Tuesday, March 21, 2006


Towards a Common Core: Step Zero - Defining the problem
Category: Web, HTML, Tech

Not unlike a supernova, the rapid expansion, explosion and then eventual collapse of a star into a smaller, much denser core, the web will eventually collapse upon itself under its own weight. This is not in one of Metcalfe's cascading network or transport layer outages, but rather when the sheer volume of information available is drowned by the noise of attention deficiting ads, porn, spam, etc.

During this collapse, which is necessarily post explosion, there will be the deafening wail of the user to be able to locate accurate answers. Not just information, but raw, unfiltered data that presents the true words, opinons, specifications and actions of individuals, objects, and organizations.

In order for the post-collapse web to be anything usable, it will have to have some order. This Web 2.0 or intelligent, semantic web is what I would prefer to refer to as "the Core". The core will consist of original content in its pure, unadulterated form. Derivative works will sit outside the core in the corona.

In order to get to the core there will be an ensuing battle and victor among two emerging, opposing forces: The force of portals to absorb all content and publish it as they see fit and the opposing force of individuals to directly publish their individual works. The emergence of Google Video is an example of the former and YouTube the later. Another example would be Yahoo! Image Search vs. (now their own) Flickr. The power of the portal is their inherent scale and reach: there ability to discover and deliver data en masse. Whether the data is hosted on their servers (as ever more of it is)or not, their spiders are actively crawling the web seeking to catalogue, contextualize and categorize all manner of data and tie it, via links to the search portal.

On the other hand, the enterprising user, with the rapidly democratized distribution of technologies such as digital still and video cameras, can through a common interface, such as YouTube, provide a similiar experience with more diverse, original content which may or may not have ever been mediated through either traditional media or even contemporary web distribution channels. This allows for more creative content, not limited by the revisions of a media producer or web editor, and creates a more effective "many to many" channel for data distribution based on interest and affinity. With the added advantage that tagging by content creators and commenters provide the human-defined relationships between disparate data that will always trump machine-defined ones.

Over my next several posts, I will discuss the key processes, technologies and transition points that will guide us toward the user-created core and away from a regimented hosted-portal core future.

Your feedback is appreciated.