Planet Social Media Research

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,129328-c,internetnetworking/article.html



The Department of Defense's Defense Intelligence Agency has been attempting to use Web2.0 technologies, starting with a wiki, since 2004. They are attempting to leverage wikis, mashups, blogs and RSS feeds to assist their analysts.



This is a departure from the standard use of technology in government where upgrading hardware and software could go for years and the latest and greatest web technologies are shunned for both security reasons as well as misunderstanding of their uses.



While we won't see these technologies in all levels of government for valid reasons, in certain aspects of the government we could see these technologies used more and more.

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/04/24/wesabes-new-reccomen.html



Wesabe takes anonymized purchase data to manage your finances better and has recently launched a system to help you purchase the same items at other locations. The system seems like it would be a nice mix to go along with Mint.com in an overall financial strategy.



Of course when the system says I should buy at Walmart instead of Target, I'll have to refuse that advice. The next step in these financial systems should start monitoring the social and green aspects of the places you are shopping.

http://www.semantichacker.com/



Semantic Hacker has an open API for semantic discovery and is running a million dollar challenge to use their system in new and interesting ways. The system seems to pull out semantic data from any text source. There is an example on their site where you can paste text and get out the data. It seems mostly like a keyboard analysis system. It would be interesting to have someone comment on the system as it stands.



"Develop a software prototype, business plan or both with commercial viability that is focused on a vertical market. Solutions in finance, healthcare or pharmaceuticals might be good places to start."

Or day after the field.



https://barcamp.pbwiki.com/SocialDevCampEast



If you have ever been to an IEEE or such conference, you know that everything is planned ahead of time and there are committees for everything. It works well, but for a smaller situation like the Social Dev Camp East that happened yesterday, the power of Web2.0 technologies came together to promote a smooth flow throughout the day.



Take a look at the wiki link above. There is a proposed schedule. At a regular conference, that would BE the schedule. At the camp, there weren't even defined sessions before the campers voted on them in the morning. You can see the proposed time schedule got pushed back as people probably showed up a little later than expected. The actual schedule exists on the page along the proposed, showing the differences. Updated in almost real time, this is a huge break from the monolithic existence of regular conferences. It was encouraging and impressive that such an open source type of event flowed so smoothly.



The actual content of the day, and the overall purpose as I saw it was interesting. At a regular conference, the sessions might go for two hours each, starting at 8am and ending at 5pm. This camp has one hour sessions ending about 4pm. Each session was about an hour long on one topic. Since the topics were decided on in the morning, the presenters varied in their preparation. Some were ready to go with organized presentations, others were thrown together according to the requests of the campers.



Two sessions in the mornings with discussions during led to a discussion filled lunch followed by another two sessions in the afternoon. Each session had four different topics in individual rooms for a total of sixteen topics throughout the day. Following the sessions there was a camp sponsored open bar down the street at The Brewer's Art. After sixteen different topics were covered, people from D.C, Baltimore, Philly, NYC and other places with all kinds of technical backgrounds, made for plenty of conversation for hours after the official sessions were over.



In CMSC 491S/691S we had interesting lectures that led to discussions that had to be halted as the end of class came. Imagine sixteen lectures in one day and hours of discussions afterwards. Contacts, friends and business opportunities were made and the results of the camp will echo for quite some time.



Another camp will be held in Fall 2008. Baltimore, New York, or someplace else hasn't been announced but it will probably be bigger and better than this one.

Another interesting find from Information Aesthetics. News classes, selected via the top menu, populate a rotating column of articles that are then read at the bottom of the display. Fun - not sold on the utility.

Jeff Jarvis writes up some thoughts spring boarding from Nick Denton's post regarding the news/opinion divide. At the highest level, this is about the value of humanizing information. There are two related points that I think are missing from this discussion. The first is the value a source of information provides to the user by enabling them to be efficient consumers of that information. The second is a little more complex, and is to do with network effects and homophily.

Efficiency: news sources, or rather, news aggregators, must make decisions about which pieces of news to present to the consumer. In addition, they must figure out how to present this news. Objectivity and the editorial role play in to this by removing distractions and providing a relevance function to the possible set of news items. Opinion - that is to say - removing either or both of these filters - may well lead to a lack of efficiency on the side of the consumer.

Homophily: consumers, being human, are subject to homophily. Thus, the more human/emotional an information source is, the more it will strengthen reading behaviours that are driven by this seeking of like minded writers. With ideal information distribution goals in mind (allowing information consumers to be more efficient and better informed) this will do a disservice to readers.

I think the bigger picture here is to do with trust. If we could trust our news sources, then objectivity and editorial control would be fine. However, the forces that determine what a news source reports work directly against trust as they are financial. Bringing in the emotional element - the personality of the writer - into the picture provides a powerful connection with the reader, thus replacing trust with a personal relationship.

I attended the SocialDevCamp East today. It was a lot of fun and very rewarding. The event was kind of like a conference, but unlike a typical research conference it didn’t have any specific agenda or planned breakout sessions. I have attended many planned research conferences in the past, but this bar camp (bec it has free beer after 4pm) was definitely a unique experience. I would recommend future bar camps to anyone who is interested in technology.

