TECH TALK: The Now-New-Near Web: Introduction

One of the ideas I had discussed in my previous Tech Talk on the mobile Internet was about the Incremental Web, or what I had described as “now, new and near.” In this series, I want to elaborate on that because I believe that this Web is fundamentally different from the one we have. It is a Web which will come into being in emerging markets like India where the legacy isn’t that deeply embedded.

Take a look around some of the hoardings in Mumbai and you will see ads from two Internet companies – Rediff and Yahoo. Both have a common theme – email. What struck me as amazing is that after more than 11 years of the Internet in India, the two leading portals are fighting a battle around email. That’s how frozen in time we have become!

On the other hand, many entrepreneurs in India are a few steps ahead of the pack. The buzz is around Web 2.0. In a country where Web 1.0 hasn’t become part of people’s lives, we are already talking social networking, user-generated content and the like. One key facet is forgotten amidst the hoopla about the 40 million Indians on the Internet – that for most of them access to the Internet is limited to barely a few minutes a day. Or, put another way, since cybercafes are the way most Indians access the Internet, they spend time every few days on the Internet. The reality remains that the Internet is still not central to the lives of Indians.

My belief is that the Web that we have come to see around us is mostly built around reference, global information. The Web that is to become relevant to the lives of Indians needs to be focused on the “now, new and near.” I think of this as the N3 Web.

Here is a small excerpt from what I wrote recently: “Think of the reference web as the one that has already been created for the PC world – and for which Google has become the window. This web has been created for the big screen of the PC. The incremental web is about the present and future – it is the real-time web. This is the web which will be increasingly built more for mobiles – because it is a device through which access can happen anytime and from anywhere. Suddenly, it makes sense to create real-time information because there are users with two-way devices which can access this information with near-zero latency. I think of the incremental web as being about ‘now, near, new.’”

The N3 Web is a web that will be available primarily via mobiles. It is a Web that doesn’t exist. It is a Web that has to be built.

Tomorrow: Reference and Incremental Webs

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TECH TALK: The Now-New-Near Web: Reference and Incremental Webs

It is important to first understand the different between the Reference Web and the Incremental Web. This is from a post by Rich Skrenta of Topix.net from February 2005:

Search has become the dominant navigational paradigm for goal-directed reference queries. But search is a poor way to stream new developments around a topic.

Google searches the reference Internet. Users come to google with a specific query, and search a vast corpus of largely static information. This is a very valuable and lucrative service to provide: it's the Yellow Pages.

Blogs may look like regular HTML pages, but the key difference is that they're organized chronologically. New posts appear at the top, so with a single browser reload you can say "Just show me what's new."

This seems like a trivial difference, but it drives an entirely different delivery, advertising and value chain. Rather than using HTML, the delivery protocol for web pages, there is a desire for a new, feed-centric protocol: RSS. To search chronologically-ordered content, a relevance-based search that destroys the chronology such as Google is inappropriate. Instead you want Feedster, PubSub or Technorati. Feed content may be better to read in a different sort of client, such as Newsgator, rather than a web browser.
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While there's been considerable deployment of goal-directed services, there has been little technology development around automated aggregation of relevant topic streams. Until now, this hasn't been a problem. Most of the growth on the web over the past 10 years has been reference services. But now we're seeing an explosion in the number of sources publishing new incremental content every day. Blogs certainly -- but other sources too, such as news organizations, companies, and our increasingly web-enabled governments are pumping out gigabits of fresh news online every day. There is a vast proliferation of new incremental content underway.

The Reference Web started off more than a decade ago. Various publishing tools made HTML publishing easy. It took a second-generation search engine like Google to convert the publishing that had taken place over the years into rich material that we could browse on-demand. One can thus think of Google as an information refinery for the Reference Web. This Web has grown to billions of pages and has all kinds of stuff that one could spend a lifetime looking over. This Web is now going multimedia – with broadband networks now supporting the transmission of video.

Tomorrow: The Potential

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TECH TALK: The Now-New-Near Web: The Potential

This is what David Beisel wrote in March 2005:

For the past ten years, the web has been filled with static content using the HTTP protocol. Search engine relevance from for the past five years was derived from link analysis – how many pages have linked to a particular page. The offline model equivalent of this structure is a yellow pages or encyclopedia.

Now, the web is becoming dynamic and ever changing. RSS is a more appropriate protocol to deliver this information. Relevance of content isn’t just about how popular it is – it’s about timeliness. So traditional search relevance is turned upside-down. The offline model equivalent is a newspaper.

The opportunity is so much greater than just blogging-related – RSS and the Incremental Web will transform the way that all information is created, aggregated, and delivered. Individuals and corporations alike are now able to “RSS” anything. The key question: what does this mean for the creation of new content and the new enterprise value associated with that content?

Another related post in this context is one from Bob Wyman from February 2005:

The basic idea is to go beyond "mere" text in blogs and include structured XML that describes job-openings, events, new prices, press releases, updates to phone numbers and contact info, requests for proposals, etc. i.e. Using the now almost ubiquitous content syndication network to broadcast useful business *data* -- not just prose or text commentaries. Blogging, or the more general idea of "syndication", will have its most important and profitable impact on business by providing a new and effective way for businesses to broadcast data. The result is that in the future, we'll see "blogging" built into corporate systems (ERP, CRM, etc.) that process data -- not text.

Let me give just one example of structured blogging or syndication in business: If your business relies on building things with electronic parts, one of the problems you have is that the parts on your Bill of Materials (BOMs) are constantly being updated, repriced, replaced by new parts, etc. Today, it is very hard to keep track of all the announcements concerning parts that might impact all the BOM's that your business produces. However, in the future, it is likely that what will happen is that parts suppliers will have "blogs" into which they will post "Change Notices" (using a structured form with fields for 'part-number', 'Change-type', 'replacement-part', etc.). Your company will then "subscribe" to the feeds generated by these blogs (either directly or via PubSub) and will send you notices when the Change Notices apply to BOM's that your business relies on. As a result, you'll be able to do a much better job of maintaining up-to-date BOMs and preventing production problems that result from parts-availability problems. The result is that some of the promise of EDI will, in fact, be accomplished via "blogging" or the use of syndication formats and systems. The future of business blogging is more than just text...

Astute readers would have noticed that most of the posts and thinking happened quite some time ago. What’s the connection between them, India and the present?

Tomorrow: India Scenario

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TECH TALK: The Now-New-Near Web: India Scenario

In countries like India, however, even the Reference Web hasn’t been created well. There have been three problems. The first challenge has been that the existing Internet players haven’t really made the investments to build out this Web – focusing instead more on communications-oriented services like email and IM. The second challenge has been the diversity of India itself – especially, the languages spoken. English is not good enough for the mass market. Finally, the user base so far has not demanded an “India Reference Web” – primarily because access to the Web has been limited on account of both the low computing penetration, and the limited and expensive communications options. All of this has resulted in a Web that, from the perspective of Indian users, has excellent global information, but very limited local information.

