Data Portability: The Next Great Frontier for the Web

In this newest post at Internet Evolution, I extended my discussion on the issue of portability that was focused on the new initiative of data portability. I briefly discussed the issue, the potential solutions to the issue, and the future impacts of this issue.

Resource Portability | The Path towards Next Generation, Series No.2

During Web evolution, I have argued that the primary contradiction that drives Web evolution is the contradiction between unbounded quantitative accumulation of Web resources and the limited resource-operating mechanism at the meantime. We need to recognize this primary contradiction at the stage of Web 2.0 to predict the post-2.0 Web.

Explicit Ownership Declaration over Resources on Web 2.0

Unlike on Web 1.0, Web-2.0 resources are always specified with explicit declarations of their ownership. On Web 2.0, we know exactly the person who specified the tag, who adopted the widget, or who made the comment. This ownership declaration over any piece of Web-2.0 resources is explicit and unambiguous. In comparison, the same type of ownership declarations over Web-1.0 resources is generally implicit and often specified in anonymous ways, and thus many times it is ambiguous to precisely determine the ownerships (since the owners themselves may leave no identities).

There is a reason why on Web 2.0 the explicit declaration of user ownership becomes essential. In my previous post on a simple picture of web evolution, I explained that Web 1.0 did connect all Web users to a common destination, which is the Web itself. On Web 1.0, however, there is a clear distinction between Web readers and Web writers. On any Web-1.0 page, the role of writers and readers are generally disjoint. This distinction gradually disappears when the Web evolved to be Web 2.0. On Web 2.0, an arbitrary Web user may simultaneously be a reader and a writer to any 2.0 site. Such a role transformation then brings a new challenge---we must precisely decide who owns which resources on Web 2.0. On Web 1.0, by default only the writers own resources because readers cannot write in general. But when readers can also write on Web 2.0, the previous default scheme works no longer. By contrast, an explicit ownership declaration mechanism must be implemented to fulfill the new situation.

Resource Portability

When the amount of Web resources with explicit ownership declarations increases indefinitely on Web 2.0, which kinds of troubles are we going to handle in the future? This is the central issue that will lead the Web to the next generation.

In the second part of my Web evolution article that was written in last April, I had argued that when regular Web users had authored more and more resources over varied sites on the Web, they would ask for a centralized management mechanism over their "owned" resources. Part of this issue has been recognized by the new workgroup of DataPortability.

The initiative of DataPortability Workgroup is to allow regular Web users freely carrying their own data over the Web. For example, at present Web users may have to repeatedly copy and paste identical personal information at varied Web sites to claim their identities. This requirement is surely annoying. To make the situation be even worse, user may feel especially dreadful when they have to update some of their general information at all of their registered sites. The DataPortability initiative is to resolve this annoying requirement by making data themselves be more and more portable automatically to varied sites.

Nevertheless is the effort of data portability timely and critical, it is not the complete problem we face when the Web evolves to the next generation. As we have discussed earlier, the central issue is how to allow users managing their "owned" resources properly. Improving the portability of Web data is a very important step towards this general request; but it is not the general request yet. To reach the eventual goal, we need to implement a new mechanism that well manages ownership, beyond portability, of data. Moreover, this ownership management issue is not only about data, but also about other resources such as services. Thus I am more favorite to the term "resource portability" than the "data portability."

Automatic Character Switch (ACtS)

There are two basic paths of resolving this issue of resource portability. One path is to make the resources be presented in more portable formats; and the other path is to produce a mechanism that aligns user-owned resources to particular community standards. While most of the current data portability efforts focus on the first path, I am going to discuss my thoughts on the second path.