My lessons learned from this event are as follows. First, the start-up culture on the East Coast is very different from which of the West Coast. On the East Coast, it’s difficult to find either VCs or angel investors to fund start-ups that don’t a sustainable revenue stream. Second, there is a large pool of talents on the East Coast (in the DC/MD/VA area) that is not currently being utilized to create social web and social media innovations. Third, it’s possible to get non-AI developers to be excited about the Semantic Web.

By chance, I hosted a session on the Social Web + the Semantic Web. My original intent was to get people to talk about Semantic Web technologies and businesses that are crucial to the success of Social Web applications. But, it turned out that the audiences were very interested to explore the possibility of using Semantic Web technologies as differentiators to help them to stand out in the fast-change social media world. If you missed the discussion, you can find our discussion topics in this Twitter stream. Also you can find materials covered in my Social Web + Semantic Web slides.

I’m convinced that Twitter is useful (sometimes). While I was attending the conference, I sent my wife the Twitter stream of the SocialDevCamp (#SocialDevCamp). She was able to follow my session and see photos of me in an almost real-time experience.

Download the paper and get the code.

Try out our anonymous client and server demos for SMOB.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch wrote an interesting blog post on Monday about a “decentralised Twitter”, which was picked up by Dave Winer, Marc Canter and Chris Saad amongst others.

I’m happy to say that we have recently described and shown how this can work. Alex has been the driving force behind a paper that we (Alexandre Passant, Tuukka Hastrup, Uldis Bojars and I) have written for SFSW 2008, demonstrating (a prototype called SMOB for) distributed / decentralised microblogging:

Microblogging: A Semantic Web and Distributed Approach

The prototype uses FOAF and SIOC to model microbloggers, their properties, account and service information, and the microblog updates that users create. A multitude of publishing services can ping one or a set of aggregating servers as selected by each user, and it is important to note that users retain control of their own data through self hosting.

The aggregate view of microblogs use ARC2 for storage / querying and Exhibit for the user interface. Security and privacy are open issues, but can be addressed in some part by requiring OpenID authentication.

The SMOB prototype code (both the semantic microblogging publishing client and server-based web service) is available here. You can install your own client and post to our demo server (set up today by Tuukka) here. There are some pictures below of it in use:

Latest updates rendered in Exhibit

Map view of latest updates with Exhibit

Global architecture of distributed semantic microbloggging

Related posts:

• Marc Canter
• Dave Winer
• Michael Arrington
• Chris Saad

Some people are crazy about Twitter. I don’t. I joined Twitter when it first came out. After few weeks, my enthusiasm for micro-blogging has gone to nil.

Recently I saw Twitter discussions in few different blog posts. I wonder if I should start using Twitter again? After some thinking, my conclusion that is that it’s better for me to stay away from Twitter.

Why I gave up on Twitter:

1. Don’t want to tell the world what’s on my mind too often.
2. Posting too much Twitter messages can gave people (esp. my boss) a false impression about me being a slacker.
3. Posting Twitter messages can’t advance my writing skill.
4. Don’t feel comfortable with strangers following me on Twitter.
5. I’m already too occupied with other social media (Facebook, my blogs and gnizr etc.)

Do you share my experience? Or are you a Twitter lover and have a different perspective?

Let me know.

The discussion over the definition of blogging is as old as the practice itself. For some all a blog is is a publication mechanism - thus any use of that mechanism is blogging; for others it is a certain publication and interaction behaviour through the web. One aspect of the application of social media infrastructure that I'm becoming more aware of is the level of engagement. For example, a typical blogger may write posts that link to other bloggers, and is likely to follow up with comments posted on their own blog. In addition, such a blogger may well respond to posts that link to their blog via the comments on that other blog or via posts on their own blog. Such an individual is engaged in the blogosphere.

At the other extreme, we have those who write blog posts that never link to other bloggers and, though they may receive a large number of comments, don't respond to these comments via their own commenting system. Such an individual is, we might say, a non-engaged blogger. Another example of this being the tweeter who has plenty of followers but who never issues an @'d tweet.

While the definition of blogging may still be in debate, the behaviours above can certainly be determined from pretty clear signals automatically. I'm guessing that someone has already done this analysis - anyone know of a paper?

An area of social media research that this measure has impact on is social network analysis. Typically, when inducing a social network from blog data, researchers look for reciprocal links. However, many political bloggers, while being of the non-engaged type, catalyze discussion in other blogs, or even simply within the many comments that each of their posts receive. Thus, one might argue, the simple notion of a tie between nodes should be abandoned for a model that can capture the different types of behaviour precipitated by different types of applications of social media publication technology.

I've long be suspicious of the wholesale adoption of real world social network analytics applied to social media, and blogging in particular (just as I am skeptical of the use of terms like 'conversation' when applied to this data). The above ideas, to me, seem to capture something of the reason for this discomfort.

I’m envious of you kids starting out now. Back in 2009 when I started at UMBC I got my new quad core MacBook running Leopard. Of course Lynx and Cougar have come out since then, and they run fine on my machine. A little slow running iLife ’12 but that is to be expected with the haptics they are running through the new iPods





Of course it doesn’t really matter how fast iLife is, I still get along fine online. That is where everything is these days. I opted for a 500GB drive when I got my machine, but it is barely full, four years later. Everything is online. I use Google Documents for the few text docs I need to exchange with some backwater friends and keep everything else in my personal cloud out in Rwanda. Lack of natural resources, a growing population and increased prices from India and China, drove outsourcing to new locations. Technically, my data isn’t in Rwanda, it is all over the world. Natural disasters aren’t a thing of the past, but it is maintained by les Rwandais. It works fine as any in Bangladesh or Peru that my friends use. Enough about my extracurricular activities and me.





