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Filed under : Kioskea - Tribune >> Web >> World Wide Web >> We are in a new transition Key words : history,future,world wide web,www,james watt,We are in a new transition10 Jun, 2008 02:54 pm | |
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Add to NewsvineAt the end of the 20th century, an Englishman Tim Berners-Lee invented how information could be transferred easily over the Internet by using hypertext. The invention is named World Wide Web. This invention is bringing human society to a new age.
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At the end of the 20th century, an Englishman Tim Berners-Lee invented how information could be transferred easily over the Internet by using hypertext. The invention is named World Wide Web. This invention is bringing human society to a new age.
Two centuries ago, another Englishman James Watt invented a machine called Watt steam engine
that made use of steam at a pressure just above atmospheric to drive
the piston helped by a partial vacuum. This invention is more than
another technology innovation. By contrast, it had revised human
society from feudalism to capitalism. Because of Watt steam engine,
industrial producing was upgraded from the traditional handicraft work
with low-quantity production to mass production,
the basis of modern industry. With this upgrade, capital (the base of
modern industry) replaced land (the base of traditional agriculture)
becoming the key asset in human society. Human civilization thus
evolved from feudalism to capitalism.
World Wide Web is the modern-time Watt steam engine. Due to WWW, information industry
is upgraded from handcraft, low quantity production, elite-conducted
work (such as produced by professional journalists or photographers) to
machine-powered, mass production, plebeian-conducted work. Information
industry hence has evolved to its postmodern stage---Web industry,
which is similar to that the modern industry was evolved from its
earlier handcraft industry stage to the modern-time manufacturing
industry after the invention of Watt steam engine. With this upgrade,
mind, the base of information industry, is replacing capital, the base
of modern industry, to be the key asset of human society. Human
civilization is evolving from capitalism to a new age. Mind asset, the essential issue
Mind is always an asset. The potential productive power of human mind is known to be overwhelming. Nearly none production could be done without the participation of human mind. Furthermore, people has realized the power of mind for long time. Modern education is a typical example that people are trying to produce more high-quality mind asset for the benefit of human society.
On the other hand, however, we often experience difficulties when trying to effectively use mind as asset. Unlike land or capital, individual mind is essentially intangible except to the owner of the mind. Presenting mind explicitly in formal ways is a long-time hard problem. Without explicit, formal presentation of mind asset, we cannot efficiently connect and compose varied mind asset and we cannot well measure the value of mind asset. The issue of mind aggregation is particularly critical because individual mind is often too shallow to be high quality.
By these analysis, we can tell that the mind-asset presentation is the center of all the issues. A formal, tangible presentation of mind asset is the key to let mind asset be circulating. Circulating mind asset is then the basis of the new civilizational transition.
Web resource, new presentation of mind asset
In tradition, we have developed varied forms to present mind. For example, authoring books, recording tapes, drawing artifacts, building constructions, etc. Through these forms, humans materialize their mind and keep the embodied mind as asset.
There are, however, at least four common problems in these traditional forms of mind asset.
(1) [cost] It is costly to produce mind asset in these presentations, and it is generally more expensive to share mind asset in these forms. In consequence, only the mind asset produced in superior quality (such as best books or artifacts) can be widely spread and shared.
(2) [strength] None of these presentations last long time. They can hardly survive from various natural or man-made disasters such as earthquake or war.
(3) [quality] By adopting these traditional presentations, we may embody mind in its static and passive aspects. But they are not good at presenting the dynamic and active (and indeed the more valuable) aspect of human mind, let it alone the deeper implicit aspects of human mind such as self (a type of mind asset with potentially the greatest value, we will briefly discuss it later in this article).
(4) [measurement] We do not have generic, objective methods to measure the value of mind asset in these traditional presentations.
If an asset is costly to present even in its low-quality form, with weak strength to survive longer, and unable to be measured objectively about its actual value, it is not a reliable asset for owning and sharing by public. This is a fundamental problem for information industry since mind asset is the base of it. The invention of World Wide Web solves the problem.
W3C
defines World Wide Web to be "the universe of network-accessible
information, the embodiment of human knowledge." This specification
describes three facets of the Web. First, the Web is a place for people
to embody their mind. Second, the Web is a network of embodied mind.
