[svlug] AI meets Web 2.0: Building The Web Of Tomorrow Today

[Karen Shaeffer]

On Fri, Jan 13, 2006 at 03:09:22PM -0800, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Karen Shaeffer (shaeffer at neuralscape.com):
> 
> > The central premise was that people and organizations are moving
> > toward publishing more and more data on the web. 
> 
> The general trends is towards hosting applications and/or customer data 
> on Web 2.0 companies.  That's what those companies are all about, and is
> what my essay addresses, from an open source perspective.


I agree that there are many examples of this today. And some will thrive
and some will not. Your essay is relevant to this issue, of course. And
it makes a wonderful point about the perspective of open source power
users such as yourself (and me for that matter as I would agree with you
entirely in that limited context).

But the presentation at PARC yesterday was far more expansive in it's
scope and ideas. And I was at a meeting last week where a panel of
Venture Capitalists were discussing the Web 2.0 as well. And their
concept of Web 2.0 was much broader than the bounds discussed in your
essay. They see web 2.0 as any service that is built on top of the
existing infrastructure of the net. While that definition includes
all the companies you mention in your essay, it is far more expansive
in it's scope and appears to be compatible with Tenenbaum's presentation.

> 
> > Amazon, Yahoo, Google, Wikipedia,
> 
> None of these is considered Web 2.0 (though some of their newer
> inititives are).


Agreed. But the presentation defined web 2.0 more in terms of providing
services. And that definition includes companies such as Amazon, Yahoo, and
Google and Wikipedia. They are providing services. And the point of the
presentation was that they are also publishing enormous amounts of data.
The key is the availability of data on the net. Amazon publishes an enormous
amount of data that can be useful in much higher functioning ways, when combined
with other data from other sources on the net and processed intelligently,
for specific individuals who have a specific interest at a given moment
in time.

And that is his vision in a nutshell. He claims the available data is
increasing exponentially and the quality of the data is improving as well.
The core idea is that machine intelligence is now capable of organizing all
that data to improve the lives of average folks. And he sees that as the
central premise that will ensure the success of web 2.0 as he defines it.

Much of his presentation dealt with business applications. He clearly
feels profit motive due to enhanced business process efficiencies will
lead to innovations in this sector. As he put it -- processed information
that some person or organization is willing to pay for -- because it
represents a clear value for them will motivate entrepreneurs to provide
the service.

Thanks for your comments.
Karen
-- 
 Karen Shaeffer
 Neuralscape, Palo Alto, Ca. 94306
 shaeffer at neuralscape.com  http://www.neuralscape.com