek hope out of hopelessness and we must look for chances from crisis.

So, Web companies and Web investors, now it is your chance. You are going to have more users who are more experienced in real life. The input by these new users would significantly improve the quality and diversity of the Web content. Are you going to grasp this opportunity? Have you noticed their compelling capability of producing (comparing to the earlier regular Web content generators)? Are you able to provide these people new ways of value production from home?

The golden time of World Wide Web is just ahead. Thanks to the Web, we should all be wishful but not be depressive.

Collectivism on the Web

Collectivism emphasizes on human interdependence and the importance of collective. As probably the greatest collective project of mankind in history, World Wide Web engages enormous practices of collectivism. In this article, we take a brief look at several typical examples of these engagements.

Collective Intelligence

Collective intelligence is the most well-known engagement of collectivism on World Wide Web. In particular, Web 2.0 advocates have declared "harnessing collective intelligence" to be the touchstone of the Web 2.0 revolution. By definition, collective intelligence is a form of intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals. If someone feels a little bit puzzled of this definition, here is an alternative explanation that is imprecise but much easier to be understood. Informally, collective intelligence on the Web is the collections of user generated "intelligence".

A keen reader may immediately find an interesting comparison: are there any differences between user generated "intelligence" and user generated "content" (or user generated "data")? On Web 2.0, we have almost mentioned users generation content (UGC) as many times as collective intelligence. In many people's mind, UGC almost equals to the collective intelligence. But the actual meanings between "intelligence" and "content" or "data" are very much different. The intent of "intelligence" is much richer than "content/data". Tim O'Reilly also had briefly mentioned this distinction in one of his earlier post about harnessing collective intelligence.

Content/data is a type of intelligence but at the low end. Jean Piaget, a Swiss philosopher and pioneer of the constructivist epistemology, had a compact description about intelligence: "Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do." Content/data provides shallow and unrefined information for people to use. Content/data is often too crude to be efficiently used. Keeping the user generation intelligence at the level of content/data is not enough. This is a problem.

I foresee that the degree of complexity (as well as the degree of efficient usage) of the collective intelligence on the Web is going to evolve with the Web. For example, by tagging content with formal labels that are defined by ontologies, the user generated content/data would evolve to be the user generated knowledge. This is exactly what the vision of Semantic Web wants to bring to us. Moreover, by augmenting formally labeled content with external logic routines, the user generated knowledge would evolve to be the user generated wisdom. By encoding the mechanism of proactiveness into machine computation, the user generated wisdom might evolve to be the user generated creativity. By engaging user generated content/data, knowledge, wisdom, creativity together, we might eventually get the user generated personality, through which the human evolution reaches a new stage of being artificially immortal. Is this path a long way? Yes, there is a long way to go. Is this path an impossible dream? No, it is not. The practice of collective intelligence is converting our society into a virtual world simultaneously from the level of individuals and the level of collective groups.

Collective Behavior

Collective intelligence is not the only practice of collectivism on the Web. Another key practice of collectivism on the Web is the implementation of collective behavior.

Collective behavior is very much difference from collective intelligence. All types of collective intelligences are static and thus they can be easily presented in an explicit way. In comparison, collective behaviors are dynamic and it is difficult to present them in an explicit way. As the result, collective behaviors are much harder to be used than collective intelligences on the Web though in fact at the same time the amount of collective behaviors is much greater than the amount of collective intelligences. The reason of this amount difference is indeed trivial. Every piece of collective intelligence on the Web must be related to at least one human behavior (i.e. the one action that post this piece of information online). The majority of the time, any piece of collective intelligence must be associated with many human behaviors such as reading and writing. With such a large pool of collective behaviors, it is surprising to see that so few actions have been made so far to manage and utilize this large pool.

Fortunately, Web researchers have started to pay their attention to the collective behaviors. The recent proposal of the implicit web is a typical example. The implicit web is a network that defragments every piece of implicitness on the explicit web. The majority of the implicitness on the Web actually belongs to the collective behaviors.

Collective Responsibility

The collective intelligence is a popular concept. The discussion of collective behavior is also not rare. But the rest of practices of collectivism on the Web I am going to discuss are indeed uncommonly. Many readers may not even hear of them before. But all these practices are unexceptionally important and valuable for the evolution of World Wide Web. The first one I introduce is the collective responsibility.

Collective responsibility is a concept, or doctrine, according to which individuals are to be held responsible for other people's actions by tolerating, ignoring, or harboring them, without actively collaborating in these actions. This concept is particularly important to the study of Internet security.

On the age of Web 2.0 and afterwards, security is no longer a solo issue with the deeper and wider implementation of collectivism. As a result, being innocent may no longer be simply taken as an individual issue. We must start to consider collective responsibility, i.e., some people may have to be punished not due to their own guilty but because they have not actively prohibited the guilty happened regularly in their participated societies. This issue is going to be very much debatable and exciting.

