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Web 3.0: A Locked Down, “Secured” Web 2.0?
While a lot of different people have attempted to deploy the term Web 3.0 to mean pretty much anything they like, I’ve read more and more reports in the last couple of weeks that seem to be positioning Web 3.0 as the locking down of all of the socially shared information that has been the core of Web 2.0. Here’s an example from Australia’s The Age:
WEB 2.0 is well established, and sites such as YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and Digg have turned the internet from a static source of information into a huge, interactive digital playground. But where to next? What will the next stage of web culture – which some people call Web 3.0 – be like? The expectation seems to be that profound changes are on the way. If Web 2.0 is about generating and sharing your own content, Web 3.0 will make information less free.Privacy fears, new forms of advertising, and restrictions imposed by media companies will mean more digital walls, leading to a web that’s safer but without its freewheeling edge. […]This openness is one of the defining features of Web 2.0. But software specialist Nat Torkington, of high-tech publishing house O’Reilly Media, predicts a backlash. He argues that one serious leak or theft of private data could change opinions overnight.”It could be a Three Mile Island of the net,” he says, referring to the 1979 accident that turned the US public against nuclear power.
While this story is more about a more locked-down web being forthcoming rather than present, it’s been noteworthy that the same paper has since run stories about the ease of hacking computers via browsers thanks to Web 2.0 technologies, the fact that stolen identities are being sold cheap by criminals since they’re so easy to obtain thanks to poor web security, and one more nasty tale about 6 teenage girls who lured another girl to one of their homes and then beat her viciously before posting a video of the beating online (or, as The Age called it “an ‘animalistic’ YouTube attack”).
So, the two broad possibilities you’d garner from reading The Age this week are either that Web 2.0 is the root of great evil and needs to be secured immediately, or that someone editing the technology sections of The Age is trying to push for a dramatic change in online culture. (Or, possibly, some middle ground between the two.) What do you think: are the freedoms of Web 2.0 going to be curtailed due to rampant misuse?
Photo by Darwin Bell (CC BY NC)
Links for March 30th 2008
Interesting links for March 30th 2008:
- Getting Started [Photoshop Express] – Great set of simple explanations (in video) for making the most of Photoshop Express.
- Adobe Photoshop Express – Adobe’s push into online applications continues, this time with a (very) scaled-down version of Photoshop as an online tool. Adobe are clearly getting into the web 2.0 side of things, too, with online galleries and a few basic community-building tools.
- An Example of Creative Commons Not Working [Aaron Landry] – An interesting post by Aaron Landry who was disappointed to see Cory Doctorow inadvertently violate a CC license. The issue has since been resolved, but the post raises some important issues about CC, fair use and understandings of ‘non-commercial’.
- Jobs to go in ABC production shake-up [ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)] – Looks like Aunty is centralising in the Eastern states even more, and shrinking infrastructure under the guise of use new technologies and “maximising creativity” while minimizing costs. (Why does this sound so ominous for our national broadcaster?)
- Legal battle over Warcraft ‘bot’ [BBC NEWS | Technology] – Blizzard, the company behind World of Warcraft, is suing Michael Donnelly, the creator of Glider bot which can ‘play’ Warcraft, on the grounds of a very technical copyright breach.
- Cyber vigilantes foil gadget thief [The Age] – Feel-good crowdsourcing/collective intelligence story about Jesse McPherson whose X-Box was stolen, the police couldn’t help much, so he turned the clues he had over to Digg and mobilised a smart mob who found the theif and his lost goods!
- Finding Political News Online, the Young Pass It On [New York Times] – “According to interviews and recent surveys, younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well ? sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks.”
Do Free Online Books Make Money?
Does making a book freely available online hurt or enhance the sales of the hardcopy? Advocates suggest that if you read a bit of the book online you’re more likely to buy the hardcopy if you like it and finish reading it on paper. You’re also more likely to recommend it to friends who might buy it, too. Those against think that free only equals more free, and no one is going to buy a book if you get given the whole thing at no cost. Neil Gaiman and his publisher have been experimenting with this question, and Gaiman’s American Gods has been available for free online for a month (it disappears again in a few days). So, it’s definitely interesting to see who many people read the book, and how hardcopy sales appear to have been effected. So: the initial stats from Neil Gaiman’s blog:
It’s worth drawing people’s attention to the fact that the free online reading copy of American Gods is now in its last six days online (it ends 31 March 08). I learned this from an email from Harper Collins, which also told me the latest batch of statistics.
For American Gods:
68,000 unique visitors to the book pages of American Gods
3,000,000 book pages viewed in aggregate
And that the weekly book sales of American Gods have apparently gone up by 300%, rather than tumbling into the abyss. (Which is — the rise, not the tumble — what I thought would happen. Or at least, what I devoutly hoped would happen.)
The book is up at This URL, if you’re interested, or want to pass it along to a friend.
While this example isn’t exactly necessarily a template for new authors – Gaiman’s existing reputation as an author and his well-read blog both come into play in looking at the figures (not to mention that American Gods is an excellent read) – the overall figures are definitely encouraging and hopefully we’ll see more experiments like this one in the future (and, yes, I realise this isn’t the first such experiment – hello Cory Doctorow – but it’s still a noteworthy one).
Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0
Web 2.0 remains one of those wonderful catch-all phrases which is employed in so many different ways to support a host of different ideas. Rather than leave the term to gain even further layers of hype as it rolls down the digital hillside, a new special edition of First Monday collects some important and engaging perspectives which take a critical look at “Web 2.0” from a number of vantage points:
Preface: Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0
by Michael ZimmerMarket Ideology and the Myths of Web 2.0
by Trebor ScholzWeb 2.0: An argument against convergence
by Matthew AllenInteractivity is Evil! A critical investigation of Web 2.0
by Kylie JarrettLoser Generated Content: From Participation to Exploitation
by Søren Mørk PetersenThe Externalities of Search 2.0: The Emerging Privacy Threats when the Drive for the Perfect Search Engine meets Web 2.0
by Michael ZimmerOnline Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance
by Anders Albrechtslund
From YouTube to UniTube?
It would appear that the University of New South Wales (UNSW) has the dubious honours of being the first Australian university to have their own YouTube channel. In the past couple of months, there have been a number of reports of US universities setting up on YouTube. For example, this article from News.com on UC Berkeley’s channel:
YouTube is now an important teaching tool at UC Berkeley.
The school announced on Wednesday that it has begun posting entire course lectures on the Web’s No.1 video-sharing site.
Berkeley officials claimed in a statement that the university is the first to make full course lectures available on YouTube. The school said that over 300 hours of videotaped courses will be available at youtube.com/ucberkeley.
Berkeley said it will continue to expand the offering. The topics of study found on YouTube included chemistry, physics, biology and even a lecture on search-engine technology given in 2005 by Google cofounder Sergey Brin.
“UC Berkeley on YouTube will provide a public window into university life, academics, events and athletics, which will build on our rich tradition of open educational content for the larger community,” said Christina Maslach, UC Berkeley’s vice provost for undergraduate education in a statement.
Similarly excited press has greeted other US universities, this article on the University of Southern California’s channel (Via). However, the I think educational administrator and web 2.0 aficionado Greg Whitby notes probably wins the most excited prize for his take on the UNSW channel (Via):
While it’s a great marketing strategy, it recognises where today’s students are. Although the channel will broadcast some lecturers in an attempt to reach potential students, it captures the ubquitous nature and popularity of Web 2.0.
This is the democratisation of knowledge – no longer contained within lecture theatres or classrooms but shared. Learning becomes accessible, anywhere, anytime. Transportable, transparent, relevant and exciting.
The University of NSW is to be applauded but we still lag behind. iTunes has developed a store dedicated to education called University. It’s ‘the campus that never sleeps’ – allowing universities across the US to upload audio/video lectures, interviews, debates, presentations for students – any age, anywhere. And it’s free. It’s astounding and exciting to think that a cohort of students and teachers from a school western Sydney can watch a biology lecture from MIT.
The challenge for us is to open our K-12 classrooms to a new audience – to share knowledge as professionals and to showcase quality learning and teaching as we move from isolated classrooms to a connected global learning environment.
Readers of any of my blogs will know I’m also an advocate for integrating certain web 2.0 tools into learning and teaching. However, these announcements seem oddly familiar to me – it’s just like the press that came out as pretty much every university in the world embraced podcasting one after another, each pushing out press releases about embracing the future. However, what didn’t happen half as readily was the pedagogical discussion about how podcasting should or could be used in education. Nor, I have to say, are we seeing much interrogation of the use of online video via YouTube or other services. Let me be clear: there is certainly value in using YouTube in particular ways in education. However, as I argued about podcasting in the past, it’s probably more important to focus on working out new ways to engage students (such as having them create content for podcasting or to post on YouTube) rather than primarily just replicating the top-down structures of lecture delivery. (I don’t have a problem with recorded lectures, I should add, I just don’t think that’s all we should worry about.)
It’s also worth keeping in mind that YouTube is a two-way street as demonstrated by clips of teachers at their worst appearing on YouTube.
Special Journal Issue on "Social Network Sites"
The latest edition of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication is live, and contains an outstanding special section on “social network sites” edited by danah boyd and Nicole Ellison. I’ve not had a chance to read all the articles, yet, but I can say with certainty that danah boyd and Nicole Ellison’s “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship” is definitely going to be one of those oft-cited and even more often read papers in university courses! Here’s the announcement from danah’s blog:
JCMC Special Theme Issue on “Social Network Sites”
Guest Editors: danah boyd and Nicole Ellison
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/[X] “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship” by danah boyd and Nicole Ellison
[X]“Signals in Social Supernets” by Judith Donath
[X]“Social Network Profiles as Taste Performances” by Hugo Liu
[X]“Whose Space? Differences Among Users and Non-Users of Social Network Sites” by Eszter Hargittai
[X]“Cying for Me, Cying for Us: Relational Dialectics in a Korean Social Network Site” by Kyung-Hee Kim and Haejin Yun
[X]“Public Discourse, Community Concerns, and Civic Engagement: Exploring Black Social Networking Traditions on BlackPlanet.com” by Dara Byrne
[X]“Mobile Social Networks and Social Practice: A Case Study of Dodgeball” by Lee Humphreys
[X]“Publicly Private and Privately Public: Social Networking on YouTube” by Patricia Lange
While not getting quite as much blog attention, it’s also worth noting that there are a number of other great papers in this issue of JCMC, too. In particular, I found these two very engaging:
[X] The Creative Commons and Copyright Protection in the Digital Era: Uses of Creative Commons Licenses by Minjeong Kim; and
[X] Every Blog Has Its Day: Politically Interested Internet Users’ Perceptions of Blog Credibility by Thomas J. Johnson, Barbara K. Kaye, Shannon L. Bichard, and W. Joann Wong
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