After Blackboard lost their patent suit while I was in high school, a swarm of open source systems sprang up to devour the previously off limits IP. UMBC switched over to one of them a year or so ago and it has been great. Built on the Mozilla Facebook platform, it has enabled collaborative wet dreams that professors trying to prep us for the real world could have only dreamed of when I was in junior high. Hell, Facebook barely existed back then. They had millions of users, sure but the interface was so simple. I looked you guys up before the tour and good job, you’ve learned how to use the fine grained access control, you’ll appreciate that in four years. Social graphing and reputation markets were just topics of research, but you use them everyday.





You may have heard of professors turning off the Internet back in 2008, that doesn’t happen at UMBC, it is used throughout the disciplines. Now that the semantic web is more reality than pipe dream, the web is more useful than ever. That required system they are quoting down at OIT and the bookstore is just a minimum, you might want to get something a little more powerful depending on your major. Right, you’ll want something more powerful whatever you are doing. Granted, much your system will exist online, but much of the rendering is done locally, so get an Intelvidia or AMD-ATI card in whatever you get. School is what you learn, but it is also who you network with, now more than ever in this connected world.





The world may be a little hotter, and gas a lot more expensive, but it sure seems like web technologies have helped make it a better place. Whatever you do here, you will be connected to everyone else on campus and around the world. No longer hindered by travel requirements, you may get a guest lecture from a Swedish designer on an all night design treatise or an explanation of biochemistry from Vietnam. They don’t call it an Honors University for nothing.





Thank you for visiting UMBC today. I know being outside in the big blue box on an August day in 2013 isn’t exactly your idea of fun, but it is good once in a while. For those using the iRobot telepresence units, please send them back to the Commons before you logout or you will be charged extra. School is a place you learn, not a place you are, but you might want to get on campus once in a while. You have such opportunity ahead of you and I think you have made a good decision choosing to go to UMBC. Class of 2018, my caps lock off for you! Sorry, that was a very very lame joke that I know only two of you understood.

I heard (via an old-school radio broadcast- Mario Armstrong's Digital Café short program) about an interesting SocialDevCampEast event this coming Saturday, May 10 (8:30 am - 1o:00 pm) at the University of Baltimore. This is described as "an Unconference for Thought Leaders of the Future Social Web". It would appear that over 160 participants have signed up in advance, including UMBC folks (UMBC is a sponsor). This is one in a series of BarCamp workshop conferences distinguished as low-overhead, self-organized, user-generated, open participation style events. The event site lists a number of diverse proposed sessions, many of which should be of interest to our class members. Frankly, I'm shocked I've not heard about this event via class or our blog! (Wish I could attend, but it's not to be).

ACM’s TechCareers site offers “career-related resources, news and job postings for IT and engineering professions”. They recommend that IT professionals and those seeking to become one, should try Branding Yourself With A Blog.

“… Certainly personal branding isn’t a new concept, but the future of personal branding could be in at your fingertips—with a blog. One of the first steps in creating a brand for yourself is to make your blog visible. Post meaningful entries, comment on your industry’s top blogs, or simply gain a regular readership. “Visibility creates opportunities,” says Schawbel, a social media specialist at EMC Corporation. He believes that when you brand yourself, the competition becomes irrelevant. “The goal of personal branding is to be recruited based on your brand, not applying for jobs,” Schawbel says. …”

This is especially good advice for students.

A while back I posted links to some research on Web 2.0 tools and scientific collaboration. For anyone who might be interested, there is a Workshop on Research 2.0 offered as part of the next Conference on e-Social Science. The call for papers was recently posted, and abstracts are due on 15 May, 2008.

Excerpt from the workshop description:

Participation in online, social networking activities has become highly popular in contemporary society. Commercial websites integrating with a range of Web 2.0 tools have created a new discourse, replacing the static, top-down nature of Web 1.0. Web 2.0 is also changing the way we do research. It has been envisioned that a well-designed social networking site can facilitate communications between scientists at different physical locations and in different disciplines, and can encourage them or at least make it easier for them to share their data and findings, and possibly recreate and reuse these resources. Research 2.0 is the term commonly used to describe the extension of Web 2.0 tools to support academic and other research. But do all lessons we have learnt from generic social networking sites apply to scientific social networking ones? Or are there any substantial differences between the two, given the specific needs of users working in scientific field?

Format of the workshop

This full-day workshop aims to map current territory of Research 2.0 (What Web 2.0 applications exist in research and how have they been adopted), and to identify the opportunities and challenges in the development and implementation of Research 2.0. It will consist of a number of short papers and a discussion session identifying promising research directions and initiating interdisciplinary collaboration.

This year’s International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2008) will host a workshop on Social Data on the Web. Submitted papers are due by July 25, 2008.

“The 1st Social Data on the Web workshop (SDoW2008) co-located with the 7th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2008) aims to bring together researchers, developers and practitioners involved in semantically-enhancing social media websites, as well as academics researching more formal aspect of these interactions between the Semantic Web and Social Media.”

Social media systems is all about information sharing, so its inevitable that it will have strong ties to Semantic Web technologies. Moreover, the ties will go both ways. Social media needs ways to annotate information objects with sharable data and meta data that can be understood by machines. Semantic computing systems focused on sharing data and ontologies can benefit from social computing systems that offer users easy ways to collaboratively develop, publish, comment on and link to their output.

