Sunday, June 04, 2006

Web 2.0 : Building bridges

So having proved in my previous post, once and for all, that the web 2.0 concept is manyfold, I can only go on and add one aspect on what the web 2.0 is, also. Many of my readers right now, may be you, are coming from my girlfirend's blog. Her readers are coming from this best of breed blog called inparisnow which has recently been referenced in a wall street journal article. How deceptive is it for a reader of charming (or not) stories about paris to come here and see stuff about "continuations" and "first order logic".... Even to wall street journal readers, whose interests can be close to what my job is, since I happen to work in finance, the journey must be pretty deceiving. Well this recognized fact is precisely what I think is the target for web 2.0 Tagging, social networking, sites mashups, all this is about building semantic groups which relates a specific audience to a specific content. The added twist to this bridge construction is the distributed nature of the semantic group. What look to one reader as "computer theory" will be seen as a "typing system" by another, depending their prevalent knowledge : the thought vocabulary is different between users, and naturally creates groups of users. Within a group sharing a common vocabulary, opinions might diverge on the relative importance of theories, but if you accept the fact that the intragroup variations are smaller than the intergroup variations, then to solve the problem of bringing information is more complex than just a democratic vote, and the solution is not a straight forward one. Having just a popularity system looks like voting for what the result of 2+2 is wont help much.. So after the current ways like tagging, voting, are taken to their technical limits, my bet is that the next challenge will be on how to easily build those 'vocabularies' in a distributed way, through complex statistics tools or method which will be rethought to integrate very easily. Which eventually will bring me to develop the "emergence" section sometime soon :)

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