[Web] surfing mimics a postmodern, deconstructionist perspective by undermining the authority of texts...no longer awed by received authority...in the form of text, graphics, music or code...[web surfers will use them] for their own purposes.
The World Wide Database is a globally distributed network of data records that reside on millions of nodes around the network which collectively behaves as a giant virtual, decentralized database system...we need a new kind of server for hosting WWDB node
Building a centralized database to process billions of open-ended queries per day is a mammoth undertaking. It appears that Google, who perhaps is the only company on the planet with enough imagination, incentive, and expertise to effectively build such a
What information will be deemed Proprietary? What information is part of the Information Commons? Who decides? How is it decided? Centralized? Decentralized? Opaque? Transparent?
Emergent structure vs. intelligent design: This all reflects a fundamental if still incoherent debate. There's one school of thought that says that if you just collect enough data and throw enough algorithms at it, the inherent structure - and the underst
Hillis has bigger fish to fry than self-programming gadgets. In the past, he's expressed a desire to create machines that transcend what he sees as the limitations of human beings. "I guess I'm not overly perturbed by the prospect that there might be some
You maintain a blog at, say, livejournal.com (but this can be anything) and you stay logged in there usually. You go to leave a comment at someblog.com (perhaps it's Movable Type, or Wordpress, or DeadJournal, ...) and you don't have an account there, s
OpenID is a lightweight, decentralized identity system that has been gaining prominence. I expect this upcoming year to be a big year for OpenID -- and not just because of the Google trend chart with the recent uptake in search query share.
Here we explore social action. By social action we mean organized activity that seeks to improve human welfare, deepen civic culture and develop group life and commitment to others. Such a definition entails looking at the cultivation of a just and caring
'Just doing it' - not waiting upon national governments and international organizations to take action - has led to a remarkable outpouring of initiatives around the global environmental crisis. We explore James Gustave Speth's vision of unscripted, volu
The Decentralized Information Group explores technical, institutional, and public policy questions necessary to advance the development of global, decentralized information environments. The Tabulator project is a generic Semantic Web data browser. Using
information theory and trillions of interconnected binary logic gates give the Internet far greater potential for enhancing social interactivity. They create a new high-bandwidth mode among or between communities in real, biological space, binding and ext
MoveOn.org and the Howard Dean campaign have pioneered new models for democratic, flexible, "network-centric" approaches, but many organizations stick resolutely to traditional "ego-centric" methods. There's a simmering tension between ego-centric thinkin
We need solutions that can help the many people whose terms and vocabulary are left out of the taxonomy... The simple idea that people’s actions model meaning better than a directory (even a flexible directory) is a critical step forward in thinking ab
Hyperlinking is the foundation of the web. As users add new content, and new sites, it is bound in to the structure of the web by other users discovering the content and linking to it. Much as synapses form in the brain, with associations becoming stronge
The emergence of P2P Inference Engines and domain-specific ontologies in Web 3.0 (aka Semantic Web) will present a major threat to the central “search” engine model. In Web 3.0 (aka Semantic Web) P2P Inference Engines running on millions of users’ P
Web architecture from 50,000 feet up... decentralization and tolerance are the life and breath of Internet...If an engine of the future combines a reasoning engine with a search engine...able to construct proofs in a certain number of cases of very real i