RE: Nick Carr on the Death of Web 2.0

“Nick Carr points to users’ unhappiness with the new Digg-like Netscape (as described by Carl Taylor) and hears the death knell for ‘Web 2.0 hype.’ One disgruntled user was quoted in Carl’s article:

“I don’t want other people voting on what I should read first. I want to see major national news stories and then, if I want to know about entertainment or sports or whatever, I can click a link,” the user said. “I liked having a choice. This new format is awful. What if the New York Times decided to have readers vote on where things should be placed in the paper? What a disaster. If this is how it will be from now on, I’m changing my homepage.”

But is this dissatisfaction really an indictment of the underlying concept? Or is it merely an indication that Netscape’s implementation is flawed?” (Nick Carr on the Death of Web 2.0)

[v.ramos paper59]

Reply 

The magic will appear when we have social networks comprised of one’s agents and not one directly.I am supposing the infant phase in this editorial shift, which can be more broadly thought of as media mediation (meMe), is exacerbated by the fact that one is performing the editorial by one’s own taste — not by one’s own agents by one’s own taste — a large difference in the total possible set-size as well as resolution into such sets.

Simply put, a few power users will always run these scale-free networks…it is in fact the law (power law) of scale-free networks. However as we all know, we just are not as good at mining as our agents traversing an object web would be.

So to see the future of this technolonique, one must first see past these baby web2.0 steps to see our agents refining not only what we might like from the raw feeds but from what our likables’ agents have unmasked as well. Couple all that meMe matching/sharing with your people-attention-monitoring/sharing and you will begin to experience meMe magic.

It might be of value for a site like digg to compose simple agents that are randomly created to like certain associated phrases, which traverse very deeply in hopes of digging ‘more’ random links. This might mitigate the typical herd behavior in any close social system.

That said, like now…it will still be us.

The idea of choosing between the ‘pros’ and your fellow human is interesting because I presume most of the popular stories were dugg from more popular sources which became popular ultimately through some ‘pro’s format’ – not to mention more and more pros are representing themselves directly in these networks (however, generally without reputation systems their vote is as equal as yours). It seems the current ‘pro’ is just moving further from provider to supplier. Besides, the idea of who is pro in this space is blurring quite readily.

We stand on the shoulders of giants, no reason to suspect our agents will not do the same.