Project Note 2

A recent series of posts (here first ) A. Milner described his vision of the device and architecture of the future Internet. One of the central concepts in it is personal space (" playground "). As far as I understand, the space in the traditional for the modern Internet sense is whether it is a personal site or an author's blog (where a team can be an author). The approach is natural, but not the only one. As there are different ideas in quantum mechanics and, accordingly, different tasks, it is more convenient to solve in one of them, and on the Internet instead of personal space one of the central concepts can be made the “author's project”. This approach emphasizes the temporal aspect of human activity, since the project unfolds over time and links its various elements into one whole rather a specific goal than a certain space. Meaningful goal setting is more characteristic of the intellectual part of users. And even if they do not have a specific goal, the very nature of working with information and people bears the imprint of quality - the materials in their blogs and personal sites are more thoughtful and structured, there is a certain policy of frending and interaction with the audience. It looks as if they are developing some of their projects, just being at an early stage of accumulation, reflection and formation. Such initial stages even for projects with a specific goal are usually long and it often looks like there is no goal))

Then I kind of repeat myself, because already wrote in different posts for different reasons. Content is easier to generate a) in the process of communication, b) in small formats. Modern services take this into account, as a result, massive production of content is stimulated. Natural evolution lies in the fact that quantitative accumulation leads to qualitative transformations - to the formation of smaller, logically connected forms from small-format elements. From individual theses and hypotheses to their justification, arguments, observations, remarks summarizing the summary and further to the articles, gradually turning into chapters of books. This is quite a “project-like” activity. But in the modern internet these processes are difficult for two reasons. First, because the content is generated and localized in the space of different, unrelated services. Secondly, because thinking and communication follow their own laws, a significant amount of randomness, the formation of oftopics, etc., is significant in them. In order to single out the necessary and integrate it into the necessary clusters from the weakly structured environment, establish relationships and form hierarchies, in other words, in order to organize and systematize, we need specially sharpened services for this. This task is solved by various existing projects. Practical familiarity with them is desirable, but here I will only mention the available “meta-information”.

In the WebBrain project, structures created on a personal computer using PersonalBrain can be uploaded to the network. atomicxp last time gave a link to the Compendium application. I certainly download and use once; I especially like the attempt (as I understood) to combine structuring and communication. Another link pointed out heruvim about the Datamash project. I looked at the proposed video carefully, but I lack something to understand whether this relates (and how) to the topic in question. Perhaps this is closer to the topic of my next post. Also read the description for the IBM LanguageWare Miner for Multidimensional Socio-Semantic Networks (here you can download ). This is said to be a tool for creating Web 2.0 applications. As well as a tool for developing innovative methods for Web 2.0. It is also a library that, through a simple unified API, allows users to solve problems of social computing, semantic processing and “activity-centered computing” (I think the best translation would be project-oriented computing)). As I understand it, this tool is for developers, not for ordinary users. In particular, for developers of projects like NEPOMUK ( Networked Environment for Personal Ontologybased Management of Unified Knowledge ), which is positioned as Social Semantic Desktop. I also met a project intended for corporate use, but forgot the name and lost the link.
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Note that the projects mentioned are not pure web applications, but partly desktop ones, since need to download something. In this form, the orientation and sharpening of the average mass Internet user disappears. However, communication takes place in the network, accumulation of content and social connections takes place in the network, self-realization, self-positioning also occurs in the network. And all this is happening with the masses of users. It is therefore logical to have a purely networked and mass-oriented service, where this activity would be accompanied by the possibilities of systematization and streamlining. (As a service, I am promoting my idea of ​​the Social Lift project). Moreover, structuring not only stimulates high-quality transformations of content from small forms to large ones, but also opens up the possibility for users to create Internet projects in a more traditional sense, which will be my next post .

It remains to consider only the above-mentioned problem of localization of content within services, which also slows down its structuring. A full-fledged and radical solution suggests A. Milner - to wait for the universal standardization and unification of the Internet in the future (more precisely, its large subset). Another option is to structure not the materials themselves, but links to them. As well as fragments of material from third-party resources, if the authors allow. For example, a link to an article can be discussed in the same way as the article itself, using the functionality for structuring.