This is not to say that the Indian Web is doomed. There have been a number of success stories – jobs and matrimonial sites have thrived, as have online trading and ticketing sites. In the first two cases, the Web serves as an information marketplace – connecting people much more efficiently than is possible through print-based classifieds. In the latter two cases, the Web is making commercial transactions much more efficient bypassing traditional intermediaries.

In this context, Search on the Reference Web has obvious limitations – since local content is still quite limited. Rediff has tried to provide an alternative to the single web search box with options to search for airfares, jobs, ringtones, classifieds and product prices.

All of this is just the start. What India needs is a grassroots revolution in the way publishing takes place. Users will come once they find the right information available online. The pain points in India are about finding the locally relevant information. Given the time that has passed, I cannot see this process being centrally driven. No single entity can make this happen. Also, building complex websites for consumption on the PC is going to be quite limited in its adoption – as we have seen. A large number of Indian websites that exist are not updated as often as they should be. No surprise – because the users aren’t really going out there and looking for them anyways!

Indian content creation will need to be focused differently. Instead of assuming consumption on PCs, the baseline should be that the content is more likely to be consumed on the mobile. Instead of trying to focus on static, reference-based content, the focus should be on what’s new, what’s happening now, and what is contextually relevant (near) the users. Another way to look at the N3 Web is to think of it as the Incremental Web for space, time and topics. Now is the Incremental Web centred around time. New is the Incremental Web centred around topics. Near is the Incremental Web centred around space.

Tomorrow: The Opportunity

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TECH TALK: The Now-New-Near Web: The Opportunity

The India of today has the right ingredients to make the N3 Web a reality. There are two key building blocks for this – the ability to publish for the incremental web, and the ability to consume that content. The publishing capability has been around for some time – blog-based publishing tools are a very good example of enabling mass creation of incremental content. But what has been missing so far has been the ability to consume the content with low latency. The PC is not the ideal device given that it is not with us all the time. This is where the mobile Internet comes in.

In India, the large base of mobile phones and the excellent mobile data infrastructure create the right foundation for building the N3 Web – arguably, better than most other countries in the world. In India, our lives are being increasingly centred around the mobile. We can leave home with anything but not without the mobile. Our phones are not subsidised by the operators – and so, we want to buy the best phones that we can afford because they are an extension of our identity. Even in tier 2 or tier 3 towns, it is not the cheapest phones that are the largest sellers – people have a tendency to buy better phones because they are a very visible part of the ‘body.’

The mobile data infrastructure in India is amongst the best in the world, as noted previously. There are, however, two issues. The first is that for the most part it is a well-kept secret by the mobile operators. Their focus has been primarily on market expansion rather than leveraging mobile data services. The second related point is that the pricing for mobile data leaves much to be desired and limits consumer offtake. What India needs is not just zero-GPRS rentals but also flat-rate pricing options for data. I believe that both will happen within the next 12-18 months.

Armed with good mobile phones and friendly mobile data pricing, I believe users and businesses will start creating a wide array of content on their own. This is what will create the positive spiral for usage in India and bring alive the Incremental Web – one where we know of the new things happening near us now. This is the [almost] real-time Web – a world envisioned by David Gelernter in Mirror Worlds. This N3 Web will be built around 4 Ms: me, mobiles, microcontent and media. This, and not the ‘incremental’ Web 2.0, is what the future of the Web is about.

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TECH TALK: The Now-New-Near Web: Characteristics

Here are some characteristics that make the Incremental (N3) Web different:

RSS, not HTML: HTML is the foundation for the Reference Web as we know it. The page as defined by a URL is the granularity of this Web. It is a Web that we need to go to. Over time, our access to this Web has evolved from typing in URLs to remembering bookmarks to using directories to using search engines. In contrast, the Incremental Web is built around RSS – an XML format that is published to be read by computers. It carries the payload for what is new on a site. It allows changes to be tracked.

Subscriptions, not Search: With HTML, the best we can do in terms of remembering a site is bookmarks. Bookmarks had gone out of fashion because of search engines, but group tagging and sharing services like del.icio.us are bringing them back to life. Search engines remain the predominant way one finds information in the world of the Reference Web. With RSS, however, a new form of access is possible. This revolves around Subscriptions. Subscriptions are akin to setting up a form of relationship with content or a site, such that future published content can be delivered to subscribers.

Persistent Search: A related idea is that of persistent search. Here is how Bill Burnham explains it:

Simply put, Persistent Search allows users to enter a search query just once and then receive constant, near real-time, automatic updates whenever new content that meets their search criteria is published on the web. For example, let’s say you are a stock trader and you want to know whenever one of the stocks in your portfolio is mentioned on the web. By using a persistent search query, you can be assured that you will receive a real-time notification whenever one of your stocks is mentioned. Or perhaps you are a teenager who is a rabid fan of a rock group. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a constant stream of updates on band gossip, upcoming concerts, and new albums flowing to your mobile phone? Or maybe you are just looking to rent the perfect apartment or buy a specific antique. Wouldn’t it be nice to get notified as soon as new items which roughly matched your criteria were listed on the web so that you were able to respond before someone else beat you to the punch? Persistent search makes all of this possible for end users with very little incremental effort.
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Persistent Search presents search companies with the opportunity to build rich, persistent relationships with their users. The search engine that captures a user’s persistent searches will not only have regular, automatic exposure to that user, but they will be able to build a much better understanding of the unique needs and interests of that user which should theoretically enable them to sell more relevant ads and services at higher prices. They will also stand a much better chance of capturing all or most of that users’ ad-hoc queries because they will already be in regular contact with the user.

Tomorrow: Characteristics (continued)

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TECH TALK: The Now-New-Near Web: Characteristics (Part 2)

More Mobile-centric, less PC-centric: I believe that mobiles are what will accelerate the emergence of the N3 Web – both for content creation and consumption. Mobiles are with us all the time, and thus can be used both for creation (taking pictures, recording podcasts) and distribution (think subscribers). RSS can be the underlying carrier for this. The same can be accomplished via PCs – and in fact is already happening. In the context of emerging markets, mobiles will take centre-stage.

More Push, less Pull: The Reference Web is all about pulling information in a request-reply mechanism. The Incremental Web is about delivering the right information at the right time to the right device. Thus, I can get an SMS alert when a stock price crosses a threshold or when Tendulkar comes out to bat. Sending the same info to a PC or asking people to keep reloading the page is simply not practical.

