[P]art of what makes a great journalist is having a good BS detector.

From a comment by John on “It’s worth fighting for”.

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It is a mobile phone with which you can make calls, write messages, add phone numbers in a contacts list, listen to music and watch videos, access the web and view the street maps. I am not kidding.

The list was chosen by a team of experts lead by Lev Grossman. In this video he explains the process of choosing The Best Inventions Of the Year. Just a note: at the very beginning you can clearly see how the Macintosh computer and the iPhone has made his work much more organized. I kid, I kid.

Although such lists can never be objective and are mostly meant to grab the attention of the newsstand surfers, they could at least try to be critical and explanatory about the items that were chosen to be included. The Time’s article about the iPhone exhibits neither of these characteristics and is more like a defense to why such irrelevant and overhyped consumer product was chosen.

Recipe for the Invention of the Year

According to the Time, the components of the greatest invention are the following:

1. The thing has to be pretty.
2. It must feel nice to touch it.
3. It has to imply that it will make other exactly the same things better.
4. It has to make you think that it is something greater than it is.
5. It has to make you believe that it will eventually become an invention sometime in future.

If the reason for choosing iPhone was this:

[W]e chose the iPhone as Invention of the Year, not merely for its revolutionary design and functionality but for how it will shape the future of communications.

then look at the Windows CE platform (also known as Windows Mobile) which has been powering touchscreen computer-like devices since 1996. Since 1996! Microsoft even opened the whole underlying source code for the application developers in 2006.

Every possible ‘mobile phone’ feature – from GPS, Google Maps, VOIP, Skype, Instant Messaging, 3G data transfer, Wifi, Bluetooth to business, media player and monitoring applications are already available for Windows Mobile based phones. There are enormous amounts of people who actually use smartphones and there are truly innovative applications being developed for them. Somehow the journalists seem to have missed it and view the iPhone as a revolutionary device.

One of the possible reasons for American journalists ignoring the Windows based phones could be the very specific U.S. mobile communications market. In the rest of the word people buy the phone that they actually want and use it with whatever network they fancy, while in the U.S. these are mostly subsides devices. Moreover, the prepaid package system discourages people from trying out new opportunities offered by higher speed data transfer availability. Therefore most of the iPhone worshipers probably haven’t used Google Maps, IM or a proper internet browser that were all available on other phones before the iPhone was introduced.

The Apple Innovation

The power of the Apple is the look & feel of their products and nobody will argue that the iPhone ‘looks pretty’ and is ‘nice’ to use, but it certainly isn’t an invention with regards to creating a mobile platform. At the same time its interface (not the touch-screen but the scrolling, flipping and resizing) is truly innovative and will definitely make other phone manufacturers realize the importance of it.

Some of the available Windows Mobile based phones and applications like PocketCM illustrate that Windows doesn’t mean ugly. Those examples also show the impact that the Apple has had on other phone manufacturers and software creators.

Reconsidering the Invention of the Year

The iPhone is clearly not the Invention of the Year because of the reasons mentioned above. But what could potentially make our lives better in future that was created this year? How about the ‘One Laptop per Child’ project, flexible fiber or the ankle-foot prosthesis. There is no such thing as a single most significant invention while there are many of them that have invaluable positive effect on different sides of our lives.

What are the most significant inventions for you this year?

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If definition means “the act of defining or making definite, distinct, or clear” then the definition of ‘web 2.0’ provided by Tim O’Reilly is neither distinct nor clear. He tries to put way too many things under a single umbrella, under one next version—the 2.0—while many of these things are in a continuous development with varying speed and can not be defined by ‘versions’.

On the first page of the article he formulates the “sense of web 2.0” by giving a few examples of how web 2.0 is different from Web 1.0, like, “publishing –> participation”, “content management systems –> wikis” and “Britannica Online –> Wikipedia”.

If these are the chosen examples to illustrate the principles of web 2.0, then the arrow used between them means something different in each of the examples, which however contradicts to the use of an equal type linguistic/symbolic link among all examples. As none of the known symbols of logic are used (like ⇒ or ∈), then lets try figure out what the author meant.

Does “publishing –> participation” mean that participation has become more important than publishing, or that there is an increase of participation over publishing? In any case, the value of blogs and wikis is their content; the value of a photo sharing site is the photos published and the tags added not the bare fact of people participating in this act.