Collective Identity

A collective identity refers to individuals' sense of belonging to a group.

Identity is a tough issue on the Web. Normally, a web user may have varied identities on different sites. These varied identities, however, cause serious problems when people try to organize their information of interest across the boundaries of web sites. To address this problem, web researchers have issued the project OpenID that allows users to use a single ID over the entire Web.

But OpenID, even if it would be a standard over the Web, is not the end of the Web identity issue. Similar to that individual persons have their particular roles in real life, individual identities on the Web must gain their particular social roles in virtual life. The identification of these roles is particularly important when we would start to manipulate human generated information on the Web, i.e. collective intelligence, collective behaviors, etc. Only until humans or machines may identify the social roles of the information producers or owners, these humans or machines may be able to properly manipulate the information. The research of collective identity will focus on the identification of social roles of individual identities.

The collective identities are identities of identities. The study of this issue is another exciting and unexplored field that may cause much attention in the future.

Collective Consciousness

Collective consciousness refers to the shared beliefs and moral attitudes which operate as a unifying force within society. In the other words, the collective consciousness is about machine morality because human consciousness on the Web is handled by machines. The machine morality is not a sci-fi term; this issue is indeed real. Machine morality is the reflection of human morality onto the virtual world.

The implementation of collective consciousness is very much related to all the previously mentioned collective factors. Human consciousnesses are materialized on the Web as static intelligence and dynamic behaviors. Moreover, the collective identities assign social roles for the materialized consciousnesses. The integrity of these materialized consciousnesses is closely related to the level of collective responsibility that is maintained at the meantime. The combination of all these issues compose the intent of the machine morality.

Collective Effervescence

Collective effervescence is a perceived energy formed by a gathering of people as might be experienced at a sporting event, a carnival, a rave, or a riot. This energy can cause people to act differently than in their everyday life.

Collective effervescence is the emotion web site owners want to bring. Collective effervescence represents one word---hype! Collective effervescence is the ultimate goal of implementing collectivism on the Web. At the same time, how much an implementation of collectivism successfully brings collective effervescence into a web site is the fundamental standard that we can measure the quality of the implementations of collectivism. This concept encloses the entire set of collective factors and upgrades the evaluation of collectivism into the computational realm.

Summary

We have discussed several examples of how we may engage practices of collectivism onto the Web. Certainly there could be many other possible practices that are beyond this article. But one thing is certain. Collectivism is a crucial phenomenon on the evolving Web. The study of collectivism on the Web is going to be a critical issue of the Web Science.

What is Web 2.0? | The Path towards Next Generation, Series No.1

(Revised October 19, 2007)

This new series is the follow-up of A View of Web Evolution. In the previous series, we studied a theory of web evolution. In this new series, we apply the web-evolution theory to predict the next generation web. Since this new generation web follows Web 2.0, I adopt the name "Web 3.0" for it. So this series may also be called The Path towards Web 3.0.

To know a path, the first thing we need to discover is its starting point. The starting point toward the next generation web is the current web, which is well known as Web 2.0. So in this first installment we begin with the question: what is Web 2.0?

Various Expressions of Web 2.0

There have been dozens of expressions about what Web 2.0 is. I picked five representative ones that complement to each other. By analyzing these five expressions, I am going to conclude a new definition of Web 2.0 from which our path towards the next generation starts.

Expression from Tim O'Reilly

Tim O'Reilly, one of the co-inventors of the term "Web 2.0," had a substantial explanation of Web 2.0. I summarized the 5-page-long explanation into one compact definition.

Web 2.0 is a platform web that enriches user experiences by harnessing collective intelligence, encouraging explicitly declaration of ownership over data, and prompting the conversion from software products to services.

This definition seems complicated. It is, however, not sophisticated. Let's unfold its meaning one clause by another.

1. A platform web is a web of platform. Components in a platform web are portable. Users can freely plug and unplug these portable web components into arbitrary web spaces.
2. Since users can freely plug and unplug their favorite web components into their own web spaces, a platform web enriches user experiences on the Web.

Enriching user experiences is actually a general long-term goal of web evolution. But the typical methods used to enrich user experiences are, however, varied to different evolutionary stages. At the current stage, three typical methods are applied to enable this web of platform. In particular, they are collective intelligence, explicit ownership over web resources, and SaaS (Software as a Service). These methods are the identifiers of Web 2.0.