Distributed, Bottom-up Publishing: The N3 Web is about empowering each one of us to publish because we have the tools to do so. Since much of this web is non-existent, the only way it will get created rapidly is with mass publishing.

User in control: With RSS, the user is in control. There is no question of any spam. If a user is not interesting in continuing the relationship, the user can simply unsubscribe to the RSS feed of the source.

RSS Aggregator Use: The N3 Web will be consumed in two primary ways – via alerts delivered to mobiles or PCs, and via an RSS Aggregator. The aggregator tracks what subscriptions users have, and what has been read by a user.

Ping Server, not Crawler: From an infrastructure standpoint, the web page crawlers get replaced by ping servers. Whenever there is new content published, the source pings a server which can then go fetch the new content and then notify users.

The post by Bill Burnham also elaborates on the infrastructure needed:

1. Ping Servers: Most blogs and an increasing number of other sites now send special “pings” to so called “Ping Servers” every time they publish new content. The ping servers do things such as cue crawlers at a search engine to re-index a site or provide a summarized list of recently published information to other web sites. Because ping servers are the first to know about newly published content, they are critical to enabling the real-time nature of Persistent Search.

2. RSS: RSS feeds can be used both to feed raw information into Persistent Search platforms (in a similar fashion to what GoogleBase does) as well as to take processed queries out. RSS is a polling based mechanism so it does not provide real time notification, but it is good enough in most cases.

3. Stored Queries: Stored queries are simply search queries that are “saved” for future use. Ideally, the stored query is constantly running in the background and it flags any new piece of content that meets the search criteria.
Two related concepts which will help us understand the N3 Web better are microcontent and microformats.

Tomorrow: Microcontent and Microformats

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TECH TALK: The Now-New-Near Web: Microcontent and Microformats

One of the key ideas for the N3 Web is that of microcontent. Wikipedia has this to say about microcontent:

The term Microcontent has first been systematically introduced and defined by Anil Dash in 2002: “Today, microcontent is being used as a more general term indicating content that conveys one primary idea or concept, is accessible through a single definitive URL or permalink, and is appropriately written and formatted for presentation in email clients, web browsers, or on handheld devices as needed. A day's weather forcast, the arrival and departure times for an airplane flight, an abstract from a long publication, or a single instant message can all be examples of microcontent."

In the years of the booming blogosphere the term became important and useful to describe the emerging new content structures that were enabled by new technologies (like trackbacks, pings and increasingly RSS), new types of CMS-software and -interfaces (like blogs and wikis), and not least by new socio-cultural practices (people creating, bringing into circulation and re-using/re-mixing 'microchunks' of content).

Microcontent could be other forms of media like an image, audio, video, a URL (link), Metadata like author, title, etc, the subject line of an email, an item in an RSS feed.

Anil Dash wrote in November 2002: “The primary advantage of the microcontent client over existing Internet technologies is that it will enable the sharing of meme-sized chunks of information using a consistent set of navigation, user interface, storage, and networking technologies. In short, a better user interface for task-based activities, and a more powerful system for reading, searching, annotating, reviewing, and other information-based activities on the Internet.”

A more detailed explanation comes from Nova Spivack who wrote this in December 2003:

What is a "microcontent object?" Here is one attempt at a definition: It is a finite collection of metadata and data that has at least one unique identity and at least one unique address on the network, and that encapsulates no more than a small number of central ideas, where the number of central ideas encapsulated is usually 1.

For example a Weblog posting is a microcontent object because it is a finite collection of metadata (the fields of the posting as defined in XML or RDF) and data (the content of the posting), and it has an identity and URL, and is generally focused on providing a small quantity of information about a single central idea (although not always).

Contrast this with the concept of a "Web page" or a "Web site" and the distinction becomes a little clearer. A Web site is a complex, compound collection of metadata and data that may be addressed on a single domain-name, and that contains one or more information collections of unbounded size where each sub-collection may itself comprise a Web page or another Web site. A Web site is therefore "macrocontent" rather than "microcontent."

A Web page on the other hand is a little closer to the micro-level, but even here there is still a distinction between a typical Web page and true "microcontent" -- namely that a Web page is not limited to being "small" or to being focused around only a few central ideas (for example, consider the home page of Yahoo -- this is a page but it is not microcontent).
Microcontent is "small content." That is, small, granular pieces of content, each with an unique identity and URI, that may be published, subscribed to, and linked across the network.

Examples of microcontent include typical Weblog postings, RSS/Atom posts, discussion postings, Wiki nodes, or database records that have their own URI's.

Tomorrow: Microcontent and Microformats (continued)

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TECH TALK: The Now-New-Near Web: Microcontent and Microformats (Part 2)

A related discussion is around Microformats. Knowledge@Wharton had this to say in a July 2006 article:

When someone views information on a web page about an upcoming concert, why can't he instantly add it to his personal calendar? Or when a person's contact information is displayed, why can't it be added to a contact list or cell phone directory with a single click? Sites like LinkedIn and Friendster let their users explore social networks, but the users have to enter the information about the people they know at each web site. Those who have a personal web site or a web log (or "blog") probably already link to many of the people they know. Why can't a search tool automatically build a social network from those links?
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A grassroots movement has emerged that seeks to attach intelligent data to web pages by using simple extensions of the standard tags currently used for web formatting -- HTML (or XHTML, its more formally structured cousin). These so-called "microformats" may change the way the web works.

Pingerati offers a concise definition: “Microformats are tiny bits of markup in web pages that label contacts, events, reviews, addresses, geo-locations, and other commonly published chunks of information. Microformats are often published on blogs and in feeds, but are increasingly published on other types of web pages as well such as event databases, social network profiles, reviews sites, and contact information pages.”

Tantek Çelik, senior technologist at Technorati, said in an interview in the same K@W article:

We've taken a lot of the really tough problems in the past -- [such as] how to publish structured information in a way that's presentable to humans as well as something that machines can read -- and we've said, "What's the simplest possible way that a [web] publisher can do that today -- on today's web -- with simple XHTML?"

That's what microformats do. They are intended to focus on the human side. We ask, "How can we make this information adapt to people's behaviors currently? And how can we keep things as simple as possible, so that the effort required by publishers is minimal?"

Now, what happens as a result of that? Our belief is that -- by offering a solution which provides better exposure to publishers, better indexing in search engines, better opportunities to get found, blogged and linked -- that they will take that small extra step of adding this little microformat markup to their content. This is in direct contrast to a lot of other solutions which say -- "Oh, here's a new language we want you to learn." Or, "Here's a new language we want you to learn and now you need to output these additional files on your server." It's a hassle. We've lowered the barrier to entry.

