derek abdinor

Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web, has a great way of putting internet terminology into focus, from his unique vantage point. I reproduce some concepts here for simplification:

The Net
aka: The Internet (http, nntp, ftp, email), International Information Infrastructure
Era: 1980s-1990s
Realisation:

It isn’t the cables, it is the computers which are interesting

The Web
aka: World Wide Web
Era: 1990s-2000s
Realisation:

It isn’t the computers, but the documents which are interesting

The Social Graph
aka: Web 2.0, semantic web, now
Era: 2000s -
Realisation:

It’s not the documents, it is the things they are about which are important” or “its not about the social networking sites, its about the social network itself

Tim has put things nicely into perspective. I especially agree with the last point: I don’t care about Facebook, but I like what Facebook has taught us thus far and wrote a little ditty about it.

He goes on to say “The less inviting side of sharing is losing some control. Indeed, at each layer — Net, Web, or Graph — we have ceded some control for greater benefits.”

IBM announced today their version of cloud computing, Blue Cloud. This comes shortly after Amazon’s announcement of Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

“As more Web 2.0-style applications, which include lots of content contributed by end users, come online, companies will need to have better tools to handle them”, said Dennis Quan, chief technology officer of high performance on demand solutions at IBM.

“What’s at the heart of this is the realization that this technology is not restricted to universities or academic institutions. There’s a broad applicability for this technology,” Quan said.

Cloud computer primer
Cloud computing is essentially the harnessing of computer power to scale to a massive size, which allows for the following:

• replicating the size of the internet or a part thereof
• testing application viability (esp Web 2.0 apps) by simulating user adoption across the internet
• crunching numbers on a massive, scientific scale. Think the Genome Project, SETi@Home, scanning pictures of Space or the desert. Apparently, in the 50s-80s academics used to book time on a computer to perform data analysis (like calculating pi) and they can now buy time on Blue Cloud or EC2/S3.

I thought the battle for search was done and dusted, but I guess that’s before I discovered tags and the semantic web. Still, I have my means of getting information in the way I want it and short of paying Google for the pleasure, am happy to hit their energy-sapping home page.

Take a look at these other search engines, and the great narrative they are presented in (would have liked links). I rate Kartoo and Quintura, because they attempt to define the non-linear relationships of the cloud, and its quick-loading and fun.

And read this article about all the various new search engines and what they bring to the party.

Went to the launch of this auspicious organisation and its Southern African presence at the Meraka Institute, CSIR on Monday 14 May. The W3C have been credited with “inventing” the internet (along with William Gibson, Al Gore and Bill Gates) but actually their Director is Tim Berners-Lee, of “inventing the World Wide Web” fame. Essentially they’re saw what the browser wars of 97-99 were doing and decided a standards body was necessary, sort of self-appointed marshals of the Wild West.

Bragging rights include the best CSS2 reference for much of the early 2000′s, starting RDF, arbitrating RSS-Atom, extending the extensible Markup Languages. Tim, feeling slightly underachiev-ish, having created the web, decided to make sense of this all and has begun the Semantic Web project. Look at this, as well as the Mobile Web Initiative which Meraka is also doing good work towards.

Incredible: PageRank indicates a 10/10 for W3c.org, first I’ve ever seen!!!