"So, er... what's your research going to be worth?
"That's one of the good questions," said Professor Hall."
Don't coin a fancy new name if you don't know what it is.
"Web science" has been pushed for a while by ECS and The Multi-Armed God of the Internet Sir Professor Tim Berners Lee (I believe that's his full title) but no-one seems to know what it is. I find it hard to be positive towards it when the people involved seem rather unable to tie it down. The report is about as biased as it gets (god bless The Register) but their answers hardly impress me. All they seemed to manage to put across there is that things are bad, and web science will make it better. I'd like to see something more concrete.
But you won't see anything at all, concrete or fluffy, if people don't research it? As far as I could make out, TBL was just arguing that the social impact of the web is worth studying and that combining Computer Science with Web Psychology would be an interesting field. The Reg reporter seemed to be arguing that just because we haven't come up with a solution to Spam (Google links or email) that we should not research it? This is blatantly ridiculous, just because we haven't found a solution in the last 10 years doesn't mean we won't. The internet is still very young and still evolving incredibly rapidly (Who had 'blogs 5 years ago?)
Fair points. I do believe it's worth studying, my issue is more with the marketing I've seen surrounding the issue. The quotes about web science I've read (I lack references I'm afraid) have made it out to be an incredible new field that will revolutionise the way we think, but I don't see how you can hype it like that when it currently seems to have such a loose definition. Basically I'm unconvinced that it's not just computer science (I could argue that a rather large chunk of my degree fell under the banner of "web science"), and I'm unconvinced that it's anything more than the semantic web.
I looked up some stuff in case anyone's interested - it's probably best just to start with the Wikipedia article and work out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_science
Also, I did have a blog 5 years ago. Check out my web2.0ness.
LOL (I knew as I wrote that, that someone would come back and say "I Did", I should have said 10 years. :) ) I agree that it's pointless stating that it's "The Next Big Thing" in the way that the proponents in that article are saying, but nevertheless it will certainly be interesting. My main complaint was the dismissive tone of the Reg reporter, who seemed to think that it was better to give into spam that to attempt to research how to fix the problem.
"Here's what I found both disquieting and depressing from the GBL.
I've asked similar questions to engineers in every field. Without exception, all have thought deeply about the consequences of their original design decisions, and express quite specific solutions. These are often quite radical rewrites - throwing out many of the assumptions they first made."
Is it valid for the reporter to draw rigid comparisons from engineers in other fields to computer engineers? Virtual environments are easy to create, modify and destroy especially in the context of a research project. Obviously designs should be thought about before implementation, but if there are problems with it then people won't use it. Or they'll use it and complain until someone else comes along with a better design. There are very few disater scenarios that could arise, and they're all pretty recoverable. It's not like Chemical or or Biological experiements where a wrong result could seriously screw up the local town.
I'm not sure I agree with you here. It's a lazy approach to say, "oh well, we can always fix it later", and I believe that a design, especially for a complex concept such as 'Web Science', should be made with the utmost care. Obviously it needs to be flexible enough to be refined, but I think the objection was that they dismissed the suggestion that any refrlection and possible rewrite might be neccessary.
I wasn't saying "fix it later". It was my understanding that this initiative is still in it's formative stages. There's still a lot of groundwork to be done before we know what the interesting problems are, much less think about the different ways to tackle them. I'm not sure TBL et al. dismissed the possibility of rewrites, but I think they could be forgiven for ignoring it anyway until someone has an idea of something to write in the first place.
I'm not sure I completely agree you here. It's a perfectly acceptable method to do throw away prototyping for something as easy to setup and destroy as virtual environments. As long as the correct steps are taken to learn as much as possible from each iteration. Not that that's what I think the whole point of the Reg reporter's comments were anyway. His original comments "At this point, your reporter wanted to remind Sir Tim that of all the problems the web has..." To which apparently TBL's response was..."Yes you'll find a bank that's less usable - ... I've never been phished." So irrespective of the fact that the question and response was completely irrelevant to the whole topic (which was an introduction to the web science concept) the reporter seemed to just be trying to blame TBL for all of the Web's problems, and then slagging him off when he suggested that web science will work best behind firewalls.
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"That's one of the good questions," said Professor Hall."
Don't coin a fancy new name if you don't know what it is.
"Web science" has been pushed for a while by ECS and The Multi-Armed God of the Internet Sir Professor Tim Berners Lee (I believe that's his full title) but no-one seems to know what it is. I find it hard to be positive towards it when the people involved seem rather unable to tie it down. The report is about as biased as it gets (god bless The Register) but their answers hardly impress me. All they seemed to manage to put across there is that things are bad, and web science will make it better. I'd like to see something more concrete.
Reply
The Reg reporter seemed to be arguing that just because we haven't come up with a solution to Spam (Google links or email) that we should not research it? This is blatantly ridiculous, just because we haven't found a solution in the last 10 years doesn't mean we won't. The internet is still very young and still evolving incredibly rapidly (Who had 'blogs 5 years ago?)
Reply
I looked up some stuff in case anyone's interested - it's probably best just to start with the Wikipedia article and work out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_science
Also, I did have a blog 5 years ago. Check out my web2.0ness.
Reply
I agree that it's pointless stating that it's "The Next Big Thing" in the way that the proponents in that article are saying, but nevertheless it will certainly be interesting. My main complaint was the dismissive tone of the Reg reporter, who seemed to think that it was better to give into spam that to attempt to research how to fix the problem.
Reply
I've asked similar questions to engineers in every field. Without exception, all have thought deeply about the consequences of their original design decisions, and express quite specific solutions. These are often quite radical rewrites - throwing out many of the assumptions they first made."
Is it valid for the reporter to draw rigid comparisons from engineers in other fields to computer engineers? Virtual environments are easy to create, modify and destroy especially in the context of a research project. Obviously designs should be thought about before implementation, but if there are problems with it then people won't use it. Or they'll use it and complain until someone else comes along with a better design. There are very few disater scenarios that could arise, and they're all pretty recoverable. It's not like Chemical or or Biological experiements where a wrong result could seriously screw up the local town.
Reply
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To which apparently TBL's response was..."Yes you'll find a bank that's less usable - ... I've never been phished."
So irrespective of the fact that the question and response was completely irrelevant to the whole topic (which was an introduction to the web science concept) the reporter seemed to just be trying to blame TBL for all of the Web's problems, and then slagging him off when he suggested that web science will work best behind firewalls.
Reply
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