Tomorrow: Microcontent and Microformats (continued)

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TECH TALK: The Now-New-Near Web: Microcontent and Microformats (Part 3)

Here are a few more comments on microcontent and microformats to help deepen our understanding.

Arnaud Leene: With the advent of Internet, publishing has become accessible to everyone. People have been creating and gathering content and made this content available to everyone in the world. Where web-pages and -sites as MacroContent. MacroContent enfolds MicroContent...People realise that it is not just thoughts that they are publishing, but reviews, comments on other blog-entries, announcement of events, recipes, interesting sites, records of a golf run, books they keep, images they have taken, places they have been to, etc, etc. Items contain links to other Items, Items have structure. We are moving to Structured MicroContent.

Richard MacManus:

Microcontent design involves: microchunking your content, taking advantage of open standards, employing microformats, letting users subscribe to all kinds of RSS feeds, freeing your content via APIs and other means, designing for re-use of information, monetizing it, and more.
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Structured Blogging is a set of formats and plugins that enable blogs to publish different kinds of information - like events, reviews and classified ads - in a 'structured' format, so that aggregators can pick up the data from all over the Web.

It’s that “re-use” of blog content via aggregation that will be where the real value lies in Structured Blogging. As of writing there are no Structured Blogging aggregators available, but a hint at the value that it could provide in future is the independent company edgeio -- which was launched in February 2006. Sellers can get their data listed on edgeio’s website, simply by posting an item to sell on their own weblog and tagging it “listings”. Buyers are able to search and find goods and services at the edgeio website. How it works is that edgeio aggregates goods and services data by scanning over 25 million RSS feeds, looking for the tag "listings".

Alex Bosworth:

The idea of Microformats is a cool concept for the web, involving adding simple markup to html to highlight metadata about the displayed content. But like any standard, without a killer application microformats are under-utilized. The problem is a classic bootstrapping dilemma. Why should I add markup if there is no application that uses the markup? Why should I code an application that parses markup if there is no content that includes it? The solution lies on small leaps of faith by both sides.

Fortunately, Microformats make marking up data really easy, so making a committment to Microformats on the content side is as simple as appending a string. And parsing Microformats isn't harder than parsing anything else in XML/HTML (or RSS). The key is just small easy steps to make these formats matter.

Dion Hinchcliffe: “Information is often the most useful in bite-sized pieces. Storing information in convenient, tidy bundles sometimes called microcontent is still uncommon but this is changing quickly. Indeed, Web 2.0 trends will only increase the popularity of microformats that support discrete bits of lightly formatted information. This is one reason why Web 2.0 concepts strongly encourage small pieces, loosely joined: Monolithic specifications generally make for information that's trapped inert behind large, hard to consume, and brittle walls of formatting. Microformats seek to add just enough structure to make the information easy to create and use as well as eminently repurposable.”

For the N3 Web, we can think of microcontent as having the following characteristics: incremental (with the same repeating structure), having a permalink, and syndicatable (available via RSS or an equivalent format).

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TECH TALK: The Now-New-Near Web: The Now Web

The story so far: The Now-New-Near Web is the incremental Web in Time, Topics and Space. It is a web which is made by us with our mobiles, using rich media, and is a mirror image of the real world about us. This can be summarised as the N3 Web built around M4 (me, mobiles, media, mirror world).

Let us take each of the three terms – now, new, and near – and delve into them in the context of the incremental content.

Now is about incremental in Time. It is about events that are happening now. Other words to describe this web are real-time and live. The World of Now is the world around us. Watching a cricket match on TV or a business channel with its constant updates of stock indices and prices is a view on what’s happening now. As Ryan Stewart wrote on ZDNet: “The world works in real time. Stock quotes, conversations, events, all of it is in real time, and the web shouldn't be any different. Being able to experience that event in real time is something that could be a huge draw for users. Why do people pay so much money to go to a sporting event or to a concert? Because of the experience. They're surrounded by fans, they're seeing everything with their own eyes and therefore creating their own perceptions.”

Time has been a key aspect of our lives for as long as we can remember. History is organised along timelines. We think of key events in our lives via dates. 9/11 has been ingrained into the world’s memory as a defining moment of our lives based on the events that took place this day five years ago. In Mumbai, over the past year, two dates have been etched into people’s memories – 7/26 and 7/11. The first date refers to the day Mumbai received over 900 mm of rain in 2005, and the second date refers to the bomb blasts which took place in the city recently.

Time is an organising aspect for our lives. So far, the view that we have had into our days has been via the calendar. The calendar compartmentalises time and links them with an activity. Our mobiles phones also have calendars built into them making it that much easier for us to make use of the calendar on a continuous basis.

In the enterprise context, the Now Web can be thought of as the ability to get real-time updates from business applications for decision-making. In the consumer context, the Now Web can be thought of as being able to get a view of what Ramesh Jain (with whom I have co-founded Seraja) has called the EventWeb. Over the next few columns, we will delve into the EventWeb in more detail with a series Ramesh Jain has been writing on his blog.

Tomorrow: EventWeb

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TECH TALK: The Now-New-Near Web: EventWeb

This has been abstracted from a recent series Ramesh Jain has written on his blog. The EventWeb, as he and I look at it, is a fundamental upgrade from the DocumentWeb that we are familiar with. Today’s World Wide Web is primarily built around documents. We have also referred to it as the Reference Web. As Ramesh put it in a recent interview: “Today’s Web is a document Web. Everything is presented as a page. Yet, audio and video are becoming easier to store and disseminate. Figuring out how we’ll search through ‘events’ is only one small piece of the problem. For example, as mobile phones become the primary client, people will use the devices to look for information: how do you design search tools for that platform?”

The EventWeb will be the foundation for the Now Web. Ramesh’s first post deals with the importance of Events.

Two things are distinct in emerging applications of information systems: they contain vast amount of multimedia (both live and archived) data and attention is moving away from examining isolated silos of data toward more holistic pictures of evolving situations. Multimedia systems, including text, video, images, and audio, provide both information and experience related to a dynamic situation. As information and communication technology evolved, multimedia has become increasingly ubiquitous; structured data is now a very small fraction of useful data in emerging applications.

Current information tools are very good in dealing with entities, objects, and keywords. To address the needs of information management in dynamic multimedia environments, new concepts and techniques are needed. It is clear that the current concepts and tools are good for the text oriented and structured information systems. These tools are not good for dealing with images, video, audio, and other sensory information. A very good example of their limitation is the poor results that one sees on every major search engine for images and video. Since these search engines try to apply search tools effective for text to the text associated with images and video, but not processing images and video, their results, contrasting them to text search, are surprisingly bad.