…but unfortunately due to a major review here next week, I have a lot of presentation preparation to do.

Anyway, if I were going to XTech 2008 tomorrow in Dublin, here’s what I’d go to see (thanks to the XTech 2008 personal scheduler):

9:45 Wednesday, 7 May 2008

Opening keynote

David Recordon (Six Apart)

11:00 Wednesday, 7 May 2008

Using socially authored content to provide new routes through existing content archives

Rob Lee (Rattle Research)

11:45 Wednesday, 7 May 2008

Browsers on the move: The year in review, the year ahead

Michael(tm) Smith (W3C)

14:00 Wednesday, 7 May 2008

Here Be Dragons: Knowing Where the World Ends

Leigh Dodds (Ingenta)

14:45 Wednesday, 7 May 2008

Linked Data Deployment

Daniel Lewis (OpenLink Software)

9:00 Thursday, 8 May 2008

OpenSocial, a standard programming model for the Social Web

Matthew Trewhella (Google)

9:45 Thursday, 8 May 2008

Creating portable social networks with microformats

Jeremy Keith (Clearleft)

11:00 Thursday, 8 May 2008

The Programmes Ontology

Tom Scott (BBC Audio and Music Interactive), Yves Raimond (Queen Mary, University of London), Patrick Sinclair (BBC Audio and Music Interactive), Nicholas Humfrey (BBC Audio and Music Interactive)

11:45 Thursday, 8 May 2008

Ni Hao, Monde: Connecting communities across cultural and linguistic boundaries

Simon Batistoni (Flickr)

14:00 Thursday, 8 May 2008

SemWebbing the London Gazette

Jeni Tennison (The Stationery Office), John Sheridan (The Office of Public Sector Information)

14:45 Thursday, 8 May 2008

Data portability for whom? Some psychology behind the tech

Gavin Bell (Nature)

16:00 Thursday, 8 May 2008

Google Data APIs on the move: innovation vs. Standards Compliance

Frank Mantek (Google)

16:45 Thursday, 8 May 2008

The attention economy is only just around the corner

Ian Forrester (BBC)

9:00 Friday, 9 May 2008

Data Portability with SIOC and FOAF

Uldis Bojārs (DERI Galway), John Breslin (DERI, National University of Ireland, Galway), Alexandre Passant (LaLIC institute (at Université Paris Sorbonne) and Electricité de France R&D)

(Here is the full schedule.)

Growth, Slow and Painful



HTML 5 is not set to finished for 10 to 15 more years. It will provide many needed upgrades. This includes a much desired concept: HTML5 doesn’t just define how valid documents are to be parsed, it also defines how parsing should work if documents are invalid, ill-formed, and broken, so that browser vendors can make their products fully interoperable with each other.



But that's 10 year away. In "web time," that is an eternity. So what do we do in the mean time? HTML 5 (or some other well, thought out solution) will be a new standard for developers and designers to use. Proper use of this new standard will allow for more semantic, consistent web pages.



The reason this sounds like a dream is most of the content on the web adhears to nothing. Perhaps, we should fill the next 5 to 10 years with this: teaching standards and CSS. Before semantic web, there's got to be a better mark up language. Before the better mark up language, people have to even get the point of standards. Part of those standards include seperating content from presentation, thus the the need for CSS.



None of this change we want is going to happen over night. As quickly as trends come and go on the web, the languages that it is written change at a much slower rate. There is a hodpoge of HTML version in use. Despite the fact that CSS 2 was released in 1997, many web developers and designs do not know or do not use CSS despite its obvious benefits. CSS adoption has been hinder by the very same thing as HTML has: cross-browser inconsistencies.



So when we push to teach standards to ourselves and to others, perhaps we should also include the browser programmers in this. Perhaps a half step in the progression is to put enough pressure on browser developers to provide similar and consistent output.



Where does that leave our grand plan?

1. Consistent browser output
2. Acceptance and practice of standards
3. Thought-out, more semantic markup
4. The web as it should be
• semantic data and content
• separate content and presentation mark-up
• robust page renderings and visualizations

To move foward, we need to hit each of these points square on the head. We need walk before we run. If you want use the popular wild west example, we need to bring law and order before we can advance. So what would this all look like?



I would love to something like this: (take from A List Apart)

With this, there should separate file for styling the output. Inside the layout blocks, should be semantically defined (I leave this how to the semantic researchers) content and data. A more semantic DOM would be probably help.



These features fully enabled and in practice, I can see search, api's, and data mining becoming far more practical and powerful. Advertising will continue to blossom; if it is easier for machine to understand a page, then the software can present better target ads.



Speakng of ads and money, the last and thing that would help all this is money. Search, advertisements, and business need to be able to see the clear benefits from these efforts. Before a company would ponder why it would need a website, now most companies launch a website at their conception and wouldn't do business with out one. Perhaps, one day, we could convince companies that they shouldn't launch a new venture without first creating a standards-based, accessible, semantic web site.



I look forward the to web of the future.

I think the web in 2013 won't be completely unrecognizable to the web users of today. To project where the web will be in 5 years, I think it's helpful to look at where the web was 5 years ago.



