One delightful dialogue

had this one stimulating talk with an old colleague and friend of mine last night that I feel urged to write it down before it vaporizes.  It was after the presentation of the redwing, during the second phase of drinking between two of us over some house Czech style beer.  Talk was about current inanimate web structure, and redwing with its purpose to bring about life to web through incorporating human ingredient.  Redwing is all about making web users be real entity capable of interacting with other real entities in the web during surfing.  Web users are viewed as owner, carrier, service provider of all the contents, and that he/she can use them any time, any where while one is on the web.  Told him that I call it nomad web.  Kim was ecstatic with the concept.  He suggested a dichotomical view, web contents in the url as passive objects, and web users as subjects that also own multiple objects and capable of interacting with other subjects and objects, infusing active will and changing agents to the web.  I like that. 

When we were first introduced to the web way back in 93, for those of us trained in AI and all the concepts and noises that go with it, web was like neural network of computers firing asynchronously propagating its influence in uncontrallable manner.  Man, this is akin to neural seizure on grand scale in Internet.  We have this tendency to conceptualize the inanimate computer thing to living organism.  Even to us, who were living in sedate happiness with telnet, email, ftp, and gopher, ah there were all those goodies in alt.xx, were hooked to the web instantly.  Web didn't actually bring new services that existing services lacked, but there was something to it.  We all know it is the hyperthread that links the contents dispersed worldwide, and its ability to transport us with a single click.  We've been using hypercard for some time, and didn't see it coming. 

Nomad web isn't that new.  Then again, what is new under the sun?  Wasn't it that when the web came, we thought it would make us easy to find and reach documents, which it did so elegantly, but also it would enable us to weave a rich interacting human fabric?   In there, human component will be the keeper, evolution initiator of the web.  Social network sites thing isn't exactly what we had in mind.  Hate that single place, concentrated notion.  Web presented us with this rich network links to dabble with.  Intelligence and all the interesting thing is in the network.  It's a sin not to capitalize on it.  Keeping us tied to a single place is denigrating the human race. 

See, it's the human, the very us that should be the subject, owner, and active mover of the web and we should be able to use it anywhere, any time we want it.   We take our own head anywhere we go, aren't we?   But look what we have.   Web is still a fabric composed of islands of static, passive documents just seating there waiting to be consumed by the visitors.   And our belongings in the web is stuck to a url.  Our things aren't exactly cumbersome to carry aournd or difficult to reach.  They are just friggin data.

I am 100% certain that Tim Berners-Lee wanted to see much more than this.  His involvement in the Semantic Web came out from this vision to enrich the web by infusing meaning, and knowledge representation to the web contents so that people or robotic agents can better utilize it.   Nomad web envisions that users of the web visiting various places enrich the contents and knowledge representation of the web through interactions happening between the users relevant to the page, or through richer interactions between the visitor, the subject, and the page.  Crappy logic?  Yeah, I agree.  It was over the talk with the beer.

Say that web has two components.  The url bound documents and the surfers.  Currently, surfer are nobody, just ghosts without any means to interact or be infuenced by other users.  It's the document/contents tightly bound to the url that still characterizes the web.   Web made us easier to move around in cyber space.  And from any place, we can always reach our own data/content with a single click.  Web begs us to look deeper into this matter.   What forbid us to carry all our stuff as we surf around, and interact with others we meet at the various sites?   Nothing.  It should be all the more easier because all that we need to carry, and even our very existence in the web is, after all, some hodgepodge of data.  And storing, maintaining, reaching, transporting data is dirt cheap in web.  


Notion of space in the web.  In real life, it is degree of closeness in distance, line of sight, or a concept attached to a specific place.  In the web, closeness in terms of distance is moot, for everyother place is just click distance away.  But pages got links.  So, as Kim suggested we need to think deeper about affinity between web pages in term of a page, and its links viewed as multi-dimensional feature maps.     

See, all these computer and IT technology are byproduct results of AI people.