The second statement “content management systems –> wikis” seems to be an equally bad one. What are people using for publishing their blogs — a wiki or a content management system? What are they using for collecting and organizing information? WordPress and MediaWiki are examples of a software for both — one powers enormous amounts of blogs while the other powers the Wikipedia. At the same time both Wikipedia and blogs are used as the primary examples to illustrate the idea of web 2.0. So what did O’Reilly exactly meant by using this “CMS –> wikis” example?

At the same time I do understand how people actually can understand or find their own formulation/sense of what the web 2.0 is. However, I would also argue that many of them who claim to have understood the web 2.0 don’t quite know how the web works, and what is unique about the increasing amounts of people contributing to it.

Many people would call facebook a typical web 2.0 application, while in fact it is a typical PHP software — no different than WordPress or MediaWiki. Now a lot of you will argue that those are its users (and that what they do) who make it a web 2.0 application, or that an API they provide for programmers, make it web 2.0.

So what exactly do you want to say about the facebook — do you want to describe how it enables user interaction or how it allows other programmers to use its data?

The lack of clarity and proper terminology is my single and only problem with bloggers/journalists using the term web 2.0, because they don’t get to the point of their message by simply labelling something web 2.0, and hence imply that they are talking about everything that Tim O’Reilly mentions in his article.

Bloggers and journalists (in press, TV and radio) should avoid using the term web 2.0 and concentrate on the particular subject of the web that they want to describe or analyse. There is a wealth of appropriate terminology that can be used to describe the web much better and more precisely than the buzzwords.

Suggested Reading

• “The Good, the Bad, And the ‘Web 2.0′” by Andrew Keen and David Weinberger in The Wall Street Journal — an excellent debate which illustrates that there is much more to the web than blogs, rss, podcasts and networking under the same web 2.0 cover.
• “Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense” by John Markoff in The New York Times already suggesting web 2.0, 3.0, 4.0…
• “Waiting for the Web 2.0 bubble to pop” by Jack Schofield in Guardian Blogs — isn’t such a title implying that either facebook, flickr or Wikipedia are to pop? Although it talks about the companies making business out of web 2.0, it doesn’t explain who is actually going to be hurt in case of such an event and how it matters to an average user of a web 2.0 website.

What do you think?

What is your view on the web 2.0 term? Do you use it, and if so, what is your definition of it?

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• The User-Generated Content Myth by Scott Karp where he perfectly explains that an average creator of a useful web content is not an average citizen.
• The Fakebook Generation by Alice Mathias who excellently describes the reasons for the popularity of social networking sites and what they actually mean to people using them.
• Facebook Is NOT For Business also by Scott Karp where he explains why the popular view of Facebook (or any other website of kind) being useful for business and during the business is false.

More Views About the Web and Journalism

Continuing the debate over the importance of professional journalism and the rising popularity of individual publishing, there are number of different viewpoints presented in the following blog posts:

• Let’s have a real debate about Web 2.0 by Suw Charman and Kevin Anderson,
• Still going: more of the NUJ debate by Shane Richmond,
• Is the Web as weak as its weakest link? by David Weinberger,
• The NUJ and me: a considered response by Roy Greenslade,
• Hands up those who think Web 2.0 is rubbish! by Sian Claire Owen.

While I may disagree to some of the views expressed in the above articles, I still think that most of the authors would be better of without using the term Web 2.0, to make their point clearer.

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• Shane Richmond, The NUJ’s blinkered approach to online
• Jeff Jarvis, The new collective
• Roy Greenslade, Why I’m saying farewell to the NUJ

I disagree with the idea that personal publishing on the web is a threat to journalism, and I also don’t think the increasing popularity of individual publishing could undermine the professional standards of journalism (in its broadest sense). However, the idea of personal publishing replacing the concept of media is totally absurd, indeed.

Notice that I use ‘personal publishing’ instead of citizen journalism, because calling blogs or podcasts the pieces of journalism would really blur and question the characteristics, values and qualities of professional writing and production.

Increasing availability of the internet has made writing and publishing in general more popular than it has ever been. The more people explore what other individuals have published, the more they want to try it themselves. It is reasonable that a person who wouldn’t have had a possibility to reach thousands and thousands of likeminded people, is now considering their efforts of actually writing/drawing/recording something worth while. The opportunity of earning some money while doing it even adds to the motivation.

What Does the Web Have to Offer?

Many people who publish something on the web today might have a far greater expertise on various niche topics than an average industry expert/reporter working in a newspaper staff. Equally those individuals most often don’t have the composition and writing skills of a trained journalist, who has the knowledge and practice of good writing. It is tough to be a professional journalist and it takes a lot of time and effort to become a good one. Somebody who writes 600 words per week will rarely achieve the quality of professional journalists and editorial teams.

