Web2.0 and Ideas on Ideas

When I started this research thing, a hot topic was Web2.0, and in particular defining what it meant. Specifically, at the time I listened to a lot of talks on ITConversations and read everything Tim O'Reilly and his clan wrote, such as what Web 2.0 is, and is not. I was reading over my notes from around that time and was reminded of the insights these guys were making. I didn't forget exactly, rather just pushed it all to the side to focus other things.

It is easy to payout unifying abstractions, but O'Reilly has a well known knack (passion) for identifying and meshing existing tools and practices, and promoting an adjusted perspectives. It's not just him and his crowd, and it's not effective all the time, although re-reading some stuff today, I realised I still find the posts on unifying P2P and Web2.0 quite thought provoking.

I relate reading so-called design patterns for web2.0 and meme maps for P2P (and related analysis) like reading about GoF Design Patterns and books on data structures and algorithms. My brain fills with principles and I have a busting desire to run out and try my hand at them all. Perspectives are king. For example, motivating metaphors in computational intelligence stick around long after the abstraction of computational principles because they frame the resultant models and lower the barrier to entry for complex material. The penalty of a low barrier is misuse. For exampling in the field we call hanging onto the inspiration for to long "reasoning by analogy". I see Tim and gangs unifying abstractions in a similar way. They frame a perspective of the present state of the web and preliminary motivate with hand wavy examples, and are only used again after the fact to help sites with marketing spin and such. This is not a bad thing, my point is that they not only help developers, but also the uses relate to the ideas.

Anyway, I was reading over some of my old notes and came across some general comments about how crazy or radical Wikipedia is (was perceived to be). Such observations were not limited to web2.0 commentators, even Wales makes the comment nonchalantly to position (market) the product in his presentation at TED. Same old story, you tell people about an encyclopedia that anyone can edit and the notion is shutdown as crazy. Even in the context of wiki software the notion is less than sane, although it works because the average case is read, and the malicious write case is an outlier which can be picked up by automated tools and the (dedicated) contributing write case (I suspect is also an outlier). Other examples of crazy ideas to me include MS Office things on the web and doing photo and or video editing on the web. If you had mentioned to the (just as) naive me of 2000, I'd argue it was not viable. It is, only if you think about the situation in a different way, such a richer client and minimal feature set.

I like public by default, so my ideas for 'do something crazy or radical' are all about creating community sites around stuff it would conventionally be 'crazy' to share. For example I think the potential for sharing (maybe not directly) health data in google health and sharing personal finance data in Wesabe are crazy and brilliant ideas.

One thing I have noticed in research, is that ideas are sacred and must not be discussed with people you cannot complete trust until you publish them. I totally get notions of priority (or maybe not as it turns out), although I think notions of being ripped-off are as misguided as notions of vandalism on a publicly writable encyclopedia. In academia the perceived problem I think is novelty, priority may just be ego. Novelty, (at least for a dissertation) is practically automatic given varied perspectives and interpretations on the state of the field. Those that generate (great) ideas are already ahead even if they are ripped-off simply because of the depth of understanding and the flexibility that the effort of generation affords. The duplication of approach is likely based on a superficial understanding at best.

I mention this example because I think a similar situation exists with software and web project ideas, some seem to guard them like precious jewels. I suspect that giving away ideas is 'crazy' only in a minimal set of cases, and that the average case is not as crazy as expected, especially when facilitated by good tools. The outlier cases are being ripped-off and collaboration because generally people don't care, or worse still people don't act on them. It is the latter outlier of collaboration towards viable realisation of ideas that makes it worth solving the perceived problems of a public idea ecosystem. Ideas do have tremendous value, but only in the hands of people who know what to do with them. A broader perspective argues that 'idea reuse' (being ripped-off) is a desirable characteristic. For example, I'm sure the zillions users of YouTube don't care that others had a good crack at the idea of video sharing first.