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

[Henrik Ingo]

Athina, I still disagree

On Sun, Mar 30, 2008 at 5:17 AM, Athina Karatzogianni
<athina.k at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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...

I still disagree. (Will still not bothering to read all of the article :-)

For instance, to continue using the HTTP protocol as an example, the
purpose of it is to locate a document and deliver it to you. There is
no room for "fuzzy logic" here, nobody would want to use a web where
you get a page that is ALMOST the one you requested.

The fuzzy non-binary part is contained within the documents that are
delivered, and I argue that to some degree we already have made great
advances to a more colored and less black and white reality. Instead
of reading THE political truth from the one major Finnish newspaper,
you can read a lot of blogs on the net with DIFFERENT viewpoints. You
can go to Wikipedia to read an article that is ALMOST factually
correct. etc...

Furthermore, there is computer science that deals with non-binary
logic, in particular Artificial Intelligence practices like Fuzzy
Logic or Neural Networks (which try to emulate how we know our brains
work, really interesting). While this is much more difficult than
"normal" programming, and therefore these techniques are not as
prevalent building blocks of the Internet today, as the "binary based"
technologies are, we do use them today:
 - Spam filters are often based on Bayesian filters or some other NN techniques
 - Google tries to find you pages that you are most likely going to be
interested in (as opposed to pages whose content most exactly match
the keywords you search for)
 - Amazon will send you advertisements on books that they think you
might be interested in, etc...

 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.

Again, I see Web2.0 being exactly like this. The blogosphere is not a
customer-client relationship, it is a "networking and building on each
other" phenomenon.

> 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.

But I'll give you the last part, although it is imho a subjective
judgement. To me as an IT literate, I know of nothing more fun than
the current Internet :-) Of course, the future Internet will be even
more fun!


henrik




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