John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly, founders of the Web 2.0 Conference, have coined a new term (and released a white paper) on what they believe is the next evolution of the internet – Web Squared (Web²).
The Web is no longer a collection of static pages of HTML that describe something in the world. Increasingly, the Web is the world – everything and everyone in the world casts an “information shadow,” an aura of data which, when captured and processed intelligently, offers extraordinary opportunity and mind bending implications. Web Squared is our way of exploring this phenomenon and giving it a name.
According to Battelle and O’Reilly, Web 2.0 + World = Web².
Rather than talk about specific technologies, this week I thought I would post the technology/social media authors or researchers that I believe are worth paying attention to.
One.Alice Marwick is a PhD candidate at the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University and her dissertation is on social status and elitism in Web 2.0 communities. I originally began to read her for her earlier work on microcelebrity and internet fame.
Two.Jane McGonigal is a game designer and researcher, who focuses on pervasive gaming and alternate reality games, and is currently the Director of Game Research and Development at the Institute for the Future. She is especially interested in the way games can be used to improve the world and impact player’s cognitive processes, social relations and public participation, an interest that can be clearly seen in her work in World Without Oil, a multi-player online game designed to examine the challenges of a future without petroleum.
Three. Aleks Krotoski is a journalist for The Guardian newspaper and hosts their technology podcast, and also an academic in the process of completing her PhD in social psychology, where she is examining how information spreads through online social networks. She is also currently working on the BBC series Digital Revolution, about the social history of the Web, for broadcast next year.
We all know librarians wear glasses. Well, Nokia has decided to give us a glimpse of what may be possible with librarian’s eyewear in the near future, complete with soundtrack. A vision of the Nokia Research Centre, Nokia Mixed Reality…
…allows to you to experience immersion and effortless navigation in an Augmented Reality environment. New types of interactions involving near-to-eye displays, gaze direction tracking, 3D audio, 3D video, gesture and touch. Through these new types of social linkages people will be connected in innovative ways between the physical and digital worlds.
And what about those of us who want to break this librarian stereotype? Just wait for the augmented reality contact lenses, of course.
One. Google Maps will now be displaying live traffic data for more roads, not just the major highways. While it is clear that they are still working on the technology and its application, it gives us a good idea of what will be possible in the future as real time, mobile technology, and location based applications develop.
By describing the practices of knowledge workers who blog, this research provides a view into the changing nature of work that becomes increasingly digital, nomadic and networked. It shows the power of individual knowledge workers, who bypass existing authorities and use their networks to stay informed and to get things done. It documents the blurred boundaries between what is personal and what is professional, as well as the growing need to know how to deal with transparency and fragmentation of one’s work.
It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you. Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person – to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.
And in case you want to know what the final outcome looks like, here is my online Persona.
As the deadline for proposals to the 2010 National Diversity in Libraries Conference is fast approaching, I thought it would be appropriate to post examples of intersections between culture and mobile technology.
A cellular company, Zain Uganda, which allows clients to pay for fuel purchases via their mobile handsets through the ZAP service
The predictive text programme which predicts Welsh words as you type, launched by the Welsh Language Board at the National Eisteddfod in Swansea
LG Electronics two mobile handsets that include features specifically created for Muslims, including a Qiblah indicator, Adhan and Salah prayer time alarm functions, Quran software, Hijiri calendar and a Zakat calculator