However with cameras and video capable phones dropping into almost everyone’s pocket, all the events around the world are continually witnessed and captured. This is where crowds and individuals matter to those who try to understand, explain and analyse the events. The connectivity and wakefulness of this social place called planet Earth is what matters to journalism.

Some may argue that a lot of important stories are covered in greater depth by bloggers than by traditional newsrooms. And it’s true. However, the keyword here is ‘important’, because importance of any story is very different to each of us. A biology professor might find time to write about the ethics and development of stem cell research on a blog which will be read and appreciated by many of those who are interested in sciences. But how could this professor threaten science journalism in general?

Journalism is about gathering, filtering, verifying and presenting the information.

Do you really think that many freelance field “experts” will replace fulltime journalists and there will be only teams of “editors” who collect articles, photos and videos from those individual publishers/bloggers? If so – what about ethics and responsibility of a journalist, what about ensuring valid and trustworthy sources of information? Crowds can’t be held responsible for one or another opinion. Crowds are useful for collecting information, while editors and professionals are required to filter, verify and present it in a way that people have expected and loved to receive from professional journalism.

Look at the Wikinews – there are only around 10 news links for October 27. The whole front page is a complete mess. Crowds are simply incapable of organizing information; crowds can’t prioritize.

Journalists should view the web as a source of information, like a perfectly indexed phonebook of experts who may often be the most knowledgeable in their field because of the work they have published. A decision on one’s authority is exactly what journalism is responsible and respected for. It is a false perception that publications on the web intrinsically have less authority.

Web becomes the media only when the published information is perceived by a person who can further reflect on it. And the rest of the web is reference material. However, journalism is so much more than a reference material.

The Public Perception of the Web and Journalism

The reasons why an old time (in a good way) editorial staff is worrying about the web as a threat to professional journalism are easy to imagine. However it also seems that an average citizen has an perception of the cool new thing called ‘web 2.0’ being somehow superior or able to replace articles, photos and videos that they are currently getting from papers and TV – be it news or entertainment.

Reporters who try to explain the web in ‘traditional’ media lack critical analysis of what the web actually is and how it can be good for public. Few articles are about what the web can’t do while there are plenty of those full of jargon and buzzwords.

It is a matter of informing general public that internet and its participants are not in competition with journalism, although it has been portrayed in such a way by many publications in print, TV and radio.

Who is to blame for such blatant ignorance and lack of critical writing? Believe it or not, but it is the ‘traditional’ journalism itself. A Great deal of fault with popularizing this type of message lies on those who write about the web 2.0 and do it with no knowledge of what the power of crowds actually is and is not.

It’s up to you, Journalist – only you can change the public perception of journalism and its importance. There is little of what labour unions can do to increase the demand for journalism, but there are myriad opportunities for making journalistic values important also on the web.

Endnote: I also think that the term ‘web 2.0’ is very bad. The previous article What is Wrong with the Tech Journalism explains why.

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Web is not a software that is developed and released in versions. Actually, the “versioning” of the web is the worst thing that could happen to the hype of the internet. In the particular article, the author was informed by “Mr Spivack, the founder of Radar Networks, a leading Web 3.0 company” that the cycle of the web development is ten years.

Think of “Mr Einstein, the founder of General theory of relativity, a leading Physics 2.0 theory” saying that the cycle of physics development is 30 (or any other number) years until the Physics 3.0 which concentrates on strings and membranes in an eleven dimension environments. Can you see the absurdity of such statements?

The web is demand driven, and not developed by superduper Silicon Valley companies.

The first email message was sent in 1972¹ by Ray Tomlinson – a long time before 1990 when Tim Berners–Lee proposed the idea² of hypertext linked nodes which is the web we know today. Since the very beginning of the web, it has been used as the means of communication between academics, scientists and recently everybody in the world. Before the hypertext were email groups where scientist exchanged ideas, asked questions and solved problems. Web has been a social network since the early days. How is the web 2.0 more social then web at its birth?

By People for People

The early adopters of the web from the general public were the computer enthusiasts in the 90’s who used email lists to ask questions and help people they had never even met. In the spirit of sharing knowledge, people created web pages to summarize the questions and answers collected in the email lists. University professors created home pages with personal information and publications.