The key of resource portability is the switch of ownership over resources instead of the deployment of resources. For instance, when a user make a comment on a blog, who should own this comment, the commenter or the blog owner? By default, the current mechanism is that the one who owns the physical storage space of the comment owns the comment. Most of the time, the comment belongs to the blog owner. Many other times, however, the comment may actually be owned by a third party who provides the space for the blog owner. In very few extreme cases, the commenter actually owns the comment. This reality theoretically contradicts to the comment logic that the one who makes the comment (i.e. the commenter) should be the unquestionable owner. Will the improvement of portability of comments solve this problem? Not precisely since the problem is not really about whether the comment is portable but it is about who should own this piece of user-generated resources.

The fundamental assumption underneath the current environment indeed has no problem. That is, the one who owns the physical storage of a resource should be granted the ownership of the resource. Following this assumption, we need to let any Web user have a piece of Web spaces that can store their "owned" resources. In our previous example, whenever a Web user leaves a comment in a remote site, the commenter should actually store this comment in his own space instead of the remote site. By contrast, the remote blog site should be added an RSS-type feed that brings the comments to the proper location. This mechanism allows the ownership of the comment clearly belonging to the commenter, and the commenter has the full control of updating or even deleting the comments based on their own interest. At the same time, the commenters might be granted an option to leave their comment out of their own spaces (i.e. storing them on remote site as it is done currently). By choosing this option, the commenters agrees giving up their ownership over their generated resources (the comments in our example).

A center component in this described environment is the home-spaces (comparing to homepages) of the Web users. By storing the resources in their home-spaces, Web users exclaim the ownership over these resources. When users connect to a registered site (i.e. be willing to participating to the social activities in the specific community), it is a process of casting the respective stored resources in home-spaces to the community convention. This process, as I names, is Automatic Character Switch (ACtS).

In each home-space, a Web user may store many resources that are related to varied sites (communities). When this Web user join a site, there must be a communication between the site manager and the user to decide which resources are of interest and thus could be casted to the community view and contribute to the community. This is the key of the ACtS technology. Apparently, ACtS is similar to a Web operating system. But indeed it is not an operating system since it does no more "operations" than "managing" the switch of ownership over resources. This mechanism may eventually solve the resource portability problem and leads the Web to the next generation. For readers who are interested in this idea, more discussion of ACtS is in my article of Web evolution.


Previous Installments in this Series:

• What is Web 2.0?
  

Is Microhoo a right movement to the future Web?

A very recent news said that Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo with about $44.6 billion. Although I am recently too busy to blog much, this is a news that I have to say something.

Is Microhoo a right movement to the future Web? This is the question I raise; and my prompt feeling is that this deal, if it ever becomes true, is a bad call.

In short, if Microsoft want to challenge Google in the market of web search, it should look for next-generation search strategies rather than Yahoo. By owning Yahoo Microsoft can immediately get the share of web search that Yahoo occupies at present. But this share is declining. Partial of the declining is due to the bad performance of Yahoo administration; and Microsoft might believe that this problem is the main issue and thus Microsoft can solve this problem. But indeed, from my viewpoint upon web evolution, the decline of Yahoo is due to its fundamental web search strategy that does not match the progress of web evolution. What Yahoo does is always either beyond the trend or behind the trend, and it never hits the right target. By buying such a team would only hurt the future of Microsoft. If this deal would become true, it shows the end of Microsoft search as well.

The Web is evolving rapidly. And very soon completely new thoughts of web search will come to the world to be compatible to the new Web. By buying Yahoo, Microsoft is to buy a huge burden that will soon damage itself in few years.

The Dynamic Web

My newest post at the ThinkerNet is about the Web is dynamic. The post focuses on the argument that the fundamental of World Wide Web is currently evolving from static to dynamic.

In my comment for the question raised by Paul Whyte, however, I emphasized that this argument of dynamic Web is not the same as the dynamic web discussed among the web navigation people. In the realm of web navigation, the property of Web dynamics is about the degree of activities that web resources are consumed by users. In the realm of web evolution, however, the dynamic Web refers to the prediction that the fundamental of basic building blocks on the Web is current evolving to engage more and more dynamic properties. Furthermore, we may have to identify these basic building blocks as dynamic components (i.e., dominated by services) in contrast to static components (i.e., dominated by data).