The web in 2003:





A lot of the web sites that were known to only a few early adopters in 2003 are quite mainstream now. So the websites and ideas that will be wildly popular in 2013 probably exist now in some form.



Picking out which websites today will really take off in the next five years is difficult. I think that mashups will continue to grow in popularity. Commercial mashups will be created that pay licensing fees for their data.



I see semantic web technologies primarily being used behind the scenes to improve the web of today. The average web users of 2013 probably won't know what the semantic web is, but it will enable them to find the information they need every day. Sites like FreeBase will continue to grow and applications will be built to take advantage of their free structured data. Improvements in natural language processing will help the semantic web to use unstructured data.



Applications will continue to move off of the desktop and onto the web. Already slimmed down free versions of desktop applications are appearing online. GoogleDocs and Adobe Photoshop are good examples. Cheap online storage providers like JungleDisk or XDrive will start to replace large hard drives in home PCs. In the next few years I would not be surprised to see laptops being sold with only a web browser for an operating system.



Accessing the web through mobile devices will become more and more common, so more sites will appear that are optimized for viewing on those devices.



Watching TV shows online will become quite common. Because of this, advertisers will be forced to adapt and find new ways to reach consumers. Companies will try to create or buy internet memes. For example, a fast food restaurant will buy icanhascheezburger.com and turn it into a marketing slogan.



I think the web of 2013 will be an improvement on the web of today. I believe that it will become easier to find information and manage personal data.

I remember discovering the internet in 1996. Back then I accessed the world wide web via AOL 3.0, connecting at a blazing speed of 14.4 kbps which was enough for me to read my online message, join chat rooms filled with young kids from around the country, and to surf ‘web pages’ that contained useful information about a given subject. Back then, web pages were static, images were low resolution and contained a handful of colors, and there was little or no standard methods driving web development.



Fast forward 10 years. The web today is cooked up in a variety of languages and frameworks and delivered to us using complex platforms that are built on a foundation of accessibility and scalability. Pages are beautifully styled, content is polished, and audiences are targeted and information is abundant. The evolution from the web of 1996 to the web of today was unlike anything we’ve seen before.



That brings us to the future. At this pace, what will the internet be like in 5 years – 2013? Some things will evolve faster than others; old ways will die out or become popular again; some new exciting technology may be introduced that changes all dynamics of the inter net, and if I had an idea of what it was, I would be rich. =)



So what will change?



Everything will be HD by default



I am a self-admitted news junky, so I spend a lot of time going through the hordes of websites providing news from various sources and reading user comments that help shape a stories impact. The single most frustrating thing about more of the news I read, though, is that the photos accompanying the story are low resolution – often 400x200 or some other 1996-era size. I predict news sites, especially mainstream sites like Reuters or CNN, will have galleries of HD pictures with each story. Each of these sites currently has a ‘pictures of the week’ or ‘pictures of the month’ photo galleries, but the images are low res. These sites feature stunning pictures that really have an impact on the story they are telling, but without access to the full quality, the whole story can never be told. So by 2013, most of the pictures we see on the net will be in high definition. The following prediction will make this possible.





Bandwidth – Not a problem



According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, the US is currently ranked 15th in the global broadband market, and that rank is falling. Bad business practices and lack of competition has stifled the growth of US broadband capabilities and we are not seeing the types of speed that countries like South Korea or most European countries. Hopefully the next president will be more open to the idea of net neutrality and take seriously our need for better access to the internet. Better broadband and more bandwidth will allow the publishing of high definition photos and video because more people will have access to them. Right now, bandwidth is the only roadblock standing in the way of the high definition web. (Companies save money by not publishing HD content; I personally find it disgusting that telecoms seem to be turning bandwidth into a commodity).





Web 3.0



The ‘semantic web’ is still a relatively new subject, with researchers scrambling to find a way to implement the technology that will once again change the way the web works. While I believe we will see successes in our progression to the semantic web, I think there will be intermediate steps along the way that promote ideas of the semantic web but lack the fully autonomous ‘agents’ that are at the core of the semantic web. We have to see a migration that is on the scale of Web 2.0 – that is we have to see incentives for business to invest in change. The incentive that is attracting companies now is advertising revenue. Mainstream companies bode well to develop rich content that invites user contribution, attracting an audience that can be advertised to. These mainstream companies play host to ‘average Joe’ users and those who are not web enthusiast who track the changes of the web as part of their thinking and understanding.



That’s why I think we will see a ‘Web 3.0’ before we see the full blown semantic web as envisioned by Tim Berners-Lees of the world. Web 3.0 will first attract users via quality, usable information found by intelligent searches and delivered automatically with the help of rdf-like languages. After successful broad-scale beta-like trials that see users utilizing Web 3.0, the big push will happen and mainstream companies will once again latch on and attract what I call the average Joes. The transition will be measurable, natural and one that will serve as the next platform for the evolving web.



Wrap up



After seeing how fast Web 2.0 and current standards came about, 5 years in the internet world will seem like a lifetime for developing technology. Hybrid applications will become the norm, IPTV will overtake regular TV, and personal web spaces will bind to users in a similar way as cell phones. Content will be, high-def be default, available for sharing and circulation, come majority from users like you and me. It is my hopes that the internet stays free from political manhandling and corporate strongholds. As net neutrality gains traction, it will the responsibility of the ‘you and me’s to ensure the internet’s freedom. The internet is the most democratic form of medium ever to exist, and the same power that is driving the web today (us) will keep it moving tomorrow.