3. Originally, World Wide Web allows everybody contributes and everybody enjoys contributions from everybody else. A web of platform upgrades this philosophy by making every contribution be not only enjoyable but also freely portable to everybody else. Through this augmentation, the web intelligence becomes collective.
4. When web components are freely portable, the clarification of their ownership becomes a crucial issue. A web of platform requires an explicit mechanism of declaring ownerships over web resources so that they would not be mixed up during the deployment.
5. In particular, traditional software products are not suitable for a web of platform because they are generally not portable. The conversion from software products to services prompts the growth of a platform web.

Expression from Joining Dots

Joining Dots, a research consultancy company at UK, published its vision of Web 2.0. People at Joining Dots had not tried to define Web 2.0 in general but expressed Web 2.0 in their own way.

Web 2.0 is the joining dot of digital natives, internet economics, and the Read/Write Web.

This compact expression contains three clauses.

Web 2.0 connects people; and the connected people are digitalized and become native to the Web. This observation is illuminating. Real humans become part of the Web 2.0. In comparison, real humans were foreigners (not native) to the Web before Web 2.0. Humans visit Web 1.0; but humans live on Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 represents special economical opportunities. The theory of Long Tail is a commercial mutant of collective intelligence. With the participation of "native web people", the execution of Long Tail becomes not only practical but also profitable.

Web 2.0 is a Read/Write Web. Blogs and wikis (primarily read and write) prompt the transformation of web users from foreigners to natives on the Web. This presentation of Read/Write Web is the precise description of Web-2.0 front end. Comparatively, the presentation of platform web in Tim O'Reilly's expression is the description of Web-2.0 back end.

Expression from Andy Budd
Andy Budd, an internationally renowned user experience designer and web standards expert, has his understanding of Web 2.0.

"Web 2.0 isn't a thing... It's a state of mind."

Sound even more weird this time. What Andy emphasizes is that Web 2.0 is a change of thought. The essence of WWW never changes; what does change regularly how we indeed understand about the Web. Before Web 2.0, we commonly think of the Web as a document delivery system. On Web 2.0, we start to watch the Web as an application platform. This updated view gives the Web a new life.

Although it is short, Andy's expression helps us to understand better about web evolution. Web evolution does not change the essence of WWW, i.e. an interlinked system that prompts human communication. But with continuously upgraded views, WWW may mean differently to us within different time periods. Looking for a revolutionary but pragmatic view is the key to investigate the unknown future of World Wide Web. This discovery is a principle when we foresee Web 3.0.

Expression from Nicholas Carr

Nicholas Carr, an acclaimed business writer and speaker whose work centers on strategy, innovation, and technology, had his fabulous vision that "Web 2.0 is amoral."

"From the start, the World Wide Web has been a vessel of quasi-religious longing." Nicholas said. He also quoted from Kevin Kelly's marvelous article We Are the Web that "because of the ease of creation and dissemination, online culture is the culture." At the end, Nicholas conclude that Web 2.0 is "what it is, not what we wish it would be."

These expressions are enlightening. As "a vessel of quasi-religious longing," the Web is a religionary existence. The growth of WWW is thus beyond the judgment of right or wrong, mortal or immortal, profitable or nonprofitable, and favorite or unfavorite to individuals. Based on Nicholas's expressions, the emergence and growth of Web 2.0 is due to objective principles that reflect amoral willingness of the general public. The emergence of this Web 2.0 is not due to that we wish there was a Web 2.0. Web 2.0 emerged only because it was the time for it to emerge. Web evolution is independent to humans' will.

Expression from Dion Hinchcliffe

Dion Hinchcliffe, a well-known evangelist of Web 2.0, SOA, and Enterprise 2.0, had another outstanding explanation on how we got Web 2.0. His expression supplements to Nicholas's expressions.

"Web 2.0 is what happened while we were waiting for the Semantic Web."

In real, no one had expected Web 2.0 before this Web 2.0 suddenly boomed out. What did people originally expect? The answer was Semantic Web. The plot of Semantic Web was drawn several years before the name "Web 2.0" was coined. Many web evangelists had looked for a web that machines could understand. Barely few people had thought of a web in which humans were digitalized. Most of the web evangelists back to the pre-2.0 age and even a few top-tier web professionals at present think of connecting humans on the Web to be a fake question. Hadn't we already connected humans in the original World Wide Web? they asked. They have mistaken "the connect to the Web" and "the connection on the Web."

Dion's observation is revealing. We didn't expect the emergence of Web 2.0 at all from the beginning. The emergence of blogging was a minor improvement on online communication; the spread of web services was a standard advance on leveraging web applications; the rise of tagging was a little bit more than a semantic sugar; and the invention of AJAX was nothing but another one out of one hundred new technologies that had invented. Few people had seen how all these little things might constitute a grand new version of World Wide Web.