For who are interested in this topic and my arguments, the full article is at here.

Social Graph

In my most recent article at Internet Evolution, I discussed the emergence of social graphs and its impact to the Internet evolution. In fact, the social graphs discussed in my article are beyond connecting only human web users but also the resources that used by the users. So they might be closer to the semantic graphs that were described by Nova Spivack.

Macroscopic regularity over microscopic Brownian motion | the secret beneath the wisdom of crowds

Happy New Year! 2008 will be an exciting new year for many reasons. The philosophy of Web 2.0 has been understood and accepted by more and more people and organizations. "Engaging the wisdom of crowds" has been a slogan of many new-age startups, as well as a few old corporations. In the year 2008, we will watch more deep implementation of this philosophy in the industrial realm. On the other hand, the new concept "Giant Global Graph" starts to be a bridge connecting Web 2.0 and Semantic Web. As the result, Semantic Web, after many years research in labs, will gradually approaches the public audience in 2008. At last, in person I will start a new career in this year. 2008 thus means especially different to me.

In this first post at 2008, I want to address an interesting and essential topic about Web 2.0---why is the wisdom of crowds often superior to the wisdom of individuals even though the individuals might be domain experts and the crowd is generally unprofessional?

The previous argument is the foundation of a best-selling book The Wisdom of Crowds written by James Surowiecki. In his book, James describes many evidences to show the superiority of crowd wisdom and he has also suggested several ways to approach the crowd wisdom while at the same time avoiding some regular traps of misusing this concept. Nevertheless is the book well written, there are a few important absences in the book. One Amazon book reviewer Aaron Swartz criticized that James's book was lack of thoughtful analysis on the intrinsic reasons beneath the described phenomenon of crowd wisdom. A similar critique was made also by another Amazon book critic, David J. Gannon, who wrote that "[James's] choices seem to be crafted to provide maximum support while eliminating any element of contraindication whatsoever." Despite of my sincere support to the basic concept in James's book, I have to confess that I incline to the arguments made by the two critics. These negative viewpoints, however, does not decrease the value the book (they only mean that the book could be even better). But they really pointed out at least one essential missed issue in the book, i.e., the question I rose at the beginning: what are the intrinsic reasons beneath the fact that the wisdom of crowds is often superior to the wisdom of individuals? With this question, I read through the book carefully and finally, I got an insight---the superiority of the wisdom of crowds is another example of a natural fact that there is often macroscopic regularity over any microscopic irregularity.

One of the most famous irregular natural events is Brownian motion (click the picture on the left). Brownian motion is the random movement of particles suspended in a fluid or the mathematical model used to describe such random movements. In nature, Brownian motion exists everywhere. For example, in a body of water every individual H₂O molecule moves towards random directions and with varied velocities at the microscopic level regardless, however, how the entire body of water actually flows at the macroscopic level. An interesting phenomenon is that despite of the pure random movement of each individual H₂O molecule, a body of water always has its regular path of flow at the macroscopic level. Hence the irregularity of Brownian motion that may be supposed by many people to lead to random unpredictable flow actually generally cause regular predictable flow at the macroscopic level.

At the mathematical abstraction level, the phenomenon of Brownian motion and the phenomenon of crowd wisdom are indeed the same. In both cases, we have vectors that point to desultory directions and have random magnitudes in their respective directions. In Brownian motion these vectors represent the momentum of the particles and in crowd wisdom these vectors represent the decisions made by individual persons. By adding up these vectors, we may obtain a collective final result towards which the entire body moves. In Brownian motion the result is where the fluid body flows and in crowd wisdom it is what the collective decision is made by the crowd.

This mathematical model well explains several likely controversial claims in James's book. For example, in his book James observed that the collective decisions made by independent participants with highly diverse disciplinary areas is generally at least not worse than the collective decisions gathered by participants who are professional experts in the particular disciplinary area of the question. This observation is indeed surprising when we first see it because we often expect that to the same challenge the decision produced by a group of experts must be generally better than the decision made by a group of laymen. But based on the mathematical model of Brownian motion, we can see that although every individual particle acts purely random to each other, the sum of their momentum vectors always points to a fixed direction, i.e., the direction where the fluid body flows at the macroscopic level. In similar, although every individual person makes a decision solely upon his own profession that may be far away from the destinate disciplinary area, the sum of these decision vectors will point to a certain direction, i.e., the direction where the true answer sits (though nobody in the group really knows this direction). In this situation, it does not matter whether this group of people are domain experts or not. This is the myth and beauty of the wisdom of crowds.

The Brownian motion also explains why a group of laymen may even often outbeat a group of experts on producing a better collective decision. The figure on the left illustrate the idea. Above all, nobody truly knows the real direction of the goal. But experts often make decisions that are closer to the goal (this is why they are experts). By contrast, laymen often make decisions that are far away from the real goal. But if we sum up the decisions made by experts and the decisions made by laymen, the figure shows that it is not necessary that the collective decision of experts is better than the collective decision of laymen. Why? Experts are often biased in the same way, while laymen seldom have the type of biases experts have. Individual expert is certainly better than any individual layman on making professional decisions. But collectively experts often make biased decision---albeit the collective decision is also close to the real goal---since they are trained in similar ways. By contrast, the sum of layman's decisions might be more closer to the real goal since they do not have disciplinary bias in their mind. Though this vector addition diagram is simple, it shows why a group of laymen may beat a group of experts.

As James has emphasized in his book, independence is a crucial property of gathering better collective decisions, especially when these decisions are collected from a group of laymen. The new diagram at the left illustrates the reason. Unlike the previous one in which all experts and laymen make their decisions independently, in this new situation Expert 2 makes his decision after Expert 1 and so is Layman 2 after Layman 1. Humans are social creatures; so we often adjust our decisions to compromise the other persons in a group, even unconsciously. As the result, both Expert 2 and Layman 2 shift their decisions a little bit closer to the decision made by the respective former players. Immediately we see the consequence. The collective decision made by experts is still close to the goal since the decision made by Expert 1 is close to the goal. By contrast, the collective decision made by laymen starts to be away from the goal since the decision made by Layman 1 is away to the goal. This simple diagram shows why it is generally unconstructive (and often even destructive) to have a group of laymen communicate when they vote because most of the time they will unconsciously follow a direction that is far away from the real goal. By contrast, we may encourage the communication among experts since they are more likely to figure out a better solution after discussion. To the least, the worst expert decision may still be close to the goal.

Does the superiority of crowd wisdom suggest that we should not (or at least should not actively) hire experts on making decisions? The answer is no. There are two fundamental reasons why the existence of experts is actually crucial to the success of engaging the wisdom of crowds: (1) how to build a real diverse group of crowds and (2) how to aggregate the decisions made by the crowds.

As James has emphasized in his book, the property of diversity is critical to obtain high quality crowd-made decisions. In fact, this requirement of diversity is equivalent to the perspective of free of bias. When the voters in a group have diverse enough disciplinary backgrounds, disciplinary biases are eliminated to the least. Thus the aggregated collective decision would be closer to the real truth. But how to build a truly diverse set of participants is a problem. A random group of people invited from street might not necessary be a real diverse set to a particular question. To build a real diverse set requires highly professional experiences on the respective disciplinary field.

The two examples James told in the Introduction of his book are typical examples of why the construction of diverse groups is a highly professional job. In the first example, many people on the marketplace were beating on the weight of an ox. In his story, James addressed the participants as unprofessional normal people with respect to the issue of ox weight. Nevertheless was James right, these people were not so "unprofessional" as James had emphasized. We can safely assume that these people who had participated the beat regularly bought stuffs from the market. So they had basic knowledge on how to evaluate weight of varied things, even though they indeed were not professions on weighting oxes. This observation is important because it means that this group was really "diverse" with respect to the challenge. Think of repeating the same challenge among a group of first-grade elementary school students and we may see the difference between really "diverse" and fake "diverse" groups. By randomly calling up a group of first-grade elementary school students we may also have a diverse set, which is, however, not really "diverse" with respect to the demand of collecting crowd wisdom. The first-grade elementary school students are short of knowledge of weighting basic stuffs and thus the collective answer made by them is certainly "biased" by their short of knowledge.

Similar situation is for the second example, in which a group of professionals in varied fields was assembled by a naval official John Craven to guess the position of Scorpion, a US submarine disappeared in the North Atlantic. The story in the book was impressive; but would we be able to repeat this story by assembling a random group of professors at MIT? Certainly these professors must be brilliant and unquestionable experts in their disciplinary areas, but I bet they would certainly not able to guess the correct position of Scorpion, even collectively. Why? These professors generally have not been attended to the particular scenario and thus their decisions would be just little bit better than normal you and me in this case. On the contrary, the people John Craven had organized (as in the story) were the ones who were familiar to the submarine operation even though nobody had the complete knowledge of the particular case. So this group called by John Craven was a really diverse group and a random group of MIT professors is not.

Both the stories point out that assembling a "diverse" set is a highly professional request that demands the knowledge of domain experts.

Comparing to the demand of diversity, we may require more expertise on aggregating individual decisions made by a crowd to be a valuable collective decision. This type of aggregations is normally much more sophisticated than simply calculating the number of votes in different categories. As we show in the previous diagrams, the process of aggregating crowd wisdom is basically a procedure of vector addition (or more precisely a tensor addition since many times the number of dimensions would be more than three). How to divide a problem into varied dimensions and assign a measurement standard to it is a highly professional work that requires superior expertise on the disciplinary application area.

In summary, we now have a clear picture of how to take the benefit of crowd wisdom in real-world applications. First, we need a few experts. In contrast to rely on these experts to make decisions directly, however, we ask them to assemble a crowd that is truly diverse according to the problem. We let the crowd make their decisions independently. Then we ask the experts to aggregate the crowd decisions objectively based on the expertise of the experts. This is thus the procedure of engaging the wisdom of crowds.

Thinking Space 2007 in 12 months

This post is the highlight of what was on Thinking Space in 2007 month-by-month. I am grateful to all the readers of Thinking Space and wish you merry Christmas and happy new year!

January 28, 2007, Web 2.0 panel on World Economic Forum

How would Web 2.0 and the emerging social networks affect world business? The annual World Economic Forum at Davos organized a panel with five outstanding Web business leaders addressing this issue at the beginning of 2007. The talks, however, showed that the executives from traditional big companies such as Microsoft and NIKE were less alerted to the new technologies than the executives from new-age companies such as YouTube and Flickr. In short, both Bill and Mark were talking in languages other than Web 2.0. By their viewpoints, the Web-2.0 phenomenon was certainly less important than their own imaginary vision towards the future. What web evolution really impacts world business was severely underestimated.

At the end, the speech by Viviane is worth of re-emphasizing. When the Web evolves to be more and more mature, who are going to govern the virtual world? This question may gradually become a severe issue when web evolution goes further. Will there be conflicts between the virtual world governments and the real world governments? I do not think that in 2008 we will immediately see this type of conflicts. But the traditional means of national boards do have started to diminish while the new means of digital boards are forming; these changes are slowly but inevitably.

February 18, 2007, The Two-Year Birthday of AJAX

Few technologies have affected the Web so much as AJAX has done. AJAX is more than a technology; it is a philosophy. What AJAX really does is to decompose Web content into smaller portable pieces that are feasible to be uploaded and updated independently. AJAX prompts the dynamic recomposition of pieces of Web content from varied resources. Hence it significantly improves the reuse of information on the Web.

The prevalence of AJAX causes the fragmentation of the Web. The reverse side of this phenomenon is, however, how we may defragment the small pieces of information and reorganize them from end-users' perspectives. This defragmentation issue is the next critical challenge for Web information management. Twine is an example that has started to address this issue. I expect to see more proposals to solve this defragmentation issue in 2008.