Third, through the Web people can access the embodied mind of the
others. In particular, the mind asset on the Web is presented by Web resources, which are independent pieces of embodied human mind that can be used for producing. Note that this is not a common definition of Web resource. In common (such as the one in Wikipedia), a Web resource is any object on the Web that is referenced by an URI. I am afraid, however, such a definition has not precisely described the essence of Web resources. By contrast, this new specification is directly based on the W3C definition of WWW. A Web resource may be a collection of Web data, a Web service, a Web link, or a mixture of them. A Web resource could and should be referenced by an URI, but a Web object referenced by an URI might not immediately be a Web resource. (more descriptions of my interpretation of Web resource are at here.)
the issue of cost
Comparing to the traditional forms of mind asset, producing Web resources is cheap. The Web is a free and open place for everyone to embody mind. Web resources are presented in digital form, and digital form requires very few natural resources to keep. Hence in total Web resources are inexpensive to produce. Moreover, sharing Web resources usually costs so little that we can afford spreading and sharing the mind embodied in inferior quality.
the issue of strength
Web resources can last long time. Due to the low cost of copying digital products and the flexibility of transmitting resources on the Web, we may ideally keep any piece of embodied mind nearly forever discarding its actual quality. Furthermore, World Wide Web is a virtual world. Hence it has great strength to survive from most of the real-world disasters, either natural or man-made.
the issue of quality
The most important improvement Web resources have made beyond the traditional forms of mind asset is the presentational quality.
With the traditional forms such as books or video tapes, we can present what a mind is and how it works. For example, a stock-market expert may explain what stock is and when to buy or sell stocks. This type of knowledge is the static and passive aspect of mind. By these traditional forms, however, it is difficult (if ever possible) to allow the mind-asset users (e.g., the ones who read the book about stocks) to retrieve the same value out of a mind asset as what the mind-asset producer (e.g. the one who authored the book about stocks) has. Readers may learn from a book the general principles of selling or buying stocks, but it does not mean that the readers can handle stock transactions as good as the authors of stock transaction. There is a natural gap between the presented mind asset in the book and how readers have understood the mind asset. Such a knowledge-understanding gap is a typical issue for static mind asset and it is one of the main reasons that causes the difficulty of mind asset measurement.
To solve the problem, on the Web people can program their mind (a typical dynamic mind asset) so that the production of their embodied mind is precisely predictable by specifying real-time parameters. In our example, stock-market experts can program their thoughts so that the program always produces the exact decision they would make on certain real-time transactional situation. This type of mind asset thus has higher quality than the standard static mind asset because it is more productive in use. Web service is the typical name for this type of Web resources.
On the Web we may also embody a special type of mind asset that we rarely have successfully presented before. It is self.
Self, self-consciousness, or self-awareness, is "a personal understanding of the very core of one's own identity." Due to self everybody is unique. By self, different people may develop varied use of the same knowledge. We thus have the variety of human mind. Self is so unique that nobody can embody the self of the others. The embodiment of self shows the ultimate value of a person, and hence it represents the respect of humanity. As a typical mind asset, self plays a critical role in many fields of World Wide Web, such as the implicit Web and Web evolution.
the issue of measurement
By presenting mind in Web resources, we are able to objectively measure its value as if we measure the value of capital asset. As we know, there is a large variety of capital asset (such as stocks, real estates, etc.). But we can uniformly measure the value by testing the capital asset in free market. In similar, we may objectively measure the value of a mind asset presented by Web resources. On the free Web, the value of a Web resource can be arranged completely by the mutual consent of producers and users.
Web Industry, platform that mind flows
While
World Wide Web is a network of embodied mind, Web industry is the
platform that mind flows. In the real capital world, modern industry
(represented by the manufacturing industry) takes capital as input and
produces capital with greater value. In the virtual mind world,
postmodern industry (represented by the Web industry) takes mind as
input and produces mind with greater value. This comparison tells the
essence of Web industry.Web companies are the factories that produce varied Web resources. They may primarily produce data resources such as Amazon, or service resources such as Ning, or link resources such as Google. Discarding all the superficial distinctions between each other, all Web companies are taking a few mind assets as input and producing a few mind assets as output. Ideally, the value of the output mind asset must be greater than the value of the input mind asset. Mind is the blood flowing around the system of Web industry, which is similar to that capital is the blood flowing over the system of manufacturing industry.
Web companies also partition their work load and cooperate to each other the same way as the other industrial corporations do. Take the traditional manufacturing industry as an example, some corporations (such as iron puddling factories) pretreat crude materials and produce refined materials or parts while some other corporations (such as automobile manufactures) take refined materials and parts to produce further manufactured products. In similar, some Web companies (such as Blogger) are to help people embody their mind into Web resources from scratch while some other Web companies (such as del.icio.us) are to take the already embodied mind as input (such as a blog post in Blogger) and to produce higher quality mind assets that can be consumed better by end users.
There is, however, a unique restriction of Web resource producing and consuming in Web industry. Due to Web evolution, neither the production nor the consumption of Web resources may beyond the evolutionary stage of World Wide Web at the meantime.
