The Metaphors of the Net - Part IV

Written by Sam Vaknin


F. The Transport of Information - Internet News

Internet news are advantaged. They are frequently and dynamically updated (unlike static print news) and are always accessible (similar to print news), immediate and fresh.

The future will witness a form of interactive news. A special "corner" inrepparttar news Web site will accommodate "breaking news" posted by members ofrepparttar 118809 the public (or corporate press releases). This will provide readers with a glimpse intorepparttar 118810 making ofrepparttar 118811 news,repparttar 118812 raw material news are made of. The same technology will be applied to interactive TVs. Content will be downloaded fromrepparttar 118813 internet and displayed as an overlay onrepparttar 118814 TV screen or in a box in it. The contents downloaded will be directly connected torepparttar 118815 TV programming. Thus,repparttar 118816 biography and track record of a football player will be displayed during a football match andrepparttar 118817 history of a country when it gets news coverage.

4. Terra Internetica - Internet, an Unknown Continent

Laymen and experts alike talk about "sites" and "advertising space". Yet,repparttar 118818 Internet was never compared to a new continent whose surface is infinite.

The Internet has its own real estate developers and construction companies. The real life equivalents derive their profits fromrepparttar 118819 scarcity ofrepparttar 118820 resource that they exploit -repparttar 118821 Internet counterparts derive their profits fromrepparttar 118822 tenants (content producers and distributors, e-tailers, and others).

Entrepreneurs bought "Internet Space" (pages, domain names, portals) and leveraged their acquisition commercially by:

Renting space out; Constructing infrastructure on their property and selling it; Providing an intelligent gateway, entry point (portal) torepparttar 118823 rest ofrepparttar 118824 internet; Selling advertising space which subsidizesrepparttar 118825 tenants (Yahoo!-Geocities, Tripod and others); Cybersquatting (purchasing specific domain names identical to brand names inrepparttar 118826 "real" world) and then sellingrepparttar 118827 domain name to an interested party. Internet Space can be easily purchased or created. The investment is low and getting lower withrepparttar 118828 introduction of competition inrepparttar 118829 field of domain registration services andrepparttar 118830 increase inrepparttar 118831 number of top domains.

Then, infrastructure can be erected - for a shopping mall, for free home pages, for a portal, or for another purpose. It is precisely this infrastructure thatrepparttar 118832 developer can later sell, lease, franchise, or rent out.

But this real estate bubble wasrepparttar 118833 culmination of a long and tortuous process.

Atrepparttar 118834 beginning, only members ofrepparttar 118835 fringes andrepparttar 118836 avant-garde (inventors, risk assuming entrepreneurs, gamblers) invest in a new invention. No one knows to say what arerepparttar 118837 optimal uses ofrepparttar 118838 invention (in other words, what is its future). Many - mostly members ofrepparttar 118839 scientific and business elites - argue that there is no real need forrepparttar 118840 invention and that it substitutes a new and untried way for old and tried modes of doingrepparttar 118841 same things (so why assumerepparttar 118842 risk of investing inrepparttar 118843 unknown andrepparttar 118844 untried?).

Moreover, these criticisms are usually well-founded.

To start with, there is, indeed, no need forrepparttar 118845 new medium. A new medium invents itself - andrepparttar 118846 need for it. It also generates its own market to satisfy this newly found need.

Two prime examples of this self-recursive process arerepparttar 118847 personal computer andrepparttar 118848 compact disc.

Whenrepparttar 118849 PC was invented, its uses were completely unclear. Its performance was lacking, its abilities limited, it was unbearably user unfriendly. It suffered from faulty design, was absent any user comfort and ease of use and required considerable professional knowledge to operate. The worst part was that this knowledge was exclusive torepparttar 118850 new invention (not portable). It reduced labour mobility and limited one's professional horizons. There were many gripes among workers assigned to tamerepparttar 118851 new beast. Managers regarded it at best as a nuisance.

