Initial Web 2.0 mind-map

June 22nd, 2006

3 responses about “Initial Web 2.0 mind-map”

1. David Eddy said:
   June 23rd, 2006 at 12:54 pm

   Ed -

   I’ll take a shot at the “Making it easy for users to create content.”

   Given that humans are wonderfully creative & clearly computers tap into a major nerve… but humans tend to tremendously messy. It’s all well & good to create stuff, but then how is it organized so someone else can find it?

   I’d be willing to argue that a lot of “content”—particularly behind the corporate firewall—is “created” simply because someone could not find the 27 copies of pretty similiar content already scattered around the enterprise.

   Redundancy is ok to a point, but too much is too much.

   I’ve taken to asking these two questions:
   #1 - have you ever lost a document on your computer (not being able to find it when you need it counts as lost)?
   #2 - how much training as a catalog librarian do you have?

   Obviously most answer Yes! to #1 & No? to #2.

   I believe we need a mechanism to seriously help with #2.

   I’ve been looking at the RDF/OWL/ontology/semantics folks in the hopes they will have something positive to contribute. So far I see a lot of energetic handwaving, but precious little meat.

   Also re: “Emergence of tech-savvy users”… I have a 15 year-old who’s never not known having both a computer on his desk and high-speed access.

   He’s had ZERO training in any of his schooling on how to organize files & folders.

   Soooooooo… while Web 2.0 is a nice concept, I have serious reservations about some of the thinking about the basic foundations.

   - David

2. Ed said:
   June 23rd, 2006 at 4:44 pm

   David,

   Thanks for the comment … here are a couple of responses…

   You said: “Given that humans are wonderfully creative & clearly computers tap into a major nerve… but humans tend to tremendously messy. It’s all well & good to create stuff, but then how is it organized so someone else can find it?”

   ummm … how about google? and RSS? As an example, how on earth would I have known (or cared) whether you found this new little 1-day old website of mine, and the initial posting? I’ve known you for years, and we’ve exchanged lots of emails, but it never occurred to me to “organize” an e-mail blast to everyone in my address book about this new activity…

   You said: “I’d be willing to argue that a lot of “content”—particularly behind the corporate firewall—is “created” simply because someone could not find the 27 copies of pretty similiar content already scattered around the enterprise.”

   Frankly, I suspect that much of what goes on inside corporate firewalls is pretty stagnant and boring — and I’m happy to leave it there. I think Web 2.0 is more concerned with the 6 billion people (well,okay, maybe only 5.9 billion) OUTSIDE all of the firewalls.

   You said: “I’ve taken to asking these two questions:
   #1 - have you ever lost a document on your computer (not being able to find it when you need it counts as lost)?”

   Hey! You’re a loyal Mac user, right? Heard of Spotlight?

   You said “Also re: “Emergence of tech-savvy users”… I have a 15 year-old who’s never not known having both a computer on his desk and high-speed access.

   He’s had ZERO training in any of his schooling on how to organize files & folders.”

   Yeah … and I suspect that he doesn’t want to listen to his parent’s boring ideas about the ontologically correct way of doing things. Nor does he want to read the boring crap created by his parent’s generation. He wants to create his own (equally boring) crap, and and make it easy for others of his generation to find it — IF they want to. It may turn out that only one or two other people in the universe care about your son’s creative output — but that’s okay. One of the concepts related to Web 2.0 is the “long tail” of creating more stuff for smaller groups of consumers.

   Thanks for posting your comment; I wouldn’t have noticed it, but this nifty little iWeb program told me I had a message, with the same iconic notification that the Apple mail program uses. I have no idea how to mark it as “read”, but I’ll figure it out.

   Meanwhile, contemplate the awful reality that your son and his peers are now (or soon to be) in charge of the Internet. So we’d better start listening to what THEY want.

   Ed

3. David Eddy said:
   June 24th, 2006 at 12:03 pm

   Ed -

   I happily use Spotlight regularly. But it’s bounded by the stuff that I sort of know I have. For that it’s very effective.

   I wonder if MSFT’s Vista is going to have something as effective (having heard that WinFS has been “cancelled”)?

   I’m less interested in the public Internet (Google does a wonderful job) than the corporate intranet—”Enterprise Search.” So it’s very little about finding MY stuff & primarily finding stuff created by others that’s relevant to the project du jour.

   A major distinction between stuff on the Web & stuff behind the corporate firewall is that Web stuff to a large extent has been created to be found. Corporate stuff (I’m largely thinking of software here), created to solve business problems and often with very long life spans, was most decidedly not created with any idea of being found via a Google search. Internal stuff does not benefit from the existence of explicit links & popularity.

   Fast forward this to an approaching mini-Y2K challenge… what are companies going to do to remove social security number (a VERY popular primary key in many systems) from unnecessary use?

   Naive believers will expect to roll Google in & zingo they’ll easily find all those pesky SSNs.

   So far I’ve just begun to poke at this challenge.

   One manufacturing firm—driven by the CEO’s concern about Iron Mountain losing backup tapes—claims to expect to finish their effort by this fall. (I’m hoping to get more details). That’s nice.

   Not nice is having spoken directly with the CIO of my health care provider (a conglomerate of multiple Boston hospitals). When I asked how far along they were with removing SSN from their systems, the CIO was totally flabbergasted. It was obviously NOT a thought that had occurred to her. [This little exchange was driven by the experience of making an appointment & the phone machine asking for my SSN!!!!!!]

   As exciting as those 6 billion web users are, messy corporate systems—now inter operating in ways never imagined when the systems were built—are going to rise up & bite us.

   I’d like to think some of the wondrous stuff being created to serve up Web 2.0 can also serve internal systems challenges too.

   - David