References



“XHTML™ 1.0 The Extensible HyperText Markup Language (Second Edition)”, W3C,

26 January 2000. 1 May 2008. http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/



Schatz, Amy. “U.S. Broadband Rank: 15th and Dropping”. 2007. Wall Street Journal, 1 May 2008.



Yihong-Ding. A simple picture of Web evolution. ZDNet, 5 November 2007. 1 May 2008. < http://blogs.zdnet.com/web2explorer/?p=408>

Whenever you need information to help you make a decision, wherever you are, that is an opportunity for and computing technologies and the Internet to help provide the answers. This basic premise underlies much of the computing revolution over the past few decades, although in recent years much emphasis has shifted toward the wherever you are aspect, as students and business professionals embrace mobile Internet-enabled devices. What sort of information are we talking about? Of course there’s plenty of well-structured “data” like information to be had- everything from stock quotes, product prices and information, sports scores, weather, and descriptions about people, places and things in the world, to name a few examples. As the relative cost of storage and computing has plummeted, rich multimedia content is now commonplace- images, audio, and now videos are ubiquitous on the Internet. But our most recent Internet developments have encouraged broad-based publication of more information of the “knowledge” sort. As a society we are increasingly valuing news, blogs, messages between friends, about people and events, and social commentary that the masses themselves are generating. We refer to this as the long-tail effect in media production [1]. I was struck by the statistic Akshay Java cited earlier this week- that publicly generated text content dominates professionally edited text content by a factor of four or five to one [2].



Today and tomorrow’s Internet capabilities are truly dependent on wireless communication technologies and inexpensive electronics- those of us in the software business should not forget that. Computer electronics products allow us to consume all kinds of information in a multitude of forms to suit our lifestyles- some of us sit at our computers reading e-mail, web pages, blogs and videos; others listen or watch streaming multimedia on their home entertainment systems; still others listen to podcasts portable audio players; and the mobile computing crowd does all of this and more on their computer-enabled phones (or are they cell phone-enabled computers?). In the next five years we will see all of these modalities grow in popularity- as home computers blend in with entertainment systems to support diverse sources of streaming audio and video (TiVo, Sling, Roku, Apple TV), and we take the most miniaturized forms of these electronic capabilities with us everywhere (even on highly active excursions like hiking, climbing, running, boating & swimming!) [3]. Mobile devices will be made tremendously more effective and convenient with Internet sites, services and applications geared toward convenience- beyond local content (traffic, shopping, weather, news, and events) and multimedia playback to include diverse communications- phone, messaging and even social networking [4,5].



When looking five years ahead, however, the most notable theme I anticipate is a simple twist on the long-standing premise that I began with: Whenever and wherever you would like to produce information, that is an opportunity for and computing technologies and particularly the Internet to help provide the means. We’ll be doing more than taking some geo-referenced pictures and uploading them- we’re talking about providing the context and commentary; micro-blogging on a massive and distributed scale; crowd-sourced coverage of live events; and even organizing flash mobs to create the events [6]. We will not just be consuming the information out there- we will be interacting with the world, and each other, and literally making the news.



I need information… and I need to produce information!



References:



[1] Akshay Java, class lecture on 2008-04-30 http://socialmedia.typepad.com/blog/files/socialmedia.pdf



[2] “The Long Tail” described on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail



[3] Travis Hudson “All Nike Shoes to Become Nike+ Compatible”, article in Gizmodo 2007-03-26 http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/portable-media/all-nike-shoes-to-become-nike%252B-compatible-247097.php



[4] Ellen Uzelac, “Mobile Travelers: Wireless devices, such as GPS units and cell phones, are transforming the way we vacation”, article in Baltimore Sun 2008-05-04

http://www.baltimoresun.com/travel/bal-tr.techtravel04may04,0,7453953.story



[5] "Mobile Social Network" described on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_social_network



[6] Madison Park, “At harbor, 80s-tinged flash”, article in Baltimore Sun 2008-05-04 http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/bal-md.rickroll04may04,0,4649727.story

How will the web look in 5 years? There are two ways to approach this question: one is to look at what the newest technologies are, and then pick out which will live and which will die. The other approach is to identify a major trend. I will take the latter approach, partially because I just don't use the internet often enough to have a good idea of what the newest technologies are, and partially because I like abstract theory much more than practice.



First, let us recall how not the web, but computers, looked not five, but fifteen years ago. That old old time when people were using DOS and when GUIs were a new thing. Think of the way people interacted with a computer back then -- through a command line interface -- the user issues a command and the computer executes it. Interaction with a computer was like a conversation. But then came a fancy Windows GUI and everything was done by clicking on buttons. Now the computer isn't the other side of a conversation, but a place to put the tools you use in. Those tools being applications used to manipulate documents, files, and their subparts. So the CLI to GUI shift is from interaction with "the computer" to interaction with what it manipulates, data. I am not saying that one kind of interaction is better than another, but merely that what the user interacts with is different. But since the average user would rather directly manipulate objects rather than have a civilized conversation with an automaton, the GUI interface won in popularity.



