Why I create for the web
blog.neave.com
blog.neave.com
Because it is now so much faster to get information the question has become: is the info that i want really relevant to me? Otherwise it is still a time waster even though it only takes a minute to look up. Like many people here i tend to be intellectually curious and knowing things gives satisfaction. But increasingly i have come to realize that much is not truely relevant to me. I think that's where the focus should be for future technologies, helping people get small amounts of highly relevant information while respecting their privacy.
When he mentions the president, the point seems to be that the person holding that position could simply ask and get the information he desired. That option was not available to the masses until web search came to be. And think about it. You do have access to a lot of sensitive information. Such as updated maps of every country. Direct and instant communication with people from other nationalities. And so on.
But time restriction is information restriction. Who in the 1980s had the time to sit in a library for hours on end every day researching esoteric issues? I'd argue that the information wasn't meaningfully available to everyone - only people in academic careers that had time to conduct research.
I think the President comparison is useful, because we, if nothing else, have the ability to access so much information that would have made the President's jaw drop three decades ago. However, I agree with the minor nitpick that he had access to higher quality, classified information that the rest of us will never see.
Also, I find this comic to be 100% relevant: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=759#comic
I've been thinking about this a lot recently due to an article here on HN about the fact that we are getting lots of 'data' recently in the form of scandalous articles in the media, which shock and dismay us, but are we tying these all together into a larger picture? I don't think so, therefore we end up with the modern day equivalent of shamans - conspiracy theorists. They see the 'data' (or nowadays in its current higher level form information) and give us 'information' about what it means (sorry, I'm still struggling with what the higher form of information is).
Shamans saw dark clouds on the horizon and said the gods were angry, conspiracy theorists see the NSA spying and say 'illuminati'
Now I've done a fair bit of work on KMSs (knowledge management systems) and that could be one view, structured information becomes knowledge. But I think that that is somehow missing the point. Information+structure+experience+remembrance = knowledge (one way of looking at it IMHO) So I'm searching for an other, different way to think about this issue, because that doesn't quite seem to fit the bill here.
Is the path data>information>knowledge>wisdom ? Or are we missing steps, or even missing completely different paths?
Or is it not even a path, but more of a n-dimensional network that is recursive in time and size?
Maybe this should be the future focus of technologies.
data = many news-websites out there
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v
information = RSS/Atom News Items of the sites above (basic data structure, highly available today)
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v
knowledge = ??
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v
wisdom = ??
... Do you have some ideas floating around how this concrete example could be expanded further?
Then what? You could do something simple like keyword grouping - '500 news events including the word "drone"' but I feel that is not enough. Take it further and use semantics to do sentiment analysis maybe? '50 data point talking positively about airbnb today'
But I still think there is something missing. I'm interested in any other thoughts you may have, especially after shifting info-now down to data, what would be 'new' knowledge or wisdom?
data: RSS/Atom stuff
information: do a basic keyword-analysis of the news snippets, maybe with some natural language processing, push it all into a graph database, using meaningful nouns as nodes and verbs as edges. Think of something like DBpedia, but with tiny information pieces and high interconnectedness between. This would be good structured "information", right?
knowledge: define some sophisticated query language / data endpoint, ideally again with some natural language processing, to discover the informations in the graph. the result of such a sophisticated query i'd call 'knowledge'.
wisdom: ?? <-- no idea yet, sorry.
I immediately felt that I had to own a little piece of that, that I had to create a space for myself and be useful to others the way they were useful to me.
Alway great to be reminded of the incredible opportunity we have, that nobody quite had prior to this. A child with an internet connection having access to more information than the US President did 20-30 years ago. That's really something. Thanks for sharing.
We need to extinguish this kind of enthusiasm. Sure, computers are great, and they have changed the world, but not always for the better. And all this unending praise we give technology can keep us from thinking about technology critically.
I love the web. And I hate the web. I hate surveillance. I hate data mining. I hate advertising. I hate linkbait headlines. I hate youtube comments. Hate hate hate.
Critical thinking? Absolutely. But stomping out enthusiasm is a great way to kill something valuable that people like to talk about but rarely seem to understand: Actual innovation.
I'm sure there's a lot more untapped talent out there, and I'd like to believe the net sum of their innovations will see the positives outweigh the negatives.
What the web can do is educate people (though it's also capable of misinforming them). And it can make life a little more efficient (Shopping online reduces travel time. Google maps reduces time driving around asking for directions). These are modest improvements, and they could unlock some talent. Just not much.
[Added a bit later] Although, I don't see how "mobile" is much conceptually different from the "web". The only missing part is linking and transferring of mobile app code over the network, on demand, instead of barcode/hyperlink-market-install manual process. But that's because of security model deficiencies on modern mobiles, and I won't be surprised things'll change. Then mobile'll be part of the web - no conflict here.
> You’re able to access this content without the need to
> log in, enter a password or download an app.
There was a time when you needed a different application to connect to each publisher, or each content type. You may be too young to remember that.
Why would being good enough have anything to do with whether you can create for the desktop? If anything, creating for the desktop is easier. There are far less languages, technologies, quirks, etc. you need to deal with as a dektop app developer.