Category: Science

TBL on 30 years of Web: A contract for the Web

Tim Berners-Lee speaking at the launch of the World Wide Web Foundation

In his blogpost “30 years on, what’s next #ForTheWeb?” Tim Berners-Lee shows clear thoughts on the problems of the Web today and points to the “Contract for the Web”. He writes:

“To tackle any problem, we must clearly outline and understand it. I broadly see three sources of dysfunction affecting today’s web:

  • Deliberate, malicious intent, such as state-sponsored hacking and attacks, criminal behaviour, and online harassment.
  • System design that creates perverse incentives where user value is sacrificed, such as ad-based revenue models that commercially reward clickbait and the viral spread of misinformation.
  • Unintended negative consequences of benevolent design, such as the outraged and polarised tone and quality of online discourse.

(…)

At pivotal moments, generations before us have stepped up to work together for a better future. With the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, diverse groups of people have been able to agree on essential principles. With the Law of Sea and the Outer Space Treaty, we have preserved new frontiers for the common good. Now too, as the web reshapes our world, we have a responsibility to make sure it is recognised as a human right and built for the public good. This is why the Web Foundation is working with governments, companies and citizens to build a new Contract for the Web.”

How our Attention industry corporations kill our creativity and inspiration

I’m just digging in Tristan Harris’ Videos. There are some interesting ones that I’d like to spread to make people more aware about how much life quality they loose by the hours they spend online every day. “I don’t know a more urgent problem these days.”, he says. I may do, but this is really scary. “Sometimes the most important problems are right underneath our noses.”

Tristan used to work for Google and later founded the Center for Humane Technology and Truth about Tech.

1) Tristan Harris – How Social Media and AI Hijack Your Brain – YouTube

“Tristan Harris, founder of the Center for Humane Technology and pioneer of the Time Well Spent movement, is here to address the controversial topic of how our minds are being swindled into rampant screen and social media addiction, and to expose the intelligent forces behind the scenes that have intentionally served up the internet’s most addictive drug in an effort to get rich.”

2) Tristan Harris: How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day | TED Talk

“A handful of people working at a handful of tech companies steer the thoughts of billions of people every day, says design thinker Tristan Harris. From Facebook notifications to Snapstreaks to YouTube autoplays, they’re all competing for one thing: your attention. Harris shares how these companies prey on our psychology for their own profit and calls for a design renaissance in which our tech instead encourages us to live out the timeline we want.”

3) Tristan Harris Says Tech Companies Have Opened Pandora’s Box – YouTube

“Tristan Harris, former Google design ethicist, discusses changing Silicon Valley’s culture and the fight against online extremism with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang on “Bloomberg Technology.””

Disclaimer: I’m still watching, I only came across his stuff this morning, but so far I really like it. 

The Evolution of the Concept of Semantic Web in Wikipedia

… : Publications | Free Full-Text | The Evolution of the Concept of Semantic Web in the Context of Wikipedia: An Exploratory Approach to Study the Collective Conceptualization in a Digital Collaborative Environment | HTML … :

“Based on Dahlberg’s theory of concept, and anchored in the pragmatism of Hjørland—in which the concepts are socially negotiated meanings—the evolution of the concept of semantic web (SW) was analyzed in the English version of Wikipedia. An exploratory, descriptive, and qualitative study was designed and we identified 26 different definitions (between 12 July 2001 and 31 December 2017), of which eight are of particular relevance for their duration, with the latter being the two recorded at the end of the analyzed period.“

The Midas Touch: Any Surface Input

… : See How AI Can Turn Almost Any Surface Into a User Interface … :

“A startup called HyperSurfaces wants to completely change how you interact with the physical world — and based on some recently released demo videos, it might just meet that lofty goal. The London-based startup recently unveiled a new technology that can transform any object into a user interface. Essentially, this tech lets you communicate with a computing system using virtually anything you like as a conduit — a glass wall, a car door, even a metal clothes rack — and it has the potential to end our reliance on keyboards, buttons, and touch screens forever.“

Why do we get such stupid ads? Because it’s only a numbers’ game…

Newco Shift : Dear Advertising Industry: Please Do Better. You’re Killing the Open Web. … :

“Let’s apply that reality to our robe example. Let’s say the robe costs $60, and yields a $20 profit for our e-commerce advertiser, not including marketing costs. That means that same advertiser is can spend upwards of $19.99 per unit on advertising (more, if a robe purchaser turns out to be a “big basket” e-commerce spender).  So what does our advertiser do? Well, they set a retargeting campaign aimed anyone who ever visited our erstwhile robe’s page.  With CPMs averaging around a buck, that robe’s going to follow nearly 20,000 folks around the internet, hoping that just one  of them converts.“