To publish a web page one had to know the hypertext markup language and have an access to a web server which was connected to the internet. Programmers used existing programming languages (such as Perl and C) to create software that would make updating existing websites easier. The next step in the internet communication was forums, which in fact were more organized and better manageable email lists, but had a software–type back end. In 1995 Rasmus Lerdorf wrote a simple programming language particularly for web called PHP/FI (Personal Home Page / Forms Interpreter) which made creating dynamic websites much easier.

Please, Come In

There was a growth of home pages for businesses and individuals as more and more people realized the power of publishing and finding information on the web. Initially, however, individuals used the web for finding the information not publishing. But the more accessible it became for general public, the more people realized the possibilities of finding like minded people. Car collectors found photos and information they would never have read in magazines. They realized that publishing their own car photos and old repair manuals might be of use for other web users.

As the demand for personal web publishing grows even more today, programmers write software that makes it very simple even for those who have never written a single line of code. In the spirit of openness and sharing, most of the software is being released for free and open–source, which means that those who are willing to learn and understand the code behind the program can improve or adjust it, and give it back to the community.

It should be clear from the above examples that blogs and personal publishing is not a phenomena of web 2.0, but rather simply what happens when more and more people discover the web as a platform for their work and ideas. Reason for publishing is our desire to express thoughts, work and ideas, particularly when there is an audience that will enjoy it, discuss and love it.

A car mechanic, who would never have thought of writing a book or an article for a magazine, can now publish his engine improvement tips on the web in a form of text, audio or video. And nothing can be more satisfying than receiving an email from a person in an opposite side of the world saying “thank you”.

Calling Names

Since Tim O’Reilly used the term web 2.0 in 2004, I have been really curios if the next version he will suggest would really be web 3.0. Like, what is wrong with 2.1 or 2.7? It turns out that numbers are not so good anymore, therefore, lets use something creative, such as the “semantic web”, which Nova Spivack suggests. But ohh… what a pitty, the idea of semantic documents has been around since 1970’s when Charles Goldfarb, Ed Mosher and Ray Lorie thought of GML — a way of representing structured data. GML is also an idealogical parent of HTML by Tim Berners–Lee and XML³ in general.

GML, XML⁴ and HTML seem to be another set of buzzwords that shouldn’t be used when writing for general public, but they all share a very simple and important idea that everybody should understand.

To illustrate the point, lets consider an example of a travelers diary which consists of periodical entries that have title, date, location and body. Here is how such document could look:

<diary author="Sinthy Martines" language="en">
 <post location="us">
 	<title>Its Hard to Get Up</title>
 	<date>23.10.2007.</date>
 	<body>The sun is down, I am up.</body>
 </post>
 <post location="lv">
 	<title>Folk Dancing?</title>
 	<date>17.09.2007.</date>
 	<body>Is is really so popular here?</body>
 </post>
</diary>

Now, does it really look like a kind of rocket science to you? It is all written in plain English, but in fact it illustrates what the web is all about — the beauty of semantic documents. Tags enclosing the data explain the meaning of data that is inside them.

One could easily write a program that searches all diaries for entries published in English and written on June 23, 2006 in Latvia. Think of possibilities that such semantic data provide for understanding and analyzing the information about the places, events and people.

Current State of the Semantic Web

The fact is that semantic mark–up is used in all websites and RSS feeds on the web already. Search engines make use of semantic mark–up to find websites that are relevant to your search queries. Linked and semantic documents are the building blocks of the web.

Many people might not have heard of MusicXML, MathML or Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) formats that exist already and take the idea of semantic content description to mathimatics, music and graphics accordingly.

Conclusions

Don’t call it web 2.0 just because people are creating communities, sharing photos or writing diaries and articles — the idea communicating and sharing knowledge was the reason why Word Wide Web was even created. The more people have access to internet, the greater is the chance of someone actually taking time to write an article about events and processes that are important to the individual.

Don’t call it web 3.0 because some company is working on a ‘natural-language search’ which will make use of semantic data available on the web. Google is already using its enormous brain power and financial resources for making the best possible use of existing web content.

Call it simply the Web — the best thing that has happened to communication and information.

p.s. if you really can’t ignore the use of web in versions, please don’t call podcasting, blogs, AJAX and RSS feeds the “technologies” of the web. This will simply make you incompetent in the eyes of those who actually create websites.

Footnotes & Further Reading

• A Brief History of the Internet – www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml
• ¹ The First Network Email – www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml
• ² Tim Berners-Lee, The World Wide Web: A very short personal history – www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/ShortHistory
• A Little History of the World Wide Web – www.w3.org/History.html
• ³ Introducing XML – www.itwriting.com/xmlintro.php
• ⁴ About XML – en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML

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