Now look back at the shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0: In Web 1.0 we had static web pages which were reached by typing a URL in the browser. So we have the user request a page, and the browser retrieves it, and that's it (similar to the CLI interaction, isn't it?) In today's Web 2.0 we have shifted our focus, again, to the content on the web, as opposed to the medium through which it is delivered. What I mean by this is that YouTube is used to retrieve a video, Facebook is used to interact with a person, Wikipedia is used to get information, etc. This shift to viewing websites as tools becomes more apparent when APIs rather than the websites themselves are used, or when mashups are created.



But this shift is not yet complete, which becomes apparent during the interaction with these websites. When someone goes to Google or Ask or YouTube or Wikipedia the first thing they do is enter search terms, and then they get their data. Even when we talk about searching the internet we sometimes say "Let me ask Wikipedia." "Wikipedia," clearly, is an entity when we look at it like that, and the next step would be to make the search engine's presence less apparent. Today's browsers are already on their way to make searches more transparent, if you enter search terms into Firefox's URL bar, for example, it will sometimes guess and immediately call Google's "I'm feeling lucky", or sometimes it will send you to the search results. Plugins and programs like Mash Maker go another step and truly act as tools that manipulate the data on the web.



Another way in which the web is becoming a tool rather than an entity is through desktop applications that use the web without explicitly invoking the browser. Yes, these have been present throughout the history of the web, but with higher bandwidths and wireless internet in more and more places they are becoming much more usable and much more popular.



So in 2013 our interaction with the web will be a lot more transparent, and more intimately integrated with the desktop experience.

In 2013 the web will be a different but still very similar to the web of 2008. Since the web is built around the people using the web and people have a tendency to not change all that fast, so will the web change: not very rapidly. We will still likely have almost all of the technologies we use today with only a few additions, if any. Technologies always take time to catch on, even major breakthroughs. It took time for things like MySpace and Facebook to catch on, and it will take time for other technologies to catch on.

One technology that will exist in a more advanced form is the semantic web. I believe that Semantic Web technologies will play a role in the future web but not in the web that will exist 5 years from now. The semantic web is a complicated idea that will be revolutionary when it catches on, but cannot possibly catch on until it has been perfected.

AJAX will be a driving factor in the web of 2013. It already plays an important part in many web applications and is progressing very rapidly. As more developers learn to use it and understand how easy it is to implement, and how easy it makes their applications to use, AJAX and similar technologies will become far more prevalent. I do not believe more advanced technologies like semantic web technologies will be common in 2013, they will exist in a more advanced state than they currently do but will still not be widely use, but, current technologies like JSON, AJAX, and many of the web frameworks currently employed in Web 2.0 will have made significant advances.

Another key enhancement that will come about within 5 years is an increase in bandwidth. Video and flash applications are already becoming quite common on the web and their content and quality is limited only by the speed of the average user’s internet connection. Internet2 helped to create the high speed Abilene Network and the National Lambdarail project that is a start to much higher speeds than were previously possible. It is only a matter of time before technologies like those make it to the internet.

It is my opinion that the every time an advancement is made with web technology and usage, a bad aspect of this new tech is introduced but is immediately countered by a good as aspect that that same technology introduced. Facebook and other social networking applications allow unscrupulous users to ‘spy’ on people, but also allow people with similar ideas to congregate together in groups and share ideas and experiences that they otherwise would not have previously been able to share. The world will be no better or worse but things will easier for everyone; people with good and people with bad intentions.

Internet2 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet2

AJAX - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX

Slides - http://www.slideshare.net/hchen1/semantic-web-20-381520

I am going to take the slightly pessimistic view and say that I don't believe there will be any revolution of the web in the next five years. Evolution, along existing lines will take place, but I don't believe anything major will come along and displace what we currently know as the web. I also expect the "Semantic Web" to still be gaining traction, but at its currently slow pace.



Perhaps the most significant difference is that there will be more "small screen" browsers accessing the web than "full screen" browsers. Mobile phones with real web browsers, will dominate the the User-Agent HTTP request header in server logs. The iPhone is just the beginning of enabling full use of the web on small mobile phone screens. In five years, many more people will be surfing the web from their mobile phone than from their laptop or desktop.



HTML5 will be a standards document, but browser support for it will not be complete, and even fewer sites will make use of it [1]. The good news is that HTML5 adds some minor semantic markup to the HTML specification, but it will not bring about the semantic web revolution [2]. I believe blogging software and other content management systems will have built-in support for semantically tagging content, but the majority of websites will either not use it or still develop sites with tools that do not handle semantic markup.



"Web 2.0" will have gone mainstream. Users will have their choice among a large selection of mostly interoperable online office suites including photo and video manipulation applications. And just about everything else will be accessed through a web browser, native platform applications will be thought of as "old school".



All in all, nothing revolutionary will happen in the next five years, only evolutionary extension of the current technologies.



[1] [http://blog.whatwg.org/html5-geekmeet]

[2] [http://www.alistapart.com/articles/previewofhtml5/]

I foresee the greatest changes in our society during the next five years occurring not as the result of any great new technological breakthrough, but rather as the result of the logical progression of current technology.



In the next five years the speed and ease of web publishing will economically shift information providers to primarily online distribution, rendering newspapers obsolete. This shift will threaten traditional notions of copyright and intellectual property. To cope with these changes the television, radio, and music industries will undergo radical changes.



Virtually all information of any kind will be online, and people will simply never look for information if it is not online. Libraries will move their collection into full text online documents and then shut their doors. Handheld book like electronic PDF readers will become the norm. For people who still prefer paper there will be a cheap printing and binding service (online order of course) that prints PDFs as hardcover or paperback books, and then mails them to customers.