Web resources produced in quality higher than what can be efficiently consumed at the meantime is overqualified. Yahoo! Directory is a typical example. The quality of link resources produced by Yahoo! Directory was generally beyond what Web 1.0 users could efficiently consume. Hence the service became very expensive to maintain. Eventually, Google Search replaced Yahoo Search being the leader of Web search industry thought the actual quality of link resources produced by Google Search is lower than the quality of link resources produced by Yahoo! Directory. (This is, however, not necessarily the end of the story. Y!OS is the newest step Yahoo is taking for Semantic Web. Will Y!OS eventually tend to produce overqualified Web resources again? We have this concern.)
On the other hand, Web resources produced in quality lower than what can be efficiently consumed at the meantime is underqualified. The examples in this category are plenty. In the age of Web 2.0, many Web-1.0 companies have to update the quality of their produced Web resources to the level of 2.0 or otherwise their market share is quickly taken by their Web-2.0 startup competitors.
Because of Web evolution, mind asset production is so dynamic that no company (including Google) can stick to one product quality for long. Web companies have to upgrade the quality of their produced mind assets with the progress of the Web every few years in order to just survive. Hence Web industry is indeed a business type with high risk and high payback.
We are in a new transition
We
are in a new transition. The widespread of World Wide Web is the
trigger of the transition. Because of the Web, the first time in
history human mind becomes a critical circulating asset in society that
ordinary people can buy, sell, produce, and share. The rise of mind
asset will eventually push the human civilization evolving from the age
of capitalism to the next. We are still at the early stage of this transition. In similar, the Web is still at an early stage of its evolution. The Web companies that lead the progress of Web evolution will simultaneously be the leaders of human civilization in this transition. Until now, we have seen a few of these leaders such as Google and Facebook. They have led not only new technologies, but also the change of culture in our society.
Based on what we have analyzed, to be a leader of Web evolution is actually less about doing business in a particular realm such as "Web search". By contrast, the success is primarily determined by whether the founders of company have (either actively or unconsciously) well foreseen the quality of Web resources (or mind asset) in the next generation. Google approaches the quality through Web search while Facebook approaches the same quality by social networking. Neither of the success is due to the path they choose to take because at the same time many other companies were taking the same path as they did. The key of their success is the distinction of the quality of Web resources the two companies produce.
Which companies may be the next in the list of success? Though we don't know the names, one thing is certain---the ones understanding the resource quality upgrade of Web evolution may get the better chance to be the winners. Such a successful company might be another Web search company, might be another social networking company, or might be a company with a brand new focus. As we have emphasized and I emphasize it again, the particular path taken by a company is not the deterministic factor. Different founders may have their preferred realms of interest. To the end, the variety of human mind allow us to approach the same goal in various paths. The actual key to the success is whether the founders are capable of foreseeing the progress of Web evolution, especially the progress of Web resource (mind asset) quality upgrade. Neither over-qualification nor under-qualification may clinch a winner. It can only be a perfect hit of the right quality.
Final words
To conclude this long response, I want to briefly address two startups that have the potential to be on the list of success I just mentioned. But whether they may indeed succeed at the end is still on the hand of their management team at present. They are Radar Networks and Imindi.
Radar Networks have just released the beta test of its main product---Twine.
Twine takes the path of Web resource organization to approach the next
generation Web. In specific, Twine has employed new Semantic Web
technologies such as RDF and SPARQL to defend its goal. From many
aspects, the service Twine has the potential to be a new leader of Web
evolution and civilization transition. The problem of Twine is, however, that despite of the adoption of Semantic Web technologies, its produced Web resources are still at the quality of Web 2.0. In short, augmenting tags from manually created to partial manually partial automatically produced does not automatically improve the quality of Web resources. Originally the produced resources were tagged data. Afterwards the produced resources are still tagged data but with more auto-generated tags. It is a quantitative improvement in contrast to a qualitative upgrade. This is why Twine is still a "potential" candidate to the list. It is possible for Twine to develop qualitative upgrade of its produced resource. The only question is whether the management team may have the vision to lead the change. Otherwise losing a temporary leading position happens regularly in this rapidly changing Web industry.
Imindi
is a less known company than Radar Networks. But the readers of this
article should have been familiar to the name of one of it co-founders,
Adam Lindemann.The Imindi service takes a brand new path approaching the next generation Web. In tradition, mind asset management is mainly about knowledge organization (as what Twine is doing). Imindi projects the goal differently. What the Imindi service does is to produce new mind asset by recursively re-manufacturing the available mind asset through human brains. Unlike Twine, Imindi directly focuses on the level of mind asset refined manufacture instead of mind asset raw manufacture. This is a new type of Web resource manufacturing that we are looking for.
Although Imindi is currently still in its stealth mode, the service might be the first auto-evolving Web resource production line in the world. Imindi may be the first service that can protect itself from the future Web evolution by automatically updating the quality of generated resources in its production line. Imindi is a service Web investors should be aware, let it alone the visionary leader of the company, Adam Lindemann.
Article originally published on: Thinking Space