Current information tools evolved before the wave of mobile phones, digital cameras, and broadband systems changed the landscape of information systems. With all these advances, experiences are becoming an integral part of information systems. In fact, we can already see signs of the dawn of experiential computing. There is a very intimate relationship between events and experiences in experiential computing, events will play a central role.

I believe that ‘events’ may be used as fundamental organizational concept in multimedia systems that are becoming ubiquitous. There are strong and deep conceptual, engineering, computational, and human centered design reasons to consider events as a primary structure for organizing and accessing dynamic multimedia systems. We are developing multiple applications using event models to validate our hypothesis that events are effective in capturing multimedia semantics and building efficient systems to deal with multimedia information.

Tomorrow: EventWeb (continued)

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TECH TALK: The Now-New-Near Web: EventWeb (Part 2)

Ramesh Jain’s second post discusses Events in more detail.

The term ‘event’ means different events to different people. The meaning of event depends on the context and the granularity used in that context. There is inherent ambiguity associated with the term event as seen from its multiple usages.

Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event ) defines it as

An event is something that takes place—an occurrence and arbitrary point in time. The term also refers to a significant occurrence or happening, or a social gathering or activity.

Dictionaries and encyclopedias are as confusing as the regular usage of the term is. Events are indeed different in different contexts. A wedding is an event, so is the wedding reception, and the cake-cutting. Also the first meeting of the bride and groom is as much an event as the birth of the bride, and the wedding of her parents, and so on. And yes the world cup Soccer final between Italy and France was an event and so is my grandsons first kick in his backyard. My pressing the key to type the next word is an event and so will be the posting of this article and then comes the event of your reading this post and then reading this part and thinking that I am being silly! Theoretically even my moving finger to a specific key is an event. So events depend on context and take place at different granularities or resolutions.

Events are combined in many different ways to define events. And these combinations may again be combined with other events to define yet another set of events. So this process of definition of events continues. These definitions are clearly determined by an application.

On the other side an event is the result of one or more past events, which were in turn results of other events and so on. Similarly, an event may result, maybe in combination with other events, in multiple events, which in turn may result in many other events. So this process of creation of events is a process that has been going on and will continue in future.

But, how do we define an event? What can be considered an event and what can not be. If all these things are events then how can we capture that in our computing systems – or can we? On first thought it appears that this is a confusing situation!

But this situation is not new. Objects are equally confusing. Objects could be physical things or a concepts. Also objects could also exist at many resolutions. Once again Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objects ) clearly shows how confusing it could be. So, I am an object, so is the shirt I am wearing, and the buttons on the shirt. I will not get into details of this – you get the idea.

We know that concept of objects have played a key role in the development of computer science. Object-oriented programming and object-oriented design concepts have dominated computer science for more than a decade. And this has been a powerful paradigm. Once again, Wikipedia gives a good definition of objects in the context of computer science:

a language mechanism for binding data with methods that operate on that data.

See how nicely any reference to any physical or conceptual or any other kind of objects that we use in our regular language is avoided and an elegant new functional definition is provided here. Objects become a mechanism for binding data with methods that operate on that data.

Can we do a similar thing to events?

Tomorrow: EventWeb (continued)

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TECH TALK: The Now-New-Near Web: EventWeb (Part 3)

Ramesh Jain’s third post continues the discussion around Events.

Objects in common language remain vague and are understood more clearly and precisely in a specific context.

For computers, objects must be defined more precisely. In computer science one defines objects as having two important components: data associated with the object and methods that operate or access data in predefined ways. The data is usually accessed only through the methods. In programming, one first defines classes of objects where all data associated with objects is defined, along with its type, and methods that will operate on all these data fields are defines. Each object in a program is an instance of a class. Each class may have subclasses and these subclasses may inherit some data types and methods from their parent class.

An event, defined in computing environments, should be a mechanism to define three important aspects of an event clearly and explicitly. These three aspects are:
- information about the event,
- experiences related to the event, and
- structural and causal relationships with other events.

An event in computational form should represent data associated with the above aspects and processes to acquire and present these as may be needed. By providing flexible and expressive mechanisms to define these three components and associated methods, one could define events effectively. The event environment should provide tools to define any event of interest from many disparate application domains. One may first define event classes and then each event in the system may be an instance of a class.

The basic characteristics of an event will be the ID of the event, its time and location. Time and location become fundamental defining characteristics of an event. A similar event may take place at different time and space and will be considered a different event. In this sense, an event is a defined in spatio-temporal space. There are good reasons to consider events as either point events or interval events. Point events are just points in the spatio-temporal (referred to as ST) space; interval events are regions in ST space.

The informational characteristics of an event will be similar to data elements defined for objects. All informational attributes will be data of specific types and methods may be defined to access these attributes and operate on those. The information components may consider fields like participants, objects, and similar data fields commonly defined as attributes of objects. Many of these fields will have similar data types and methods.

Tomorrow: EventWeb (continued)

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TECH TALK: The Now-New-Near Web: EventWeb (Part 4)

Ramesh Jain’s fourth post discusses Experiential Data.

The experiential attributes of an event are fundamentally different from informational attributes. Each experiential attribute represents a data (stream) that is experienced using a specific natural human sensor. Thus we may have visual data, audio, tactile, olfactory, and taste related data. Currently good sensing and reproduction techniques are available for visual (image and video) and audio data. Tactile is improving fast and others are slowly getting developed. Thus, experiential data will be defined as the data of a particular sensory type rather than an integer or real or character type as commonly used in informational data.

Experiential data is usually much larger in volume than other data types. For historical reasons, in computing most representations evolved to represent simple data like numbers and characters. A collection of numbers representing an image is thus represented using an array of data, an intensity value at different pixels forming an image. A video will be an array of such arrays. In databases, when designers faced such data, they usually lumped it all and called it a ‘binary large object’, or a blob. Search engines analyze a text file and identify words in it by analyzing arrangement of characters, but usually don’t open an image to analyze it. In general, except few people specializing in particular experiential data analysis, people have avoided dealing with experiential data. Interestingly, slowly experiential data started becoming popular and now photos, video, and audio are becoming the central data elements in computing.

Another distinguishing feature of the experiential data is that it is always grounded in space and time. A sensor captures data at a point in space and in many cases over a time period. Thus the data captures a physical phenomenon at a given point in space and over a particular time interval.

The operators and methods to be applied to experiential data are significantly different than the methods used for processing alpha-numeric data that was commonly used in many traditional computing fields. Of course due to the nature of digital computers, the most basic operations must be reduced to the basic processing operation in computing. For human abstraction and use, however, these operations are fundamentally different. The computational techniques for experiential data are emerging and clearly are not as well developed as techniques for computing and managing alpha-numeric data.

Rapid progress in sensing, storage, processing and display (reproduction) technology is making experiential data rapidly popular. It is rapidly becoming not the secondary source of information, but a primary source of experiences and communication. Have you noticed that computer as well as mobile phone manufacturers usually advertise their devices based on their experiential characteristics? They tell you how good the camera or video processing capability of the device is. They know that experiential data appeals to humans much more than the abstract numbers.

Next Week: The Now-New-Near Web (continued)

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TECH TALK: The Now-New-Near Web: EventWeb (Part 5)

Ramesh Jain’s fifth post puts forth the proposition for the EventWeb.

A fundamental insight brought into the creation of WWW by Sir Tim Barners-Lee was that documents could be linked to each other by creating links explicitly among them. Before that each document on Internet was an independent document. By creating tools and environment so documents could be linked and could be created and accessed easily, he created the Web. The tradition of linking documents explicitly has existed for long time – through footnotes, references at the end of articles or books, and by explicitly mentioning other documents in the text. The tradition of creating a link between an article and another one started with concept of hyperlinks. And this was taken to a very different utility level in the Web. These links are created to refer to another document explicitly that is considered relevant in that context. We will call them referential links.

Ultimately the Web is the Web due to links among documents.

EventWeb will be created by creating such explicit links among different events. I believe that the links among events are much stronger in many senses, as discussed in the following, than they are in documents. Links among events are also much more natural than they are in documents. There are implicit relationships among documents of different kinds and techniques for discovering and presenting such links are emerging slowly. The same will happen in case of events. In fact, insights is the result of discovering such links among the myriad events that surround us in all aspects of our life.

The early 1990s saw the DocumentWeb in its infancy. Through successive innovations, it has evolved into this gigantic, instantly searchable library we are familiar with. Similarly, these are the early days of the Now Web. As Ramesh puts it: “Many calendar and map oriented techniques that are emerging are reminiscent of Gopher days of document-web when each document was independent and was perceived by us as a document. By creating a web of these documents through referential links, the Web has now entered the Google age where we consider them related and use characteristics of the links among them in organizing, accessing, and evaluating information. Going forward, the links among events will be referential, spatial, temporal, causal, and contextual. Today we are in the Gopher age of EventWeb. Many challenges lie ahead to take us into the Google age of EventWeb.”

Tomorrow: The New Web

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TECH TALK: The Now-New-Near Web: The New Web

The New Web can be thought of as incremental in Topics. Topics relate to our interests. The New Web is about tracking people or topics. RSS (or a feed) is central to this Web.

Take a look at our own lives and interests. There are so many situations in which one would want a ‘relationship’ to track what’s new. I want to know the new books that Crossword has got in the past week and the deals that are on offer. I want to be able to track flights that I am booked on a few hours from now. I want to know traffic conditions on roads every evening along the routes to home. My wife would like to know the sales around town every weekend. As parents, we want to know the dates for the anti-polio drops.

Life is about the New. For much of human history, the combination of easy publishing and notification has not been available. Now, with blog-like publishing tools and RSS for syndication, it is simple to create and track content. We have already seen this with RSS aggregators which simplify the task of tracking updates to weblogs and topics that are of interest to us.

In this context, mobiles will make things even easier. I can take photos with my mobile – and share it with friends and family by publishing it to a website. Instead of sending SMSes or emails asking them check the latest photos, they can set up subscriptions so that will be notified whenever I publish something new. The ease of sharing will lead to a concomitant increase in the publishing. I will create more content if I know that my friends and family will be able to consume it in real-time and then be able to comment on it, which I can then view just as quickly.

The New Web also lets us pursue our micro-interests. RSS feeds let us change the granularity of what information is updated. On the Reference Web, I will only know that a page has changed – if at all. In the World of Now, the granularity can be for the microcontent – think blog posts. A legacy search engine will index a page, but an incremental web search engine will focus on the feeds. Feeds are the containers and carriers for microcontent.

A recent example will help demonstrate the power and potential of feeds.

Tomorrow: Facebook and Feeds

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TECH TALK: The Now-New-Near Web: Facebook and Feeds

About two weeks ago, Facebook made a change in the home page that users saw when they logged in. This was the announcement made by Ruchi Sanghvi, Facebook’s product manager for Feed:

We've added two cool features: News Feed, which appears on your homepage, and Mini-Feed, which appears in each person's profile.

News Feed highlights what's happening in your social circles on Facebook. It updates a personalized list of news stories throughout the day, so you'll know when Mark adds Britney Spears to his Favorites or when your crush is single again. Now, whenever you log in, you'll get the latest headlines generated by the activity of your friends and social groups.

Mini-Feed is similar, except that it centers around one person. Each person's Mini-Feed shows what has changed recently in their profile and what content (notes, photos, etc.) they've added. Check out your own Mini-Feed; if there are any stories you don't like, you can remove them from your profile.

The features caused a huge uproar among the Facebook community. At a technical level, it was about making awareness of the changes in one’s friends much more apparent easily. As Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO, explained, “This is information people used to dig for on a daily basis, nicely reorganized and summarized so people can learn about the people they care about. You don’t miss the photo album about your friend’s trip to Nepal. Maybe if your friends are all going to a party, you want to know so you can go too. Facebook is about real connections to actual friends, so the stories coming in are of interest to the people receiving them, since they are significant to the person creating them.”

The end-result? Facebook did an about-face and changed the features within a couple days. Mark, once again: “We missed this point with News Feed and Mini-Feed and we didn’t build in the proper privacy controls right away. This was a big mistake on our part, and I’m sorry for it. But apologizing isn’t enough. I wanted to make sure we did something about it, and quickly. So we have been coding nonstop for two days to get you better privacy controls. This new privacy page will allow you to choose which types of stories go into your Mini-Feed and your friends’ News Feeds, and it also lists the type of actions Facebook will never let any other person know about.”

What was interesting about this whole debate was the idea that Facebook was trying to make a reality – bringing the “what’s new” in the lives of friends as a ‘river of news’ on a person’s profile. And take a person’s actions and surface them to friends as part of their ‘river of news.’ It was, as I think about it, all about the New Web.

Tomorrow: Facebook and Feeds (continued)

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TECH TALK: The Now-New-Near Web: Facebook and Feeds (Part 2)

Fred Wilson wrote shortly after the feature was introduced: “Social networks to date have been these big unmanageable messes. Facebook is addressing that by giving users a tool to consolidate the information they care about (Jessica's friend tagged four photos with her name the other day - that's worth knowing)….Facebook is changing the experience in a significant way by surfacing in a very efficient (but also very public) way the data that is already in the system…Users will have to react to this. They'll have to think more about their privacy options. Or just get used to it. Because this is what the power of feeds and social networks is all about. This is the future.”
Fred also pointed to a quote by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in Forbes: “Before, it was an encyclopedia model, but now we’re changing to a news model.”

Dave Winer explained about the feeds feature:

The feature they introduced tells users what's new with their friends. It makes people more efficient at browsing the network of Facebook users they're connected to. It's a feature I understand because, as Rex Hammock points out, it's very much like the River of News aggregators I've been developing since 1999.

Facebook is absolutely correct that no new information is available now that wasn't available before, but only in a theoretic sense.
…
Now, on a much larger scale, with Facebook's user base, the heads-up has to be done by word of mouth, and opt-in. Instead of forcing all the users to make sense of this all at once, bootstrap a new network on your old one, call it Facebook Plus, or Facebook Big City Life, of Facebook Now, put some futuristic imagery out there, and require users to sign up for an upgrade to their account, which would work thusly.

Suppose I upgraded, and my friend Jane (in my network) also upgraded. Then Jane has a News page, and on that page all my changes show up, along with the changes of all members of her network that have also upgraded. I also have a News page and Jane's updates show up there, as do all the changes of members of my network who have upgraded.

Now change comes gradually, and users drive the change. When I run into Joan at the bookstore and she tells me she broke up with her boyfriend, I realize I didn't see that on my News page and ask if she's upgraded. Now I, a user, her friend, explain how it works. She decides if she wants to participate or not. That's what users are complaining about, and rightly so. They need to control how their network sees them.

One of the ways to view feeds has been propagated by Dave Winer. It is the “River of News.”

Tomorrow: River of News

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TECH TALK: The Now-New-Near Web: River of News

Dave Winer created the “river of news” concept and has been talking about it for many years. He explains why it is so significant:

Here's a scenario. Taking a trip. The plane lands, out comes the Blackberry. Check the voicemail, check email, then... What's next? For me it would be to check the news, find out if anything happened while I was in the air. Did a scandal break? Another terrorist attack? Any interesting Apple rumors?

But there's a lot of navigation involved, I call it the "hunt and peck" style of news-gathering, because I feel like a chicken in a yard, looking for a seed to eat. All that navigating is too much work on my desktop, but on a mobile device, that doesn't have a mouse, or any kind of pointing device, not even arrow keys, it's way to much work. But, my Blackberry has this wonderful scroll wheel, which is really all you need to read the news, if you arrange the information in the right way on the screen, and that way is the River of News.

Dave goes on to explain how it works:

Take a set of RSS feeds. Read them in random order, different every time. When you spot some new stories in a feed, ones that haven't appeared before, add them to the flow, at the top of the page. Repeat until you've read all the feeds. Do it again in ten minutes.

This really isn't new, it's a variant of how blogs work, it's a last-in first-out approach. As Paul Kedrosky points out, it's even older than blogs, it's how news wires work in the old teletype days. Want to find out what's new, go into the TTY room and watch the stories scroll in on the typewriter.

Many people have never experienced this style of news reading, but it can be fascinating, even mesmerizing, and in my humble opinion, it's a perfect fit for the mobile devices we carry with us these days.

If we think a little about it, watching the River of News is a bit like watching TV or listening to radio – with one key difference. The River of News can be customised with our feeds. Looking ahead, I believe that there will be RSS feeds everywhere – from people, from cameras on street corners, from business applications. We will set up our subscriptions to these feeds based on our interests. The mobile will be the primary consumption device in emerging markets like India for feeds. This will see the emergence of the New Web.

Next Week: The Now-New-Near Web (continued)

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TECH TALK: The Now-New-Near Web: Future of Feeds

Feeds are at the heart of the New Web, and an RSS Aggregator is the best way to consume feeds. So far, the focus has been on private RSS aggregators – where users read their subscribed feeds. There is also a need for public RSS aggregators which can showcase a collection feeds. [Topix.net is an example of a public RSS aggregator.]

The same basic idea of feeds can also be used to track topics across keywords by setting up alerts in the form of search words or phrases. With structured data, this can also be used to set up prospective (persistent) search. So, for example, you receive an alert when a stock price crosses a certain threshold.

The New Web can be used to track our specific interests – or what friends and family members are doing, provided everyone publishes. Over the past few years, there has been a proliferation of publishing with blogging tools like MovableType and Wordpress. Of late, this has extended to the creation of multimedia (images, audio and video) publishing. Mobile phones are helping accelerate the creation and consumption of user-generated content. Wrapped around feeds, this content can now be easily subscribed to and consumed in near real-time by those interested.

A lot of our life is about the new things. We would like to know what is on TV now. We would like to know the sales happening in our neighbourhood. We would like to see photos of our nephews and nieces as they grow up. So far, one has had to depend on either broadcast media or on other mechanisms of communication to know about the new content. Peer production combined with feeds can now make this much easier. This will lead to the creation of niche communities – joined together by either a family bond or a common interest.

One of the innovations that will be needed around feeds is to support restricted access. This way, I can restrict the distribution of the content that I am creating. As Niall Kennedy wrote recently: “Some syndication feeds are not meant to be displayed for the world to see. Our everyday lives contain private and confidential data we wouldn't want anyone else to see, and especially not search...Examples of private feeds intended for 1:1 communication include bank balances, e-mail notifications, project status, and the latest bids on that big contract.”

Facebook users may have been surprised to see their actions distributed to their friends via feeds. In a short while from now, it will be commonplace. The New Web is, quite literally, at hand!

Tomorrow: The Near Web

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TECH TALK: The Now-New-Near Web: The Near Web

The Near Web can be thought of as incremental in Space. It is the Web that is around where we are physically present. It is a world of shops, malls, schools, hospitals, traffic, and much more. In India, much of this Web does not have an electronic presence. It needs to be created. In this context, I want to share two ideas that I had mentioned some time ago – PIN-News and IndiaMirror.

PIN-News is about building a bottom-up community information system. It is built around PIN codes. Neighbourhood events can be posted on to specific pages, organised in a weblog-format. By using standardized forms to do the post, it is possible to capture the information in XML format and use a matching engine to send out alerts to people. For example, if I am interested in book exhibitions or special offers, I can set up an alert on a few PIN codes around my home and workplace. When the book shops in the area do their updates, I can be immediately alerted. PIN-News thus fills the gap in communicating dynamic information to people who are most likely to benefit from it.

Think of a Mirror World, by geographical area, categorised PIN code. (Everybody knows the PIN of where they live and work. Think of it as an About.com for the physical world -- only it is managed in a distributed manner. Our goals in doing IndiaMirror are the following:

1. Create a revenue model from the local small buyers and sellers -- a MicroGoogle
2. Be a utility in the lives of people -- used daily
3. Create a platform which can be used to discuss and solve local issues and problems
4. Build an Information Marketplace platform
5. Enable people to create their own blogs and RSS feeds (via DIY forms). People can do their own updates - publishing
6. Create a weblog/wiki/RSS for every PIN in India. Everything goes into a backend database
7. The RSS Aggregator delivers RSS feeds to people�s mailboxes. People can subscribe for specific events - which are delivered to their computer or cellphone
8. Imagine if each “physical object” has a virtual presence (for example, a theatre could provide updates on movies and bookings; local shops can provide updates on what's new in terms of sales, etc.)
9. People can also create a directory of local resources and landmarks. During elections this can be used to discuss the candidates contesting.

This is an innovative grassroots exercise in getting person-to-person publishing and syndication. It bridges information gaps. Think of it as an "information marketplace". What is required is a mix of seeing the new technologies that are coming up, and applying them to fulfill needs of today's non-consumers.
We now have the devices and the digital infrastructure to make the Near Web a reality.

Tomorrow: Citizen Media and Physical World Hyperlinks

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TECH TALK: The Now-New-Near Web: Citizen Media and Physical World Hyperlinks

People with mobiles can be content creators and consumers. 'Networked Journalism' is how Jeff Jarvis puts it:

“Networked journalism” takes into account the collaborative nature of journalism now: professionals and amateurs working together to get the real story, linking to each other across brands and old boundaries to share facts, questions, answers, ideas, perspectives. It recognizes the complex relationships that will make news. And it focuses on the process more than the product.

In networked journalism, the public can get involved in a story before it is reported, contributing facts, questions, and suggestions. The journalists can rely on the public to help report the story; we’ll see more and more of that, I trust. The journalists can and should link to other work on the same story, to source material, and perhaps blog posts from the sources. After the story is published — online, in print, wherever — the public can continue to contribute corrections, questions, facts, and perspective … not to mention promotion via links. I hope this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as journalists realize that they are less the manufacturers of news than the moderators of conversations that get to the news.

Another concept which is relevant in the context of the Near Web is that of the Physical World Hyperlink. This is how Scott Shafer explains it:

Great thought goes into the packaging of a product, but one thing is put on every package that brands have never been able to use before, until now. The barcode. Its universal, can be scanned/typed, doesn’t take up any more room on the product to market, and can now provide a direct connection w/ the Internet…a Physical World Hyperlink.

Brands have the opportunity to create their own “soft innovation” by turning on their barcodes. By turning on the barcode, you have created a physical world hyperlink. A hyperlink offers a direct connection to the wherever the brand owner wants you to go. Leverage the existing product package and turn it into a portable website.

Brand manager creates the ad that makes a consumer click/type a barcode (already existing) and creates an innovative marketing tool.
What brands or brand manager will be the first to start marketing this tool? Do brands even know they have this tool?

The killer app for Mobile Advertising will be a portal/platform that “turns on” those physical world hyperlinks.

Tomorrow: Content Discovery

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TECH TALK: The Now-New-Near Web: Content Discovery

A number of other developments are helping bring the Near Web to life. Internet Yellow Pages are making yellow pages much more accessible. Google Earth brought us satellite pictures of the world around us. People then started tagging places. Flickr added geotagging support so that now photos could be linked with locations. In some parts of the world, webcams and sensors are already providing real-time information of the world around us.

The Near Web is important because that is where we live and do a lot of our socialising and spending. Yet, there is so little that we know of that world. To find out about the specials in restaurants or bookshops, one has to walk to the place to find out what is happening. We hear on radio and watch on TV about events in far-flung corners of the world – in real-time. Yet, we have very limited knowledge of what is happening a few hundred metres around us. What we have is a discovery problem.

Businesses have to start thinking of a new world – a world in which all of their customers have access to a mobile phone. How does one rethink local marketing? Can one use the mobile phone to create relationships with customers? Customers, too, are keen to know what's happening around them. TV, radio and their newspapers do not necessarily cover the world near them. How can this chasm be bridged?

This is where we need to think of the new digital infrastructure that is being put in place and the far-reaching implications it will have on life and commerce. Here is a quote by Ashby M. Foote II which captures the essence: “One of the most insightful commentators on the changes at work in the economy is Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine and author of a brilliant new book, The Long Tail. He cites three forces that are transforming the economy and creating vast new opportunities at the grassroots level for small and boutique businesses. Force 1: The democratization of the tools of production. (The obvious example is the PC as a tool for publishing and multimedia.) Force 2: The democratization of the tools of distribution. (For instance, the combination of the PC and the Internet makes everyone a distributor). Force 3: Connecting supply and demand. (Search filters and feedback loops like those found on Google, iTunes, Amazon, and Netflix help niche content find interested buyers and users.)”

Tomorrow: Leapfrogging

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TECH TALK: The Now-New-Near Web: Leapfrogging

The Economist recently had an interesting essay on leapfrog technologies. It wrote:

Leapfrogging involves adopting a new technology directly, and skipping over the earlier, inferior versions of it that came before. By far the best-known example is that of mobile phones in the developing world. Fixed-line networks are poor or non-existent in many developing countries, so people have leapfrogged straight to mobile phones instead. The number of mobile phones now far outstrips the number of fixed-line telephones in China, India and sub-Saharan Africa. By their very nature, mobile networks are far easier, faster and cheaper to deploy than fixed-line networks.

...The lesson to be drawn from all of this is that it is wrong to assume that developing countries will follow the same technological course as developed nations. Having skipped fixed-line telephones, some parts of the world may well skip desktop computers in favour of portable devices, for example. Entire economies may even leapfrog from agriculture straight to high-tech industries. That is what happened in Israel, which went from citrus farming to microchips; India, similarly, is doing its best to jump straight to a high-tech service economy. Rwanda even hopes to turn itself into an African tech hub.

In countries like India, the Reference Web almost does not exist. Most businesses do not have websites; the ones that do have updates that are few and far between. This has been partly due to the slow growth of PCs and the lack of an inexpensive and reliable broadband infrastructure. Most of us in India rely on the 'global' Reference Web that we can search through the likes of Google and Yahoo.

India needs to leapfrog to the Now-New-Near Web. This is a web that will be built around mobiles and with a significant contribution coming from user-generated content. It will significantly improve life by bridging the information gaps that exist. It is a Web in which India can be the leader. The digital infrastructure and the devices to create and consume content are in place. What is missing is the set of services.

Another barrier to the creation of the Reference Web for the mass-market has been language. India has a multitude of languages. The computers that exist do not make it easy to create local language content. By adopting multimedia content creation techniques, India can break this barrier. Mobiles are the ideal devices for the creation of such content.

The Now-New-Near Web will be at the heart of the New India. It will be a virtual mirror of the physical world around us, accessible via the device we already carry and over networks that already exist. It will be the next big upgrade to the Web – and one which India can lead.

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