Nicolas Mery's Library tagged no_tag →  View Popular

What if there were standard ways for people from outside the Web community to write mini applications and host them on Flickr or Wordpress blogs, or whatever. What if every Wordpress installation was a hosting platform for applications that could be written in two lines. I was really excited to hear yesterday about how GMail has an API for GreaseMonkey.

You know, what if the art of Web design was not to design applications,

but to design kits of parts for other, other differently creative people to design applications, in ways that we don’t expect.

You know, I don’t mean in a really powerful and generic way, but small, accessible, hosted way,

so we end up with a cascading recombinance of web services and miniature, hosted Hypercard-like apps,

as easy as wikis, as easy as blogs and as easy as tagging,

facilitated by us,

but authored by everyone who’s not in this room.

So that’s my third challenge, to find the ignition state for the Web this year.

No one knows what organizational technique will ultimately prevail. But what's increasingly clear is that different kinds of order, and a variety of ways to unearth data and reuse it in new applications, are coming to the Web. There will be no Dewey here, no one system that arranges all the world's digital data in a single framework.

Even in his role as digital librarian, as custodian of the Semantic Web's development, Miller thinks this variety is good. It's been one of the goals from the beginning, he says. If there is indeed a Web 3.0, or even just a 2.1, it will be a hybrid, spun from a number of technological threads, all helping to make data more accessible and more useful.

"It's exciting to see Web 2.0 and social software come on line, but I find it even more exciting when that data can be shared," Miller says. "This notion of trying to recombine the data together, and driving new kinds of data, is really at the heart of what we've been focusing on."

John Borland is the coauthor of Dungeons and Dreamers: The Rise of Computer Game Culture from Geek to Chic. He lives in Berlin.

Action item list

Reading List



• Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud
• On War, Von Clausewitz
• The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman
• The Evolution of Useful Things, Henry Petroski
• The Art of Computer Game Design, Chris Crawford
• A History of Architecture, Spiro Kostov
• The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander
• Blade Runner