August 29th, 2006
Robert Bosman
Web 4.0 is not about technology,
it’s the infrastructure of a whole new society: Society 4.0.
What invention will connect all those separated websites into one interwoven network of networks?
As said: the answer to that question opens the door to Web 4.0. Nobody knows this answer at this very moment. But together we may find it. I’ll continue to develop my thoughts about it over here.
Web 4.0 will be that new, that ‘citizens’, organizations of all kinds, governments, semi- and supra-governmental organizations together will co-create a whole new society. In that new Society interconnection will not stop at the gate of a web portal, in the contrary: web portals itself will be interconnected too, enabling ‘citizens’ to manage all their roles more as one life! Web 4.0 is the end of island computerization, both in and outside organizations. Whole new markets will arise, new levels of creativity will be generated, surprisingly new solutions for the major problems of our time like physical and mental pollution.
Web 4.0 is not about technology; it’s the infrastructure of a whole new society, Society 4.0. In order to create that new society, we need a brand new ICT architecture. The core-architecture of most software is the same as that of the ‘80 of the previous century; rebuild as web enabled software, but nontheless with the same architecture. It’s easy to come up with a lot’s of examples for this. The core architecture for society as such is even older; take for example the bureaucratic institutions we call Democracy…or the ‘Chamber of Commerce’. Please notice, I’m not negative about them, in contrary: I see a much better future on the horizon. You can rebuild a house several times; but there comes a day that rebuilding is no longer an option. And that day is coming, soon.
Both the new Society as it’s organizational infrastructure, the new Web, will need a new architecture. Dion Hinchcliffe called it ‘the architecture of participation’. We even could name it ‘the architecture of co-creation’. And I agree with Dion when he calls the architecture of participation, ‘the next big thing’:
‘And I’ll go on record, given the results so far, building competitive architectures of participation is almost certainly going to be one of the biggest topics in software design for the rest of the decade.’ (Dion Hinchcliffe).
I think he’s very right. Why? Because the architecture of participation and co-creation will create a Web 4.0 and a new Society, in which we will be able to ‘harnessing collective intelligence’ for the very first time in history. And I do agree with Tim O’Reilly, that that’s the core of everything.
Technorati Tags: web2.0, the next web, the next big thing, architecture of participation, SOA, O’Reilly, Hinchcliffe, society
August 29th, 2006
Robert Bosman
In the 80ies PC’s were not connected at all.
Nowadays that is the same for all webportals.
When we zoom i into the development of the internet itself, we can see the same 4 waves as we used in the previous two postings, but now in just another disguise:
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The 1st internet wave brought the invention of the markup language, originally used by traditional book publishers ‘marking up’ a manuscript in order to print it properly, eventually leading to the main web languages as HTML, Java etc; the language of the first intranet that was mostly used in science and the military.
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The 2nd internet wave was the web’s writing and reading tool: the web browser. A tremendous number of websites were created; most of the producers of websites were companies and (semi)governmental organizations, while most of the readers were the ‘normal citizens’ like you and me.
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The 3rd internet wave arrived when new standards like XML enabled the rise of web portals, intelligent website that connect websites to corporate back offices (sometimes web servers themselves). Just like book printing created mass distribution of the written word, web portals are nowadays generating mass distribution of web services. But were books are one-way communicators from the writer/publisher to the reader, the web is a two-way communicator, changing the traditional roles of society.
The customer of the past is for example nowadays also a salesman in Amazon’s Associate program, a supplier in eBay’s trading system, a volunteer coworker in Wikipedia, a producer in iStockPhoto, a musician in iTunes, a community member in LinkedIn, a citizen journalist in OhMyNews and a stakeholder in a lot of NGO’s (Non Governmental Organizations). And moreover, she’s also a contributor of endless information for the search engines of this world.
It are exactly these co-creative multi-roles, that are at the core of what’s commonly called Web 2.0. It will be clear that I would call this Web 3.0, while for me Web 2.0 is that of the good old simple websites and Web 1.0 that of the original scientists and web pioneers.
So, that leaves us with one question: WHAT IS WEB 4.0, the Next Next web?
(It’s not such a strange question as it may look: there’s already that September 2006 conference called ‘The New New Internet’!)
There are two ways to approach the answer to this question. First of all, we could raise the question if the web portal based Web 3.0 is really ‘harnessing collective intelligence’, as Tim O’Reilly wrote about. The answer is: quite a bit, but not that much. So we need a better web, Web 4.0, for that.
The second way to look after the horizon of Web 4.0, is by realizing that all those powerful web portals of Web 3.0 are isolated islands, just like the PC’s of the ‘70ies were islands. The poor user is jumping form website to website and is sick of all that incompatible login names and passwords.
The invention of the servers connected all that separated PC’s into the net. What invention will connect all that separated websites into one interwoven network of networks? The answer to that question opens the door to Web 4.0. We’ll do so in the next post.
Technorati Tags: web2.0, evolution, society, new world, philosophy, practosophy
August 28th, 2006
Robert Bosman
The future is easier to see,
if we understand the past…
There’s a lot to do about Web 2.0 today. The definition of Web 2.0 is diffuse; it’s sometimes described as ’social computing’ or ‘collaboration and sharing information online in a new way.’ But Tim 0′Reilly, the man who ‘invented’ the words ‘Web 2.0′, wrote in his blog recently that the essence of Web 2.0 is ‘harnessing collective intelligence’.
All authors agree that the old internet of one-way-websites isn’t growing anymore, and that a new web is on the rise, in which people, organizations and even governments are co-creators of information.
‘I write a site - you read it’ is the past;
‘We meet, share and create together’ is the future.
Maybe a part of the confusion about Web 2.0 comes from the fact, that we only use 2 different names: 1.0 for the old net and 2.0 the new. But in fact the change of the internet shows more then 2 essential steps. A practical way to look at this on a deeper level, is using the essence of the 4 waves or quantum leaps (language, writing, printing and digitalization) as mentioned in this blog’s posting ‘Society 4.0’. The 4 waves mentioned, may also be seen as: invention, use, mass distribution and mass co-creation. By using theses 4 waves, we learn that he forth step - digitalization - in itself shows 4 more or less identical steps or ‘digital waves’.
- The 1st digital wave was generated by the invention of the digital language as such, starting with the very first description of the modern binary number system by Gottfried Leibniz in the 17th century and the use of it in Boolean algebra by George Boole.
- The 2nd digital wave enabled a method of writing this digital language; that started by the inventions of Herman Hollerith, a famous American inventor who in 1880 created a system of recording and retrieving information on punched cards; he founded the company, that eventually became IBM in 1924. In 1937 Claude Shannon invented the use of electronic relays (vacuum tubes) and switches. Later on they were replaced by transistors and even later by microchips. But all of them were ‘digital memories’, methods of writing and recording the digital language.
In those days computers were rare, heavy, big and expensive.
- That changed with the invention of the micro-computer, later on called PC, bringing us in the 3rd digital wave: that of mass distribution of computer technology.
- It was the invention of the servers, that created the 4th digital wave: mass connection of PC’s into local area networks and later on into the internet, the World Wide Web, enabling the real time mass-cooperation of people and all kinds of organizations.
When we zoom in into the development of the internet itself, we can see the same 4 waves in just another disguise. We’ll do so in the next posting.
Technorati Tags: web history, web, web2.0, society, philosophy, practosophy
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