Web Bazaar: The Problem of Abundance

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Web Bazaar: The Problem of Abundance

8/6/2008

By Trent Batson

Walking in the old part of Istanbul, the narrow street awash in shops, each with its appealing bins of gorgeous goods, I kept expecting to find a super market of some sort. I wanted the luxury of a supermarket where I could just look at long aisles of displays and not have to haggle for the privilege. But no supermarket ever appeared, just more miles of tiny shops. Welcome to Web 2.0. (Photo courtesy of Judy Batson.)

A Super Market as an Organizing Concept

A super market would have pre-organized unfamiliar foods for me, provided a name for the foods, standardized a price -- not a familiar concept in Turkish bazaars -- and helped me do comparisons among products. Publishers provide an analogous service for information. And, higher education is a super market of knowledge, so it too pre-organizes unfamiliar and important knowledge for the uninitiated.

Abundance

A serious problem now is that the higher education supermarket is overwhelmed with super-abundance, not only in quantity but in velocity of exchange: If one dollar bill passes through 10 pairs of hands a day, the one dollar created ten dollars of value. If one piece of information is exchanged ten times a day, it may create ten new integrated concepts, or a thousand. We all experience the problem of abundance when a Google search produces 492,000 hits.

Pre-Organizing Information

Web 2.0 is the information bubble. A new business model characteristic of Web 2.0 is to scaffold a new business on the existing business of your partners. A new Web 2.0 site will run ads managed by Google and the revenue stream starts. It will import photos from Flickr and add social functions through Facebook. So, the current bubble is not the financial bubble that the Internet bubble was in the late 1990s, but is more an information bubble. To write of the "buzz" nowadays is to create a buzz within a buzz within a buzz. Talk about the field of infinite possibilities!

The Semantic Web

The Semantic Web is one approach to de-fragmenting all these buzzes so we can make some sense of our searches. The Semantic Web provides us with a Resource Definition Framework (RDF) and a Web Ontology Language (OWL), which are just two of the projects as we attempt to improve search among the plethora of information bits. Instead of Universal Resource Locators (URLs), we now have Universal Resource Identifiers (URIs), for example. We can already locate too many resources; we need now to begin identifying those resources. Defining content artifacts as they are added to the Web, and defining them in a standardized way, helps us find a path through the Web 2.0 forest.

An entire conference called Defrag (http://defragcon.com/2008/) addresses the issues of overwhelming abundance. The conference site says: "As online data is growing and fragmenting at an exponential pace, individuals, groups, and organizations are struggling to discover, assemble, organize, act on, and gather feedback from that data."