Modern Heath Robinsons

In a recent publication the following passage caught my eye:

Modern Heath Robinsons
When the two Stanford drop-outs who founded Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, launched the company in 1998, they went to Fry's, an electronics outlet where the Valley's hardcore computer hobbyists have always bought their gear. Even today, some of the data centres' servers appear to be the work of tinkerers: circuit boards are sagging under the weight of processors and hard disks, and components are attached by Velcro straps. One reason for the unusual design is that parts can be easily swapped when they break. But it also allows Google's servers to be made more powerful without having to be replaced completely. (From: The Future of Technology, by Tom Standage (ed) , 2005, Profile Books, The Economist)

Interesting, even more so because it made me think about what happened yesterday sometime around 11:00 CET, when my customized Google home page disappeared, poof, just like that. One moment it was there, the next, gone!
Back home later at night, it was still gone, so I started checking Google help pages. After about 10 clicks I ended up on a Google Group forum, where I see the comforting pages and pages of user posts, voicing their complaints in various pitches of panic about the same problem. At least I was not alone…

Not a word from Google, no announcement, no message, no nothing.
Was it one of those original 1998 velcro straps perhaps, that had come loose and dropped a fat hard disk on top of a circuit board?

Then, thinking about the lesson: just think that this happens to 10% of MySpace users, could this bring parts of the internet down, when literally millions (about 15 million in this case) of people start shouting virtually ‘what’s going on!?’ It brings home the realization that the internet has become part of life, as lives are lived. It’s no longer a place to just find information, or send an email, but a place where people simply 'are' as part of their daily activities.

Oh, and by the way, my customized Google home page was back this morning.
I see someone, swearing and sweating, with his head stuck deep in some server cabinet filled with spaghetti wiring, fishing the old piece of velcro out of the depths of a mass of circuit boards, swearing once again, then cheerfully replacing it by a fresh piece of velcro, and re-attaching the fallen component, ready to go for another ten years.

Web 2.0: Quo Vadis?

When I saw the Wired article headlining Tim O’Reilly stating:

Web 2.0 Is About Controlling Data ,

I started worrying about the future of the web.
When I first surfed the web in 1994, I was blown off my seat with amazement and instinctively understood its potential, but I was slow to catch on to the Web2.0 and Enterprise2.0 hype. I only began to realize within the last year that something different was going on, something that could have major implications for web users, both in their social and professional lives.

I am in two minds about using the term ‘hype’ . Hypes are usually things that don’t last, but if you take Web 2.0 to refer to the socialization of the web, then I think this is going to last. If you take it as something that will allow new ways of exploiting worldwide audiences and target groups of consumers, I have my doubts.

Blogs, wikis, social networks, (eg. MySpace), virtual worlds (Eg. Second Life): The basic concepts that gave rise to these popular social web spaces are not new. The easy availability to create them and the subsequent adoption by millions of users of this technology, however, is. Any user of a web browser can now be a creator of content, be it good, interesting, or boring or evil. That people want, perhaps need to create their own content is engrained in our social nature. We react to and interact with what’s going on around us, and are always trying to impose order in those goings-on. We like to document our own history, and have some record of what our life is about. This has always been the case, witness the practice of maintaining diaries and photo albums through the ages.

The new aspect, added by all the new tools to create these personal spaces, is the simple fact that they are on the web, and thereby sharable with others. Modern man and woman have their personal URLs referring to their personal web logs, or MySpace sites, or sharable bookmark sites. These sites are of course useful (or not) for the social networks of family and friends, as well as for your social professional network. In addition, anyone on the web searching for something may end up finding it on your blog and react to it, thereby creating a connection between minds which previously would have been extremely unlikely to have occurred.

Web 2.0 to me is all about a meeting of minds, in an environment that is open and inclusive. Once you start messing about with its openness and try to make it exclusive by whatever means, it will lose its value. The same holds true for Enterprise2.0, which is Web 2.0 applied to the enterprise. It’s been proved over and over again that companies that have a workforce with a predominantly collaborative mindset perform significantly better than those that do not. A collaborative mindset means that employees are prepared to make that bit of extra effort to share their expertise with colleagues when asked, or even pro-actively offer their expertise. This is only possible if the company has an open and inclusive attitude towards information and communication, and makes an effort to advertise this as standard practice and behaviour, and as part of its company culture. The effective and productive sharing of expertise is good for the company, but it also forges strong bonds between the minds of people, and by being part of a network of minds, the individual grows ever more powerful as an employee, in the sense that she can make better decisions, and get things done, better, faster, more professionally.

Putting all this in the context of O’Reilly’s statement, there is a word that particularly wrangles with me, and that is the word ‘data’. In an ongoing meeting of minds, we are not creating and exchanging data, we’re creating and exchanging ideas, and creating paths towards putting these ideas into practice. Yes, sure, there is a lot of data around, as well as a lot of meta data, data about data. Data equals products? Data is information particles, relating to countries, persons, processes, ideas, products. Apparently, according to O’Reilly, the aim is to be able to machine process everything that gets put out on the web, and make commercial gain out of the results.

In that context, another relatively new concept springs to mind: the Semantic Web. In a sense you could see the concepts of Web 2.0 and Semantic Web as competing with each other, but the prospect of integrating both into one vision for the web sounds even more worrying than the quote that started this post. More about that later.