Internet and Ants: How are they similar?

So our last post discussed IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) and the concept of phenotropic development… What?? Put in simple terms, both of these terms will help Web 3.0 develop into a platform where users (Ex. Consumers and businesses) will likely move into an increasingly social relationship. Pretty cool right? Just nod in agreement…

Now what is even cooler is the concept of stigmergic collaboration! “Stigmergy” is a biological term first introduced by French biologist Pierre-Paul Grasse and it describes environmental mechanisms for coordinating the work of independent actors. It is basically a form of self-organization that allows distinct actors to product complex and intelligent structures without planning, controlling or even communicating directly. An example of stigmergic collaboration in the natural world is when ants leave pheromones to exchange information and create trails.

  

By now you are probably asking yourself what does stigmergic collaboration have to do with the technology? Well, the answer is surprisingly simple. The World Wide Web (Yes, the Internet we use every single day to read the news, update our Facebook status, pick our Fantasy League team, etc.) is the first form of stigmergic communication for people. If we relate back to our ant example, people use weblog links ("pheromones") to establish information paths between different users.

Is everything on the web considered to be “stigmergic collaboration”? Nope. For instance, e-mail does not count as stigmergic collaboration because e-mails can only be read by the senders and receivers on either end of the e-mail. Although I’m not so sure how true this is considering the recent NSA scandals but will leave that out for another post... To sum up, stigmergic collaboration must have messages that can be read by everybody on the World Wide Web and it is a extremely powerful tool!

 

We mentioned the ants and weblog example but do we have anything else? Of course! Think of Google and every time you conduct a search on it. The results are displayed based on Google’s PageRank and this is stigmergic collaboration. The links on the results page act as “pheromones” left by users and every time we click on a link we “create a trail”. The more we click on a link, the more we use the trail and the more we engage on stigmergic collaboration. 

 

Now to conclude, I want to leave you with four major points from Mark Elliot, a well-respected scholar when it comes to stigmergic collaboration. You can view some of his work at http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/03-elliott.php. 

1) Collaboration is dependent upon communication, and communication is a network phenomenon. 

2)  Collaboration is inherently composed of two primary components, without either of which collaboration cannot take place: social negotiation and creative output.

3)  Collaboration in small groups (roughly 2-25) relies upon social negotiation to evolve and guide its process and creative output.

4)  Collaboration in large groups (roughly 25-n) is dependent upon stigmergy.

Human + Computer Language Tech part 2

Phenotropic Development

In the development of Web 3.0, IPv6 is required to allow for more devices to communicate with each other. The richness of how those devices communicate with each other in the future is dependent on phenotropic development. What this development will do is basically allow software to move past protocol adherence toward pattern recognition. The main significance of this in terms of expanding the web is the size and richness of programs. Jaron Lanier, web 2.0 pioneer and Microsoft partner architect, discusses how we need to start thinking about creating software differently because
“we will not be writing programs bigger than about ten million lines of code no matter how fast our processors become,”

and the way to think about this is through “pattern recognition” vs. “protocol adherence.”

The way to think about the necessity of phenotropic development in computing is to think of making use of superior developing technology through richness of expression.





Or perhaps how the development of technology and richness of expression may go hand-in-hand. So what does the proposition of phenotropic development mean in commerce? Principally, commerce will move increasingly from selling and buying activities toward social dealings. As we’ve seen relatively recently, firms have moved increasingly toward more social relationships with consumers through social media, such as Facebook.

Through advancements such as IPv6 and phenotropic development, businesses and consumers are likely to move into an increasingly social relationship space far beyond consumer-firm relationships we see today.

New Language Coming

Tech alert: this post contains explanations of internet technology and some technobabble.

Why it’s important:
The buds of technologically-based culture and language have already emerged. The growth of this culture and language have been relatively constrained by defined protocols and the resulting disparate technology-bound human-to-information interface. Web 3.0 will move past constraints of protocols and sequential communication, and spawn an undefined mode of human communication and expression.

Remember the 90’s when people commonly misused basic internet terms? Like, “instant message me” when meaning to say “send me an email.” What about, “log on to x website” when meaning to say “go to x website?”

Don’t be that person as web 3.0 expands the common internet lexicon.

What will the internet language be in the future; what will common terms be? Nobody knows, but read on to discover what will be some of the roots of the forthcoming language. We’ll be throwing out some of the technical roots of Web 3.0 in this blog. For this post, let’s talk about “IPv6.”

IPv6 = Internet Protocol version 6. From wikipedia:

The communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic across the Internet. IPv6 was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to deal with the long-anticipated problem of IPv4 address exhaustion.
Every device on the Internet must be assigned an IP address in order to communicate with other devices. With the ever-increasing number of new devices being connected to the Internet, the need arose for more addresses than IPv4 is able to accommodate. IPv6 uses a 128-bit address, allowing 2128, or approximately 3.4×10^38 addresses, or more than 7.9×10^28 times as many as IPv4, which uses 32-bit addresses.

