[p2p-research] From the document web, via the data web, to the active web

Sun Mar 30 05:24:52 CEST 2008

Thanks to Henrik and Athina for the commentary, I added Henrik as a
blog post tomorrow, and Athina, perhaps you can your own as a comment?

Michel

On 3/30/08, Athina Karatzogianni <athina.k at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi
>
> Well its the middle of the night here too, and after reading that I thought
> that there is a little bit more to the technical side of this, which Henrik
> very competently discusses here.
>
> I think this piece makes a serious point in relation to our understanding of
> knowledge and how our philosophy of human-to-human and human-computer
> interaction influences knowledge and particularly 'universal'  knowledge (a
> truly bizarre utopian enlightment concept), as well as the uncertainties
> created by 'globalization' and technocracy.
>
> The article deserves attention because it warns against relying on 'boolean'
> logics in IT terms, I would argue in relying also in 'binary' terms in the
> political sense (although that is more relevant on the point of allowing for
> interaction, disagreement and happily conflict, as they produce the most
> interesting results).
>
> What has been done 'technically' with Web 2.0 is not enough and
> fundamentally the architecture is still the same relying on certain logics
> of 'universal' truths, fact triangulation and customer-client relationships,
> instead of networking and building on each other and why not, even producing
>  'biased' knowledge. The reason the Web 2.0 is not that 'fun' is because it
> is impersonal (or often too personal!), alienating to the computer
> illiterate, and not catering for exciting interactions for those that are IT
> literate.
>
> To put it simply, some aspects are too centralized (control of platforms,
> software, e-commerce etc), while others are too scattered and lost to the
> few more well known blogs and webpages. The architecture is not enabling,
> because it was devised for different purposes.
>
> All the great efforts and amendments to that will always fall short. It is
> like a house constantly changing builders, architects and engineers, I see
> it difficult though, however good these people are to have better
> cyberspaces, unless the foundations are looked at, and not only in technical
> terms.
>
> The philosophy part this author advances is in my opinion spot on.
>
> Hello from chilly England
>
> Athina
>
>
> On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 10:43 PM, Henrik Ingo <henrik.ingo at avoinelama.fi>
> wrote:
> > Michel,
> >
> > It's in the middle of the night, but I just feel compelled to add some
> > points. This is not good enough for a blog, but may be freely
> > copypasted by anyone...
> >
> >
> > My impression of the article is that it is written by some academic
> > non-programmer, who has tried to study the HTTP protocol and some W3C
> > standardisation efforts, but has no experience in actually producing
> > web applications. As first impressions go I could of course be very
> > wrong, I didn't even bother to read some of the middle parts of the
> > article!
> >
> > The Document web definition is fine, it is what anyone would consider
> > "Web 1.0". What I strongly disagree with is the authors criticism or
> > belittlement of current "Web2.0". In my opinion a significant shift in
> > the web happened with the maturation of the Firefox browser, which
> > released an avalanche of web based applications and portals that made
> > heavy use of JavaScript and CSS. (If someone wouldn't like the term
> > "Web2.0" it may be better and clearer to call this "The advent of
> > AJAX".)
> >
> > Before Firefox there where 2 browsers, Internet Explorer and Netscape
> > that supported advanced JavaScript, but they supported totally
> > different versions of it (the standardised version today is the IE
> > one, a testament to the fact that MS indeed employes some very good
> > programmers, the ones that happened to work on IE from 4.x to 6.x
> > before 2001). Therefore most pages that tried to do anything with
> > JavaScript or advanced CSS supported only one of these browsers, or
> > sometimes tried to support both of them, often with poor results. And
> > many in the universities or Open Source crowds for instance were still
> > using text-based browsers - which is notable because at the time this
> > group had significant mindshire in the web's development. For all of
> > these reasons use of JavaScript was considered evil by (in my opinion)
> > a majority of web developers and what was then called "Dynamic HTML"
> > was mostly a phenomenon of the Microsoft camp. (Even today if you use
> > the web interface to Microsoft Exchange email, it is very nice on IE
> > but barely usable on Firefox.)
> >
> > With the advent of Firefox - which supported the then standardised IE
> > style of JavaScript - the situation started changing, since there now
> > was a standard, and a free multiplatform browser to support the
> > standard. Quite soon very cool web based apps were born, led by Google
> > maps, Google mail... This was called AJAX programming, as in
> > Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Compared to Microsofts DHTML
> > evangelisation this was much cooler technology than anyone had ever
> > dreamt of, and availability of an Open Source browser to support it
> > made also the opposition vanish. So imho this, and not IE4.x with
> > DHTML support was the de fact next phase of the web.
> >
> > At the same time we had developed some additional techniques - most
> > signicant would prehaps  be RSS and the family of XML markups used to
> > provide blog feeds. This lead to a collaboration between websites
> > beyond linking: You could provide parts of another blog or newssite on
> > your own page, for instance. Or to take a very different example,
> > BookMooch uses Amazon to provide data and cataloguing of books. Yet,
> > BookMooch is a site for free sharing of old books, you'd think Amazon
> > wouldn't like "helping out" such a project. Not so, in reality lots of
> > BookMooch users end up buying books on Amazon. In fact, BookMooch
> > probably makes most of its income based on money they get from Amazon
> > for these referrals.
> >
> > AJAX combined with RSS and some other by then standard tools (wiki is
