English 342 (NU) discussion

As far as what Web 3.0 may look like is a topic that for some reason scares me. Although web 2.0 may be an amazing leap in technological advances it comes at a cost. In order for web 3.0 to be something positive, better personal security needs to be implied. Little things such as spam and pop-ups should be removed and identity theft shouldn’t be something that many online consumers fear. However I have a hard time imagining an online community where all of this can be made possible. Another problem is that although the internet has made life easier for our generation the people have become lazier. Is society bound for a matrix like reality?

This article made me think a lot about the issues currently at hand on capital hill. The technology that could be used for something like stem cell research could be phenomenal. the difference between changing lives by making doing homework easier on a computer or even typewriter or making a Parkinson disease patients life easier with treatments that could be found or created through stem cell research. Don’t you think medical research and technological advancements should be higher on our priority list? Perhaps they would be if laws were created to allow such advancements.

I think that the "ideas" of Web 2.0 mean well, but in reality they may be a little too dangerous. Allowing anyone and everyone to create or view what they want on the web is obviously going to be risky because not all people are going to make things that are appropriate, or are going to be honest about what they have made.

Things like dashboard views make some things just a little over the top. Who really cares if a site has had a billion hits? It probably isnt even statistically correct since a lot of people click on it and realize it wasn't what they were looking for and just press the back button. How can you count that as a hit when the person didnt even view the page in its entirity?

Also things like tagging give away TOO much information. Say on facebook someone gets an embarrassing picture of you while you were passed out drunk and you don't even know about it, then while you are recovering in bed for the next 48 hours they tag it to your facebook and hundreds of people see it without your permission first? Is that considered fair? Not in my opinion. In order for tagging to work, there must first be confirmation from the person as opposed to just the opportunity afterwards to untag it.

These are just a few examples, but in conclusion, my point would be that no, not all "associative trails" are valuable (nor fair) to all users.

After reading the Web 2.0 article I'm interested and confused. Like kpeworchik said, there was a vocab that I didn't understand, and I'm not going to try because I never will. But I think that web 2.0 is a good thing. I think its a great idea for people to be able to create and categorize their own information on the internet. I could be wrong, but to me it seems as though if people are able to decide keywords and phrases that describe their work we may find pages which we would never have found before. Just think how much easier research would be. I'm always on websites like facebook and myspace, and it seems to me that sites like these would be impossible to navigate because there is so much movement involved when you are "playing" on one of the sites. People can categorize their profile by adding a favorite activity or class being taken and anyone can search for either of those. It doesn't seem as though we would be able to be creative with these sites in the original web. As for web 3.0 i think it will continue where 2.0 left off. Making navigation and design on the internet more and more user friendly.

The article "As We May Think" was interesting in my opinion, it was really interesting to read how the author basically looked into the future and saw much of what we have today with computers and technology. mjhiggins asked the question " are these advances actually helping us or are they just making our society lazy and overly reliant on technology?" in my opinion they are absolutely helping us and just moving us forward. What would happen if all of a sudden everyone was like "hmm I'm happy where we are, lets leave it at that"? then i think that life would get boring, i love going to best buy and finding a new toy, in my opinion advances like speaking into a microphone and having your words appear on your computer screen are essential. Yes it may be making life easier for everyone but is that bad? 100 years ago people were riding around on donkeys, back then we couldn't really go on a vacation across the country, so was it bad to have technology create cars just look where we are today today, other than the price of gas we could pick up and drive to Florida in less than 24 hours when 100 years ago it would have taken a month. To me it just seems that if we stop trying to improve our technology and our lives, then that would be when we would become lazy.

In regards to the Web 2.0 article, I think these advances are all extremely interesting...AND confusing. I have never heard of things such as Ajax, Dashboards and Human Filters. But it this article was kinda of an interesting "behind the scenes" look at how the internet not only works but is advancing, and what is really going on behind the everyday tasks we perform on the web.

My comments are mostly referring to the first couple sections of the article. I liked how Bush started off by saying that man used technology to improve his physical state. After certain advances were made he could avoid disease and lengthen the span of his life, but evidently that wasn’t enough. Bush states that eventually man started to use technology to improve his surroundings as well. He breaks down the creation of several technologies such as photography and computers into a chronological order of advances. I believe he does this to show that no matter how sophisticated the equipment was, scientists still tried to improve it. There is a reoccurring theme of technology changing in Bush’s article. It’s almost as if he is saying that continuing improvements are inevitable. I think its kind of ironic that men were involved in such complicated processes where so much effort was put into making things easier. They were basically working hard to eliminate work. In a way it makes it seem as if these scientists feel that nothing is ever good enough for our society. They are constantly working on things to make human beings’ lives easier. He even refers to certain types of machinery as “embryos” thus implying that even though they are successful in accomplishing their goals they are still like babies and will be growing through further advances. I understand that in some cases these technological advances do in fact improve our society, however, I find it uncessary to have a computer which can record our voices so that we don’t have to type anything. My question is, are these advances actually helping us or are they just making our society lazy and overly reliant on technology?

Vannevar Bush (the author of "As We May Think") is credited with the invention of the concept of hypertext due to his discussion of the concept of the "memex" featured in the article we read this week. While Bush is envisioning a Web that has become a reality, I'm especially interested in how he predicted the ways that people might collaborate and connect ideas on the Web:

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client's interest.

Wikipedia, anyone?

Web 2.0 is making good on Bush's prediction that people will have vast electronic compilations of information with "associative trails" connecting ideas and concepts running through them. In the Web 2.0 model, users are asked to create these "associative trails" in a number of ways: through tagging pages, pictures, and media with keywords, leading to the creation of folksonomies which other users can use to find information, and through "human filtering" when they rate content on the Web. Social interaction is being used to shape and create content on the Web more and more.

Here are my questions, and you can answer any of them you like:

1) What did Bush get wrong? What changes, technologies, or concepts could he not have forseen sixty years ago that we take for granted today?

2) What do you think about the ideas behind Web 2.0? Is it really such a great idea to allow anyone to create and categorize content on the Web? Are all "associative trails" valuable to all users?

3) What do you think Web 3.0 will be like?

Ok I will admit it. As a part of the self proclaimed technology generation, this sort of thing is 100% not my stong point. Instead of posting I made a commet that went something like this:

THIS: is my Junior year at NU and I feel like I have never seen half the people walking around capmus today.

Hi, my name is Katie. I am a transfer student and this is my first semester here at Niagara, and in fact this is my first class...

hope my first post works

Here goes nothing....my first post! Hope it works.

I've never had a livejournal before ... I used to have a blog when I was younger and I had a myspace account until recently. Oh, and of course I am on facebook because who at Niagara University isn't?:-p

This is my first post, I hope this works.

hello class, Nick Hasbrouck here. This is my first livejournal account... I hope I figure out how to do the post.

...is a test.

Welcome to the course community! I'll start off our discussion with a post about this week's readings, and then you'll take over from there. If you want to practice commenting, feel free to use this post to do so.