Employers will all “google”, “facebook”, etc their employees first, and these results will highly influence their choices. Your online reputation will become more important than your credit score, and may cause you to be turned down for a job or refused for apartment rentals.



This will cause search engine optimization to intensify. Organizations will spring up to both protect your reputation, and damage the reputations of others. General lawlessness will prevail upon the web. Search engine optimization packages and intelligent personal data crawling agents will become like guns in the Wild West. There will be shootouts through the streets of the net, with nations, companies, and individuals vying for control of valuable online real estate in the forms of domain names, search results for query words, and “true” semantic information.



The victor will be determined by who possess the most technical skills, or who hires the most talented coders. These shootouts will pollute the web with false information that will leave the technical have-nots and the poor swimming in a sea of falsehood. Trust propagation algorithms will only be as effective (and trustworthy) as the coder who wrote them. The gap between the rich and the poor will increase. Everyone will have a voice, but some will shout louder than others and no one will know who or what to trust.



The problem might even get bad enough that someone will solve it.

Five years ago, the web was a static environment by and large.  There wasn't the data sharing, and at that, data-focused web applications of today.  We were starting to see the emersion of online retail, which pushed a lot of the technologies that we see today.  Now in truth, the web in 5 years will likely have spawned hundreds, if not thousands, of new technologies and focuses.  But here, I'd like to focus on one area which I believe will drive the tech focus of the next 5 years - GeoLocation.

The internet in the year 2013 will be vastly different than the internet we know and love today. For one thing, it will probably be much more regulated. Long gone will be the days of tax free shopping, and that “Wild West” feeling. Instead we find the internet replaced with a heavily secured, and monitored version that, thanks to the failure of net neutrality, has been molded into a cable tv like model where users pay depending on the content they want.

Semantic web technologies play a larger role in the web in 2013. Users have tired of entering the same profile information on every new website they decide to join. This fact allowed foaf and other similar formats to amass great popularity throughout the internet. Once a user has created a profile that contains semantic data, it’s a matter of simply accessing the data from other websites.

In order to usher in this new internet age users could be made more knowledge-able so that they would be able to format their semantic data. Web sites could also provide scripts that would format their existing profiles into ways that would work with the semantic web of the future. A few modern day blogs already produce a foaf output that users can utilize.

The internet will be a better place for the typical user. For instance, people will no longer have to worry about the numerous scams they can be subjected to via the web. Spammers will be held more accountable because they can easily be tracked down and dealt with accordingly. Parents wont have to worry about what kind of content their children could be getting into because they can control what control what kind of websites they subscribe to via their monthly bill. However the users that new and loved the old internet will have to be coaxed into embracing these new restrictions.

In 2013, the web will be fairly similar to the one we all know and love today. There will be several key differences however.



The first and most obvious will be the adoption of XHTML 1.0 Transitional as a standard. Some web sites will be using pure XHTML, but the mainstream will be stuck on 1.0 Transitional due to the high percentage of users still running Windows XP and Internet Explorer 8.0 (the last supported version of IE on XP) with its horrific XHTML Strict rendering.



Another key difference will be the proliferation of high-resolution video advertisements. With 50Mbit fibre-to-the-home being standard, and 100Mbit available in some startup markets, high-definition video ads will have all but replaced the static and low-res animated graphics of 2008. Upon visiting sites, users will be bombarded with motion, forcing them to click on the ads or risk being sent into epileptic seizure.



Instead of the traditional Flash, video ads will be streamed out in standards-based MPEG-5 which will become the ISO standard for compressed 2160p High-Definition content. Thanks to the standards-based codecs used, playback in browsers will be accomplished via built-in code, no special plug-in will be required to view the embedded videos.



By 2013, frames and tables as layout crutches will have been all but eliminated from modern web sites. Instead, well-placed div tags will denote content while CSS scripts will tie everything together, effectively separating content from layout once and for all. All still using XHTML 1.0 Transitional however...



Instead of writing code by hand or using current craptastic programs that generate unreadable code, web developers will use a free open source toolkit for WYSIWYG development that generates completely readable XHTML and CSS code (including ECMAScript glue code that automagically works around known browser bugs/deficiencies).



These tools will use advanced NLP algorithms to automatically add semantic attribute data to pages. Users can manually tweak this attribute data (which will be represented as RDF embedded in XHTML), but for the most part the automatic processing will greatly increase the searchability and indexability of all web documents by providing standard semantic attributes which can be used by both search engines, mashup engines and query services.



As for the question of whether or not the web will be "better" than it is now... Things will be much more standards-compliant, although not necessarily compliant to the standards of 2013, but by todays standards an incredible improvement. In fact browsers of 2013 will block and refuse to render any pages which do not validate due to unspecified behavior. Because advertisements are more graphical, they tend to be more distracting than what we deal with today, but those same technologies allow for advanced interfaces with fluid 3-D effects and transitions making everything feel much more interactive.



But when it comes to actual content, people will be using this new enhanced web in much the same way as we use ours now, it will simply be flashier, interfaces will be more animated and fluid, and it will be much less bandwidth-efficient.



References:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XHTML



http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/24/h20_sewer_rollout/



http://www.devarticles.com/c/a/Web-Style-Sheets/DIV-Based-Layout-with-CSS/



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript