The Stairwell

We just completed for highschoolsports.net a new series of banner ads and Flash-rich video promotions for their clients that include such national brands as Nike and U.S. Army, adapting their existing marketing campaigns for online audiences serviced by highschoosports.net. The banners we developed contained a nifty Flash code that allowed for a chronometric countdown to registration deadlines, regardless of where the ad was being displayed. And the U.S. Army promotional contained some state-of-the-art video viewers. Even better, BD turned these requests around in under a day and one weekend respecitvely. Thanks RN, AH, TB, and DM.

While Hilary Clinton complains that she gets all the hard questions, the country's top technology CEO's continue to be pelted by one hard question at most of their public appearances: What is Web 3.0 going to be? Tim Berners-Lee has offered that Web 3.0 is going to be all about the Semantic Web (or a web based on markup code like RDF or OWL that can be read by machines, not just people, allowing machines to deduce and infer what data is important and share it in real time). Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, stated that he believed Web 3.0 would be defined by applications (api's) that are distributed virally and that work universally with the 'cloud' of data that is retrievable from anywhere. Jerry Yang, found of Yahoo!, sees a Web 3.0 where consumers will create software that services their needs and the division between software producers and consumers will blur.

These visions of a future web have their critics, and many of the models they have talked about over the last several years have failed to materialize in any broad way, but several notable instances of their feasibility are well documented.

My favorite summation of what Web 3.0 might be in the next decade comes from Nova Spivack, founder of Radar Networks, who defines Web 3.0 as the third decade of the Web (2010–2020) during which he suggests several major complementary technology trends will reach new levels of maturity simultaneously, including:

* transformation of the Web from a network of separately siloed applications and content repositories to a more seamless and interoperable whole.

* ubiquitous connectivity, broadband adoption, mobile Internet access and mobile devices;

* network computing, software-as-a-service business models, Web services interoperability, distributed computing, grid computing and cloud computing;

* open technologies, open APIs and protocols, open data formats, open-source software platforms and open data (e.g. Creative Commons, Open Data License);

* open identity, OpenID, open reputation, roaming portable identity and personal data;

* the intelligent web, Semantic Web technologies such as RDF, OWL, SWRL, SPARQL, GRDDL, semantic application platforms, and statement-based datastores;

* distributed databases, the "World Wide Database" (enabled by Semantic Web technologies); and

* intelligent applications, natural language processing.[13], machine learning, machine reasoning, autonomous agents

What effect this third decade of the web will have on interface design / engineering will be a topic for next week...

Great idea: Convince 10,000 digital artists to create a tiny piece of a US treasury note, then assemble it into a collage and sell the prints. Each artist received a penny for their time, and each print costs about $100. It is vaguely reminiscent of the widely publicized site "Million Dollar Home Page" of 2007. But Google isn't amused and they've removed "Ten Thousand Cents" from their legitimate ecommerce vendor list.

The project can be found here:

http://www.tenthousandcents.com/top.html

In their words this is a bold experiment:

"Ten Thousand Cents" is a digital artwork that creates a representation of a $100 bill. Using a custom drawing tool, thousands of individuals working in isolation from one another painted a tiny part of the bill without knowledge of the overall task. Workers were paid one cent each via Amazon's Mechanical Turk distributed labor tool. The total labor cost to create the bill, the artwork being created, and the reproductions available for purchase are all $100. The work is presented as a video piece with all 10,000 parts being drawn simultaneously. The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, "crowdsourcing," "virtual economies," and digital reproduction.

Perhaps. But a good experiment is one that can be replicated, and we can't imagine anyone boondoggling 10,000 busy people to work 3 minutes for a penny - twice. Even Marx and his gang couldn't pull that off for very long. Perhaps this has merit as a structure for 'crowd-sourcing' and 'virtual economies' if its profits are channeled into deserving charities. And try something besides legal tender next time. Then we might see it become a popular means for fundraising on par with more old-fashioned bake sales and lemonade stands.