March 23, 2007, Will the Semantic Web fail? Or not?

Whether the Semantic Web is going to succeed is always debatable. There are many supporters of Semantic Web, and there are nearly as many as the opponents as well. Will Semantic Web become true? The answer partially depends on whether the Semantic Web researchers can humbly learn from the success of Web 2.0. The normal public might not welcome Semantic Web if its research is still kept inside the ivory tower. Practices such as Microformat are good examples that the Semantic Web research approaches normal web users. But there are still too few of this type of examples. For instance, will the new W3C RDFa proposal be too complicated again? We don't know yet. Hopefully this time W3C would focus more on simple solutions that are feasible to normal users rather than on sound and complete solutions that the academic researchers favor. In comparison, if our real human society is far less than being perfect in reasoning and inference, why must we have theoretically perfect plans to build a virtual world?

April 18, 2007, New web battle is announced

Google is expanding rapidly. Google had replaced Yahoo being the leading Web search engine. Google has already been the largest site that produces Web-2.0 products. Google is competing against Microsoft to be the leading online document editor. Google is fighting against Facebook to be the leading social network through the OpenSocial initiative. More recently, Google starts another battle against Wikipedia to be the leading online knowledge aggregator by the announcement of Google Knol. Can Google succeed simultaneously in all of these fields? Are Google's plans too ambitious to be successful?

The age of Google is about to pass; this is my prediction after watching all these ambitious plans issued by Google. Google has started losing its momentum on originality. By contrast, Google is now repeating a "successful" path of many traditional big companies, i.e., dominating the market by defeating the opponents not by new achievements on technologies but by its superior money resources. This strategy has been proved successfully in many fields. However, it is not a winning strategy on web industry. The reason is that World Wide Web itself is evolving. When the Web evolves, Web technologies evolves. Any company that stops evolving would be thrown away. The history once happened to Yahoo may happen to Google again in the future. The age of Google will be passed with the over of Web 2.0.

May 8, 2007, Web Search, is Google the ultimate monster?

Google is beatable, but Google is not going to be defeated by another Google-style solution. When I predict that the age of Google is about to pass, I mean new revolution on Web technologies. Google is thinking of itself as the God of World Wide Web; and indeed many Web users accept this interpretation (because we have no other better choices at present). But history has already told us that this type of fake gods like Google could not stay forever. In history, we humans abandoned most of the fake gods as soon as the public education system was prevailed. In similar, this history will repeat itself in the virtual world of the Web. The fake God of the virtual world (Google) will step down when the education on Web machine agents prevails. Hakia would not threaten Google if it continues following the Google strategy by addressing itself to be a more powerful fake God on the Web.

In addition to this short summary, I have a preliminary funding request. I will graduate next year and currently I am looking for an assistant professor position. If I'd get an offer, I would start a new research project on next-generation Web search that is beyond the current Google-style search strategy. In fact, I have already done the project proposal. For any reader, if you are responsible on looking for and funding new research projects that are full of potential in the future, I am far more than happy to discuss my project with you. I can be contacted through yihong.ding@gmail.com. The philosophy underneath my new web search strategy can be read at here.

June 29, 2007, Epistemological extension to ontologies: a key of realizing Semantic Web?

The application of epistemology into Semantic Web is less explored than it should have been. We need ontologies to enhance the collaboration and agreements. We also need epistemologies to emphasize the individuality and privacy. I expect more research on this topic in 2008.

July 31, 2007, What does tagging contribute to the web evolution? | An introduction of web thread

There are many ways to describe web evolution. One unique expression is the transformation from the node-driven web to the tread-driven web. Web thread is a new term proposed by myself. In short, a web thread is a connection that links multiple web nodes to a fixed inbound. I observed that the Web was not only syntactically connected by human-specified links, but also semantically connected by latent threads each of which expresses a fixed meaning. A straightforward evidence of the existence of web threads is Web-2.0 tags. On Web 2.0, resources are automatically mutual-connected when they are specified the same tag by individual human users. When weaving these tags together, we obtain an interconnected network of all web pages.

The existence of web threads is an interesting phenomenon that lacks of insightful research at present. From one side, web threads are part of the implicit web because they are generally latent at this moment. On the other side, by proactively revealing web threads and explicitly weaving them, we might produce more comprehensive social graphs for individual web users. This new concept thus may contribute significantly to the vision of Giant Global Graph. I will publish more research on this concept in 2008. By the way, a broader discussion of web links and web threads can be found at here.

August 24, 2007, Mapping between Web Evolution and Human Growth, A View of Web Evolution, series No. 4

World Wide Web is evolving. But why does the Web evolve and how does it evolve? Few answers have been given. The view of web evolution is the first systematic study in the world that directly addresses the answer to these questions based on a theoretic exploration.

This view of web evolution stands upon the analogical comparison between web evolution and human growth. I argue that the two progresses are not only similar to each other by their common evolutionary patterns, but also literally simulate each other from all the major aspects. At present, the simulation mainly happens in the uni-direction from the real world to the virtual world. In the future, however, we are going to see more evidences of simulation on the reversed direction, i.e. from the virtual world to the real world.

The virtual world represented by the Web is nothing but a reflection of our human society. Due to the limit of web technologies, however, we are not able to completely simulate our society from every aspect into this virtual world. In particular, we are not able to well simulate all the activities of individual humans on the Web. By contrast, we can simulate individuals at a certain level within any specific evolutionary stage. This continuous upgrade of simulation of individuals on the Web represents the main stream of web evolution.

This theory of web evolution has published for half a year and I have received many requests on discussing this vision. I hope this study would bring more attention to the fascinating web evolution research.

September 16, 2007, A Simple Picture of Web Evolution

The simple picture of web evolution expresses a straightforward timeline of web evolution. The Web is evolving from a read-or-write web to a read/write web, and eventually it may become a read/write/request web. The implementation of the "Request" operation would be a fundamental next-step towards the next generation Web.

October 7, 2007, What is Web 2.0? | The Path towards Next Generation, Series No.1

What is the next generation Web? This is a grand question to all Web researchers at this moment. We might see critical breakthrough on answering this question in 2008.

At present, the advance of Web 2.0 has already slowed down. The progress of web evolution has reached another stable quantitative expansion period after the exciting qualitative transition from 1.0 to 2.0. The seed of next transition is growing underground now.

In order to figure out the path towards the next generation Web, we need to know the present and where the present was coming from. In the first post of this series "towards the next generation", I summarized the various definitions of Web 2.0. In the following installments at this series, I will continue discussing my vision of the path towards Web 3.0. I feel sorry about the slow progress of this series. I will try to post this series more frequently in the coming year.

November 23, 2007, Multi-layer Abstractions: World Wide Web or Giant Global Graph or Others

Giant Global Graph is a new concept. Although Tim Berners-Lee proposed this concept intuitively for freely deploying personal social networks onto the Web, my view of the intent of this concept is beyond this intuition. In general, I believe that the proposal of this concept is the first sign of a great transition---the organization of web information is transforming from the publisher-oriented point of view to the viewer-oriented point of view.

The impact of this transformation could be greater than we may imagine. Most importantly, this transformation will show that the Web may automatically re-organize its information system without a human-controlled organization such as W3C or Google. World Wide Web is a self-organizing system. This observation is essential to the understanding of web evolution.

December 3, 2007, Collectivism on the Web

The implementation of collectivism has been the landmark of Web 2.0. But do we know how many types of collectivism we may implement onto the Web? This last selected article at December 2007 summarized a few typical implementations of collectivism on the Web. Some of them (such as collective intelligence) have been well known, while others (such as collective responsibility and collective identity) are less known by the public. I expect to watch more creative implementations of collectivism in 2008.