The PC was thought of, atrepparttar 118852 beginning, as a sophisticated gaming machine, an electronic baby-sitter. It included a keyboard, so it was thought of in terms of a glorified typewriter or spreadsheet. It was used mainly as a word processor (andrepparttar 118853 outlay justified solely on these grounds). The spreadsheet wasrepparttar 118854 first real PC application and it demonstratedrepparttar 118855 advantages inherent to this new machine (mainly flexibility and speed). Still, it was more ofrepparttar 118856 same. A speedier sliding ruler. After all, saidrepparttar 118857 unconvinced, what wasrepparttar 118858 difference between this and a hand held calculator (some of them already had computing, memory and programming features)?

The Metaphors of the Net - Part I

Written by Sam Vaknin


I. The Genetic Blueprint

A decade afterrepparttar invention ofrepparttar 118808 World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee is promotingrepparttar 118809 "Semantic Web". The Internet hitherto is a repository of digital content. It has a rudimentary inventory system and very crude data location services. As a sad result, most ofrepparttar 118810 content is invisible and inaccessible. Moreover,repparttar 118811 Internet manipulates strings of symbols, not logical or semantic propositions. In other words,repparttar 118812 Net compares values but does not knowrepparttar 118813 meaning ofrepparttar 118814 values it thus manipulates. It is unable to interpret strings, to infer new facts, to deduce, induce, derive, or otherwise comprehend what it is doing. In short, it does not understand language. Run an ambiguous term by any search engine and these shortcomings become painfully evident. This lack of understanding ofrepparttar 118815 semantic foundations of its raw material (data, information) prevent applications and databases from sharing resources and feeding each other. The Internet is discrete, not continuous. It resembles an archipelago, with users hopping from island to island in a frantic search for relevancy.

Even visionaries like Berners-Lee do not contemplate an "intelligent Web". They are simply proposing to let users, content creators, and web developers assign descriptive meta-tags ("name of hotel") to fields, or to strings of symbols ("Hilton"). These meta-tags (arranged in semantic and relational "ontologies" - lists of metatags, their meanings and how they relate to each other) will be read by various applications and allow them to processrepparttar 118816 associated strings of symbols correctly (placerepparttar 118817 word "Hilton" in your address book under "hotels"). This will make information retrieval more efficient and reliable andrepparttar 118818 information retrieved is bound to be more relevant and amenable to higher level processing (statistics,repparttar 118819 development of heuristic rules, etc.). The shift is from HTML (whose tags are concerned with visual appearances and content indexing) to languages such asrepparttar 118820 DARPA Agent Markup Language, OIL (Ontology Inference Layer or Ontology Interchange Language), or even XML (whose tags are concerned with content taxonomy, document structure, and semantics). This would bringrepparttar 118821 Internet closer torepparttar 118822 classic library card catalogue.

Even in its current, pre-semantic, hyperlink-dependent, phase,repparttar 118823 Internet brings to mind Richard Dawkins' seminal work "The Selfish Gene" (OUP, 1976). This would be doubly true forrepparttar 118824 Semantic Web.

Dawkins suggested to generalizerepparttar 118825 principle of natural selection to a law ofrepparttar 118826 survival ofrepparttar 118827 stable. "A stable thing is a collection of atoms which is permanent enough or common enough to deserve a name". He then proceeded to describerepparttar 118828 emergence of "Replicators" - molecules which created copies of themselves. The Replicators that survived inrepparttar 118829 competition for scarce raw materials were characterized by high longevity, fecundity, and copying-fidelity. Replicators (now known as "genes") constructed "survival machines" (organisms) to shield them fromrepparttar 118830 vagaries of an ever-harsher environment.

This is very reminiscent ofrepparttar 118831 Internet. The "stable things" are HTML coded web pages. They are replicators - they create copies of themselves every time their "web address" (URL) is clicked. The HTML coding of a web page can be thought of as "genetic material". It contains allrepparttar 118832 information needed to reproducerepparttar 118833 page. And, exactly as in nature,repparttar 118834 higherrepparttar 118835 longevity, fecundity (measured in links torepparttar 118836 web page from other web sites), and copying-fidelity ofrepparttar 118837 HTML code -repparttar 118838 higher its chances to survive (as a web page).

Cont'd on page 2 ==>
 
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