> > a significant one) is in my opinion rightly called Web2.0. This is
> > very different from the original document based web and rightly has
> > been given its own name.
> >
> > Web2.0 is NOT the social web (like FaceBook, LinkedIn). The social web
> > is merely an application of Web2.0, technically it doesn't contribute
> > anything new. (Well, apart from FaceBooks innovation of letting 3rd
> > parties develop applications embedded in its own site, that is a great
> > innovation, but it is not "THE social web".) Why the social web is so
> > much hyped is in this context in fact a good question, I believe there
> > is in fact a little pyramid scheme to it all. I mean Facebook is fun
> > and all, but it isn't THAT fun, I think the effective inviting
> > mechanism plays a part.
> >
> > This is the point we are now. Now for my own predictions:
> >
> > Next we will see the advent of the Single sign-on web, most likely
> > emodied in the form of OpenID. (SSO means you don't have to create new
> > logins for every site, you just use one main identity and password to
> > log in to each site. Obviously the sites you log in to don't get to
> > know your password, they just accept the referral from your ISP, mail
> > provider, or other OpenID provider you are using.) This imho will add
> > further granularity to the web, in that users can come and go more
> > fluidly than today, where you make a choice to register and join
> > FaceBook but not something else. This in turn should foster a
> > development where we can again have smaller sites providing one small
> > funny little piece of the social web, instead of the monolithic
> > FaceBooks of today. This would be in line with what Web2.0 was all
> > about, Facebook et al are in fact a countertrend to the Web2.0 trend
> > if seen in this light.
> >
> > Whether a "decentralised social web" will arise from this is a good
> > question, and whether the Global Giant Graph will emerge from that is
> > an even better question. It might, but it might end up something
> > entirely different. The GGG is technically possible today, and how
> > OpenID works there are some similarities to the RDF used in GGG, so
> > once OpenID becomes popular, the next step might be to not just
> > externalise (or decentralise) your login credentials but also your
> > social connections. But we will know the answer to this in something
> > like 5 years.
> >
> > The proposal in the end on new HTTP commands is just pure folly (it is
> > just the wrong place to do it, period), which underlines that the
> > author wasn't just slightly off with his Web2.0 comments, but in fact
> > knows nothing at all about the technology he is talking about. To
> > implement such functionality by extending HTTP would imho be quite
> > silly, and in fact a peer-to-peer protocol like SIP would probably be
> > a better starting point in the first place, and even then you wouldn't
> > do it by commands like those, but you'd develop an XML based document
> > language to transmit this kind of information.
> >
> >
> > So, I guess it turned out to a semi-good commentary after all. OTOH I
> > think you stole my evening with this link so I'll have to do what I
> > really was going to do tomorrow. Good night!
> >
> > henrik
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 8:29 AM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > > This is a great article to understand the technical evolution of the
> web, see
> > >
> http://www.dur.ac.uk/j.r.c.geldart/essays/there_again/towards_the_active_web.html
> > >
> > >  Any comments about this to our blog would be most appreciated,
> > >
> > >  Michel
> > >
> > >  --
> > >  The P2P Foundation researches, documents and promotes peer to peer
> alternatives.
> > >
> > >  Wiki and Encyclopedia, at http://p2pfoundation.net; Blog, at
> > >  http://blog.p2pfoundation.net; Newsletter, at
> > >  http://integralvisioning.org/index.php?topic=p2p
> > >
> > >  Basic essay at
> http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=499; interview
> > >  at
> http://poynder.blogspot.com/2006/09/p2p-very-core-of-world-to-come.html
> > >  BEST VIDEO ON P2P:
> > >
> http://video.google.com.au/videoplay?docid=4549818267592301968&hl=en-AU
> > >
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> > >
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> > >
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> > >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > email: henrik.ingo at avoinelama.fi
> > tel: +358-40-5697354
> > www: www.avoinelama.fi/~hingo
> > book: www.openlife.cc
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> >
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> >
>
>
>
> --
> Dr Athina Karatzogianni
> Lecturer in Media, Culture and Society
> The University of Hull
> United Kingdom
> HU6 7RX
> phone: ++44 (0) 1482 46 5790
>
> Check out Athina's work:
>
> http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cyberconflict-Routledge-Research-Information-Technology/dp/0415396840/
>
> http://www.amazon.co.uk/Power-Resistance-Conflict-Contemporary-World/dp/0415452988/
>
> http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cyber-conflict-Politics-Contemporary-Security-Studies/dp/0415459702/
>
> http://vectors.usc.edu/thoughtmesh/publish/135.php
>
> Press interviews:
>
> France:http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0,36-924253,0.html
> http://www.20minutes.fr/article/180599/Monde-La-Chine-a-soif-d-informations.php
> Greece:http://www.enet.gr/online/online_text/c=112,id=78490200
> Brazil:http://jbonline.terra.com.br/editorias/internacional/papel/2007/11/04/internacional20071104008.html
> Poland:http://hacking.pl/6789-Czas_cyberwojen.html
>
>

-- 
The P2P Foundation researches, documents and promotes peer to peer alternatives.

Wiki and Encyclopedia, at http://p2pfoundation.net; Blog, at
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net; Newsletter, at
http://integralvisioning.org/index.php?topic=p2p

Basic essay at http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=499; interview
at http://poynder.blogspot.com/2006/09/p2p-very-core-of-world-to-come.html
BEST VIDEO ON P2P:
http://video.google.com.au/videoplay?docid=4549818267592301968&hl=en-AU

KEEP UP TO DATE through our Delicious tags at http://del.icio.us/mbauwens

The work of the P2P Foundation is supported by SHIFTN, http://www.shiftn.com/