Five Web Trends Into 3.0 (1)

It is said that Web 3.0 is coming. I agree to the point. However, what is Web 3.0 indeed? Few people have the answer. But there are five Web trends that may help us peek into the core of this next generation Web. In a five-post series I am glad to share my thinking of the five trends in this blog.

1) Personal space, converging

From homepage to site profile, the evolution from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 is also a process of the divergence of the personal home spaces. In Web 1.0, a Web user generally uses a homepage to claim his Web existence. In Web 2.0, however, a Web user often have varied profiles in multiple Web sites, while each of the profiles may (nearly identically) claim his Web existence. Intuitively the progress likes that a single, uniform homepage has been transformed respectively to multiple, varied personal accounts, each of which is settled with respect to a particular Web site. The personal home space diverges.

This personal space divergence was necessary for fostering Web 2.0 because it allowed the Web 2.0 entrepreneurs the flexibility of creating the variety of social networking products. Hence it facilitated the growth of Web 2.0.

On the other hand, the divergence also leads to a few problems. With the mature of Web 2.0, Web users are required to remember more pairs of the login/password for their registered sites. In addition, if there are Web 2.0 sites functioning similarly and the users want to use both (a common case in Web 2.0, for example, to use both of Del.icio.us and Twine for bookmarking), it is uneasy for the users to synchronize the same information in the varied sites simultaneously. The barrier becomes especially severe when the users try to update some basic information in the profiles (such as change an address), despite the message is common to all the sites. In short, Web 2.0 has inevitably led to producing a huge amount of duplicated information fragments in the Web and it is very hard to synchronize these fragments.

To solve this problem is thus a major request for Web 3.0. OpenID is such an attempt by unifying the logins in the Web. We can predicate that the adoption of OpenID must prevail continuously in the age of Web 3.0.

But OpenID is not the whole solution. The ideal solution to the problem is to have the diverged home spaces be converged back to a new form of the unified personal spaces as if the Web 1.0 homepages. Yet we still have fairly a distance to implement such a solution, it is the first trend into Web 3.0. Only through this transformation, we may eventually declare Web 3.0, a new stage of the Web that is essentially distinct to Web 2.0.

Continuing the series The Path Towards Next Generation, No. 2
Next installment: Five Web Trends Into 3.0 (2)

It is the free choice that produces the value of mind

A computer can execute a program and output a result. What does the asset of mind generated by a computer different from the mind asset produced by a human being? The difference is the free choice. A human can make free choices upon a request that are beyond any sophisticated program can make. It is thus this freedom bringing the value. This distinction could be essential when we think of producing the mind asset for the coming next-generation World Wide Web.

Inherent Complexity

A breathtaking picture, compound intent, inexhaustible extension. Does it tell the beauty of the nature or the beauty of the mind? Or it actually reveals the both. If a tiny simple water drop may disclose facts in such a greater scale, how great may an already big complex being such as a person disclose? It is the compound me that matters.

The picture is from Flickr. At here it is the original link to the photo.

June 4th

June 4th, 1989, I was in China. It is a date that had changed the history of modern China, in many aspects. In particular, it drew a line between an idealist China and a materialist China.

The picture on the right is a perfect illusion of the distinction. In the middle there stand two Premiers in Chinese history. The one in the front is Zhao Ziyang (Chinese: 赵紫阳), a Pre-June-4th Premier. Behind Zhao it is Wen Jiabao (Chinese: 温家宝), a Post-June-4th Premier (actually Wen is the current Premier of China). The picture was shot at the night of May 19th, 1989, when Zhao was trying to comfort the students in Tiananmen Square. At the meantime, neither of them was the Premier (Li Peng was the Chinese Premier in 1989). But Wen was the director of Zhao's office.

Zhao and Wen had very different personalities. Zhao was more or less an idealist that was similar to Mikhail Gorbachev of Soviet Union. In the mind of Zhao, China might not rise again until Chinese people could gain the political freedom. The thought liberation must be prior to the flourish of economy. In contrast to Zhao, Wen is more a materialist. Wen believes the economic growth be the first and the political freedom be the second. In his mind, it is fine to ask people to temporarily scarify their various freedom to exchange a better life in material satisfaction. The right of living is above all the other human rights, including the freedom to think; a typical philosophy of the extreme materialists.

It is not my duty to judge the correctness between the two thoughts. (The reader might judge it yourself.) Inevitably, however, this philosophical distinction significantly reformed China.

The majority of the youth generation in China before the June 4th were eager in fighting for gaining more freedom in all aspects of the nation. They were interested in national politics and dreamed of China to be an ideal society that might be governed by leveraging the collective voice of its people.

The majority of the youth generation after the June 4th, however, abandoned the former seemly intangible dream. They started to pay the most of their attention to earning money and enjoying the material life. They care less of the national politics but care more on individual interest. China does have achieved breathtaking progress in economy since then, while it has also paid heavily on the loss of morality national wide. On one hand, this period of Chinese history is a legend of economic growth. On the other hand, in the same period the nation had sold its soul. The absolute truth in China disappears. All truth becomes conditionally right.

