my Web 2.0 presentation to InfoConference

Here's a presentation I did on a few Web 2.0ish topics, with LibraryThing as an exemplar

http://www.slideshare.net/scilib/web-20

You may want to click on the "full" icon (lower right of the presentation) in order to get the fullscreen view.

Interestingly, SlideShare uses Amazon S3 for storage.

The presentation was given to a CISTI internal event, our yearly InfoConference for information specialists.  It was originally done in Keynote 3, exported to PowerPoint for the purposes of SlideShare import.  In uploading it, I was as usual reminded of my difficulty in tracking as-presented files.  By the time it's gone through various drafts on various local and network directories, circulated in email a few times, and passed through a laptop and USB drive or two, it's a wonder I can still find the file at all, let alone know which version I actually presented.  This one has been very slightly redacted to remove some internal info.

The main points of the presentation were:

1. it is difficult to predict the future
2. Web 2.0 is very new (about 5 years old at most)
3. we can extract some basic characteristics of Web 2.0 applications, as demonstrated by LibraryThing

http://www.librarything.com/

These characteristics are:
- a personal or person-centric nature ("your library")
- user created/generated/submitted content ("add books")
- novel, informal description and discovery tools ("tags" / folksonomy)
- recommendations generated based on human-generated content and relationships, or human intentionality ("pssst")
- social networking ("ratings, reviews, shared books")
- open, active participation (discussion groups, easy inward linking)

4. In addition to text, audio and video, there is a new type of data being added to the web: geographic information.
4a. As a secondary note, the patterns of the (now over 6.5 million) geographically tagged photos tell us something about the profile of active web users - the Flickr map of photos

http://flickr.com/map

to me bears a striking resemblance to the classic "earth at night" satellite view, and I have also seen this pattern in Google Analytics maps of web traffic.  It seems that it is mainly in the developed world, in Canada, the USA, Europe and Australia, that people have the free time and wealth to be able to afford to participate in these kinds of peer production activities.

5. Web 2.0 is also opening up science to the public - I give four examples of projects that invite public participation.
5a. As a secondary note, these projects have a relationship to the Amazon Mechanical Turk concept - it turns out that there are many tasks for which a crowd of humans is dramatically better than machines (artificial intelligence).  Humans are particularly good at visual recognition tasks.  There is a general Web 2.0 idea I think, that people (if you have a big enough crowd) are better in some sense at producing content, relationships, and certain types of analysis than machines.  Machines are better at some classes of meta-analysis, e.g. deriving recommendations by data mining Amazon user intentionality.

6. Blogging is growing tremendously (in fact, all Web 2.0 graphs seem to have a sharp upward curve).  That means a lot of junk, but also a subset of valuable content, including serious scientific content.

Although not covered in the presentation, I also think Second Life and World of Warcraft (WoW) tell you a lot about the kinds of efforts that people are willing to put into online activities.  To me WoW indicates that people will actually tolerate a very high level of complexity and tremendous time investment, if the (perceived) reward is very high.  (WoW has over 7.5 million paying subscribers, far outstripping other online 3D environments.)