When thinking of this phenomenon of providing humans 7.9x10^28 times as many ways to communicate as before, it’s kind of like human evolution and the elongation of the human throat and the reduction in the size of the mouth.

It allows us to effectively shape and control infinitely more types of expression, thus language(s). But understanding where Web 3.0 is taking us is not only about IPv6. There’s much more such as post-protocol and tangible interfaces; “phenotropic directories;” and “stigmergic networks.”

Web 3.0 shakes up the Marketing field…once again!

Today is very common to hear acronyms such as SEM, SEO or CMS in our daily life, even if you are not a techy or an online-marketing expert. The more time we spend online, the more important those terms become.

For those who are still not familiarized with them, here you will find a short explanation:

• SEM: Search Engine Management, which includes marketing tools to increase the visibility of your website, i.e. pay-per-click, pay-per view, placements, online-ads and SEO, too.
• SEO: Search Engine Optimization, referred specifically to how to optimize the position of your website in the search engines.
• CMS: Content Management System, the one used to manage the content on your website, social network and any other “platform” where your content is displayed.

But what does these have to do with the Web 3.0? Well, let’s take a look at the evolution of the web to answer this question.

First, we had the Web 1.0, focused on webpages and how to make them reachable by customers. As a result, SEM (including SEO) appeared, letting marketers get closer to their customers by pushing their content, over competitors.

Then, the Web 2.0 was developed and Social Networks came along with it. Now the web was not only flooded by one-way communication pages, but by networks that allow everybody to interact, comment and create his/her own content, leading marketers to create new tactics, in order to take advantage of these new information generated by their customers.

And finally, we are witnessing the Web 3.0 entering the picture. This new concept is still confusing for some of us, because it seems to be just an extended version of the Web 2.0, since the semantic web can be seen as a new way to organise data and make it more accessible, but as it has been explained in previous posts, it’s definitely more than that. 

One of the major aspects of Web 3.0 focuses on data and how to link it. Firms that master the rules of the game faster, will be able to enhance and optimise their online-marketing strategy (including SEM, SEO, CSM, etc.) and, therefore, generate more traffic in their website, by reaching the right customers (the one willing to purchase) with the right data (the data the customer precisely wants), at the right time (when they need it). This is a big deal for marketers, since this kind of customer has a high rate of purchasing, so sales might consistently increase (if well managed and aligned with the goals of the company).

Metadata... Wait, isn't that one of the X-Men?

Before we dive into the 4th post of our blog TINN Can, lets do a small recap of what we have covered so far:

• Web 3.0 includes a number of different meanings ranging from the convergence of the physical and virtual worlds to the conversion of web pages to semantic data formats. When we say “nobody knows what the &!%$ it means,” we mean it.
•  Semantic web is a type of technology used in Web 3.0 and the idea is to structure the meaningful content of web pages.
• Ontology is a component of semantic web, which is used to interpret and analyze metadata. As this technology continues to improve, it will provide users with the exact information they need.

Now in our last post we introduced a new concept: metadata. Meta who? Yes, I know that it sounds like some sort of superhero out of a Stan Lee comic but we are far from that. Right about now you must be thinking, “I knew we had data but what is this metadata stuff you are throwing at me?”

For the purpose of our conversation, we will keep the definition of metadata as simple as possible. And metadata is, wait for it…

DATA ABOUT DATA

Wait, what? That’s it? Yup, for now that is it. We could go into the details of the different types of metadata available but we will leave that for our more curious readers who wish to expand their knowledge and perhaps complicate their lives a little bit more. (Hint: You have structural, descriptive, operational, analytical, Business, etc.)

When we say “data about data”, we mean, for instance, the data that describes the data fields in a database, what data is allowed or how are values expressed. Take for instance, a database with the birthdays of all the people in your company or your school. Now, birth dates can either be written as MM/DD/YYYY, DD/MM/YYYY, YYYY/DD/MM and so on… For this example the term metadata would apply to how the birth date values are kept in the database (Ex. MM/DD/YYYY). Hence, our data are the birthdays of everybody and our data about the data is how those birthdays are to be recorded in our database. We can even go further and include as part of our metadata where in the database the birthdays are recorded, who is the “owner” of this data, who has access to it, etc.

Now, what does this metadata crap have to do with Web 3.0 and how is this relevant to the users? Well, I’m glad you asked. Metadata allows Web 3.0 to be fully interconnected thus facilitating better information search, findings and an overall improvement in content management. What the hell is content management? We will leave that for a future post… All you need to know for now is that metadata will improve your experience in the web as we move forward into the Age of Information.