When few people were aware, the transition to Web 2.0 had already started. Web 2.0 simply came to the world as an uninvited guest. But this unexpected guest received one of the most magnificent welcome parties ever. This is the astonishing story of Web 2.0.

My Expression of Web 2.0

Web 2.0 tells that the World Wide Web has evolved to its second major stage in its history of evolution. Web 2.0 is a new amoral view of World Wide Web that digitalizes humans participation through collective intelligence, explicit ownership over web resources, and portable web services. At the front-end, Web 2.0 is a Read/Write Web. At the back-end, Web 2.0 is a web of platform.

This expression summarizes the five Web-2.0 expressions we just reviewed besides my addition of explanations. In the following I explain its clauses one-by-one.

Web 2.0 is a major stage in web evolution. This claim is directly based on the view of web evolution. I do not view "2.0" as a pure marketing term. By contrast, it is a precise declaration that the World Wide Web is coming to its second major stage in history.

Web 2.0 is a new view of World World Web instead of a new World Wide Web. We had not built a new Web. We are still on the only Web. But we do have a new vision to the Web. This clause is an alternative to Andy Budd's expression.

Web 2.0 is an amoral new view. Web 2.0 is not a human-designed plan. This view of Web 2.0 exists independent to individual prejudice. Web 2.0 would be in this current form disregarding the human efforts on either prompting or blocking it. Humans may either accelerate or decelerate its progress. But there is no way to stop or deviate this progress. This clause is a reassessment of expressions from Nicholas Carr and Dion Hinchcliffe.

Humans participate onto Web 2.0 as digitalized natives. Humans at Web 2.0 are connected within the Web instead of to the Web. The transformation of humans from foreigners to natives to the Web is a primal symptom. This clause is based on the expression from Joining Dots.

The immigration process (humans from foreigners to natives to the Web) is only at its beginning on Web 2.0. At Web 2.0, digitalization of humans is still far away from its potential ultimate form. The transformation is at its unnoticed start. Few people have really recognized its revolutionary value. The further web evolution will gradually show how this transformation impacts the world. This clause is a composition of the view of web evolution and the expression from Joining Dots.

This engagement of human participation on Web 2.0 is achieved by prompting collective intelligence, explicit ownership over web resources, and portable web services. Tim O'Reilly's expression explains which characters of humans are digitalized and how they are digitalized on Web 2.0. At the individual level, Web 2.0 digitalizes ownership (i.e. self, the fundamental of individual) and service (i.e. action, the fundamental of being alive). Mashup is an improvement on actions, which we will specifically discuss in later installments. At the community level, Web 2.0 digitalizes aggregation of individual contributions, which is collective intelligence. These three typical achievements constitutes the foundation of a digital society. A social network aggregated with digitalized living selves is the essence of Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 have two basic presentations respectively for professional web developers and ordinary web users. To developers, the back-end of Web 2.0 is a web of platform. This presentation tells how developers can contribute to Web 2.0 and manipulate Web-2.0 resources. Typical technology-side advances such as mashup and SaaS are upon this presentation.

To ordinary users, the front-end of Web 2.0 is a Read/Write Web. This presentation tells how ordinary users play with Web 2.0 and business people venture into Web 2.0. Typical non-technology-side advances such as social network and Long Tail are upon this presentation.

Summary

Web 2.0 is more than a commercial slogan "to signify that the web was roaring back after the dot com bust!" Although the initiative of this term might be with this sole purpose, it actually ended on a grand picture far beyond a commercial trick. From the various expressions of Web 2.0, we have seen that Web 2.0 is a major stage upgrade in the history of web evolution. After a long time accumulation, the dot-com bubble ultimately triggered the Web 2.0 off; the web evangelists Tim O'Reilly and others happened to be the first ones who caught and named this big moment.

In this first installment, I present a new expression of Web 2.0 by integrating several previous expressions together with my own viewpoints of web evolution. With this new expression, Web 2.0 is a revolutionary new vision of World Wide Web. From this Web 2.0 age, World Wide Web becomes not only a great human conducted project, but also a digital society of real people. Web 2.0 is the starting point of the path towards the fascinating next generation web.

We and Machine

As it was reported, Tim O'Reilly opened the keynote phase of the Web 2.0 Expo describing the Web 2.0 philosophy: "It's about building the global computing network and harnessing all the collective intelligence of all the people who are connected…. We are talking about persistent computing in which we are becoming part of a great machine."

I see more and more people starting to agree a point that I also raised in my article of web evolution, i.e., we are cloning certain degree of our consciousness into machines.

But we are not becoming part of a machine. By contrast, we are machinizing our mind and let the machinized mind compose a society which is the World Wide Web. The Web is a society while computing on the web is the aggregation of individual capabilities. Isn't it a better metaphor than watching the entire web to be a single machine?