Collective Intelligence in Web 2.0
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Collective Intelligence in Web 2.0 José Luis de Vicente | [email protected] | Why 2005 may be as important for the be much more profitable after going public Web as 1995 was than the doomsayers predicted). A famil- iar dynamic: three giants of the informa- This year marks an important anniversary for tion economy competing to be the first to the Web. It’s not the anniversary of its crea- get their hands on the small company (like tion or its mass popularization. In 1995, Net- Flickr and Konfabulator for Yahoo, Keyhole or scape became the first Internet company to Dodgeball for Google) that has developed go public, thus opening the door to a new an innovative service that could turn out to economic era and the start of a new way of be the next killer app. An eye-catching, revo- conceiving the Web: not just a as a space re- lutionary technology being held up as the so- served for the few who passed its complex lution to all the Web’s problems (then it was initiation rites, but as a medium for the many; called Flash and everyone seemed to hate it; a mass medium. now it’s called AJAX, and for the moment, it’s not getting bad press). With its own brand Ten years down the line, many visionary con- new lexicon (folksonomies, RSS, tagging, so- sultants and bloggers see 2005 as a kind of cial software, APIs) and a catchy label that second chance for the Web. Or at least for sums it all up as a marketable brand. Forget the kind of Web that was born in 1995 and the dot-coms; welcome to Web 2.0. seemed to die for good in 2001, when the risk capital tap in Silicon Valley ran dry and the Web 2.0 is the dream that, little by little and famous “dot com bubble” burst, taking with without making too much noise, has been it dozens of entrepreneurs in casual dress taking shape in the kitchens of the Internet and offices furnished with ridiculously over- industry over the last two years. An in-depth priced Aeron chairs. Obviously the decline of re-invention of the strategies and architec- the dot-com era wasn’t the end of anything tures that are the bases for online services truly important (in fact, it was the begin- and promise to lay the web’s foundations for ning of a much more active and interesting the next decade. A model in which ‘library of web, consisting of a blogosphere, wikis and Babel’ metaphors will be obsolete, because smart mobs). But unlike the 1995 web, the there will less and less closed documents to new web that is being shaped today may store and distribute. In the new web, the have truly far-reaching effects. The promises metaphors to work with are the radar for are exciting, the technologies spectacularly monitoring the dynamic evolution of objects, promising. And no one really knows yet what the control panel full of potentiometers, the the results will be. barometers that provide a real-time reading of the state of things. But maybe we can say On the face of it, the symptoms are familiar. it without leaving Borges: The new web is An excitable stock market. (Google, the true much more like The Aleph than the infinite star of the new economy, is turning out to library or the book of sand. 179 The good news is that the industry seems to that is opening up now. have learnt a lot from its mistakes the first time around, and the new revolution is not «The first web was fairly static, and it was ba- being built behind the backs on internet us- sically a “read only” affair. For the most part, ers, but rather with their indispensable col- we’d simply download text and images from laboration and complicity. The 2000-2001 remote sites that were updated periodically debacle clearly showed that the strategy with new text and graphics. » of considering users as simply passive con- sumers, whose level of participation can be Thanks to the combination of different limited to selecting checkboxes and com- technologies that have led to the AJAX pleting forms, was almost certain to fail. (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) stand- Specially when allowing users a degree of ard, Web 2.0 is no longer static, to the extent active participation turns them into much that the pages we download no longer ex- more efficient consumers (Amazon, Ebay). ist in a final and fixed state. Where before it The digital lifestyle promoted by Apple and was necessary to reload a page in order to the self-organised revolutions of the Blogo- replace one version of a file with another, sphere and Peer-to-Peer have convinced now its is possible to update pages as they the industry that people love to create and are loaded, so that the status is modified in share content, and are prepared to do most real time, based on the user’s decisions. See of the work (generate, distribute and clas- Google Suggest , for example, a service in sify) if they are given the appropriate tools which, as you type a query into the search to do it with. The ethic of the remix and the box, the search engine suggests the most derivative, helped along by the boom in ini- popular terms beginning with those char- tiatives such as Creative Commons licences acters, together with the number of results and their widespread support, found itself generated by each search. Or Google Maps, before an architecture that is open to a cer- a satellite and maps service in which the im- tain point, which allows me to combine and ages are loaded and displayed in real time, re-create my data with that of others using as we move around in a specific direction. attractive, flexible and dynamic interfaces that I can configure to my taste, courtesy of «[...] The first big shift came when the web the major online services. Of all of the Inter- became more of a read-write system. This net’s incarnations, Web 2.0 is the closest to was a huge change, and it’s still in progress. the vision of the Internet as a shared nerv- The big change in the read-write sphere ous system, a distributed global intelligence, came about because of applications such as where a structure of meanings emerges weblogs and wikis. Not only could people from collaborative processes developed by make their own sites, but they could update all its users. Even when these processes are them easily and rapidly. » as banal as labelling millions of photographs and assigning key words to them. After assuming the revolution of content publishing systems like weblogs and wikis, Three steps towards Web 2.0 the web 2.0 focus is moving from informa- tion to metainformation. The volume of Dan Gillmor, an expert in participatory jour- data generated is becoming so large that it nalism and author of the excellent We the is worthless unless accompanied by other Media report, gives a clear explanation of data that assigns a hierarchy and meaning the different historical stages of the Web, to it. The strategy of giving users the tools and how they differ from the transition stage to collectively classify information has been 180 defined as ‘folksonomy’, and it’s most popu- been the first important step towards an lar implementation are tags or labels. As automated and programmable web. To il- “super blogger” Jason Kottke sees it, if blogs lustrate it with an image, RSS allows you to democratised content publishing, then folk- extract the juice (the content) from a web sonomies are democratising information ar- page and throw away the peel (the design). chitecture. Users of Flickr, for example, don’t Once all the content in a page is codified in just share their photographs through the this feed (data flow), it can be periodically service. By assigning different labels that as- transferred to any other Web interface de- sociate meanings to the photographs, they signed by a different user. Initially, net users are constructing a large semantic structure have mainly used RSS to inform them when of images that can be explored in different a website is updated and what the new con- directions. Users of the social bookmarks tent is, but it is possible to do many other manager del.icio.us use keywords to label things with this standard: from providing their personal collection of links, thus gen- the latest timetable incidents for the London erating an accurate thematic classification underground, to real time monitoring of of the daily growth of the Web. The del.icio. share prices on the stock exchange. us community is implementing the most effective simulacrum of the old dream of a Following the popularisation of RSS, the Semantic Web, a Web that understands it- next important step has been to make the self. “application programming interfaces”, or APIs, of the most popular services available «The emerging web is one in which the ma- to net users. An API allows information to chines talk as much to each other as humans be extracted from the database of a major talk to machines or to other humans. As the online service (Google, Amazon, Flickr) and Net is the rough equivalent of an operating added to any other application that we cre- system, we’re learning to program the Web ate. It’s what allows us, for example, to in- itself. » clude a Google search box in another page.