Is this China what we expect? Is this China the best interest of all the Chinese people? The only thing that I can tell definitely is that China really could have been a totally different nation if there were no June 4th, 1989.

A great discussion about Imindi

Thanks to François Dongier, who gave a fairly insightful discussion of the pros and cons of Imindi in the current stage. I think that it is definitely worth of being shared to more readers. Here is the link.

In particular, I quote the conclusion section of the article in the following.

"Lost in the ocean of distracting facts and contingent news, thoughts are rare and indeed very precious. There is an important sense in which they are what really matters to us, as an essential aspect of our human nature. They are also important in a more "practical" sense, playing a central role in the economy, as the major source of all the inventions that lead to new products. There are now new web applications like Imindi, Primal Fusion and, maybe to a lesser extent, Twine, that really focus on thoughts and try to isolate them from the stream to make them more visible and reinforce their efficiency. My view is that such applications will have a great impact on how the web evolves.

I personally find extremely attractive the fact that this project is very ambitious. It's got the nice A.I. feel that you also find in projects like Wolfram|Alpha and Twine. It's not just an ordinary web app: it wants to be disruptive and revolutionize the way we communicate and think together. Maybe it will fail, if the problem of efficient thought-modeling and thought-merging turns out to be too complex for the current technology. But it certainly looks worth giving it a try."

UPDATE: here is rancois`s thoughts on Imindi. A graph itself is better than 1000 words.

The newspaper crisis

Unquestionably, we are not just in a financial crisis, but in a bunch of crisis. Among them, the newspaper crisis is representative for its close relationship to the rise of the Web. In fact, the newspaper crisis is inevitable disregarding the present financial crisis. The financial crisis accelerates and amplifies the newspaper crisis. It is, however, not the reason of the newspaper crisis.

The rise of the Web media causes the newspaper crisis. The young generation news readers are more and more customized to reading news online than on paper-printed media. The online news is not only "free" but also faster in update and more comprehensive in analysis. The financial crisis became the last hay that crushed the old newspaper camel.

I am interested in the lessons we may have learned from this newspaper crisis. A successful business sector must have produced valuable asset for the society. The "valuable" means that the society members may and are willing to consume the produced asset. For many years, the newspaper business executes the goal very well.

In traditional, the newspapers produce three essential types of asset: breaking news, news analysis, and advertisement. In the pre-Web era, it was fairly costly to access the news sources. It was also fairly costly to write an insightful analysis of a news because few eligible news analysts might have enough supporting materials for them to produce the high-quality articles. And there were not many other ways besides newspapers for people to advertise their products or services. All of the facts added compelling values to the information asset produced by the newspapers.

The rise of the Web media, however, significantly decreases the value of the information asset we have just mentioned for the traditional newspapers. The cost to access the news sources becomes much cheaper; hence the newspapers can no longer charge their readers much by claiming unique news resources. All kinds of supporting materials for information analysis become freely accessible; hence the newspaper can no longer charge their readers much by claiming unique analysis. At last, the Web becomes a more popular and cheaper place for people to put advertisement; hence the newspapers can no longer charge their readers as well as the advertiser by claiming unique market. Therefore, the elapse of the glory becomes inevitable to the newspapers since the entire value of their produced asset has been decreases definitely. This newspaper crisis is not about the greediness of human nature, it is not about the poor execution of the business, and it is not about a normal economic cycle. The newspaper crisis is about the unchangeable fact of the value decrease of the asset that the newspapers can produce.

So here are the lessons learned. The cost of the raw information generation is minimized. The cost of static analysis over the raw information has been cheap. The cost of posting advertisement has been cheap. If the Web has decreased the value of nearly all the information asset in the traditional mean, what should we do to produce new type of information asset that can be charged decently in this new Web age? This is thus the real question the newspaper business should consider instead of believing the problem be solved by simply producing online newspapers.

Strategic Alliance, FUJIFILM and GE Healthcare in Life Sciences

FUJIFILM Corporation announces that it has entered into a Strategic Alliance Agreement with GE Healthcare. The alliance allows Fujifilm to develop, manufacture and supply advanced biomolecular imaging systems for GE Healthcare. The products, however, will be sold worldwide under the GE brand in the life science research and drug discovery markets.

This alliance leverages Fujifilm's strength as a leading device manufacturer and GE's strength as a leading reagent and service provider in the life sciences area. In 1987, Fujifilm was the first company to introduce the revolutionary digital autoradiography device which utilized the Imaging Plate, a radiation detector with sensitivity 100 times greater than X-ray film. In 1923, GE Healthcare introduced the first radio isotope reagents, which initiated the field of biomolecular labeling and detection. FUJIFILM is currently offering scientific imaging systems for chemiluminescent, fluorescent and radioisotopic detection in the life science market. It does not offer reagents/consumables nor applications. The alliance may strengthen Fujifilm's already leading position on medical imaging technologies and device manufacturing.