Thibauld - Imagination and Execution -

David Weinberger conference notes

What is good with having events such as LeWeb taking in place in Paris, is that it offers great opportunities to meet people we're not used to see here. While I do not attend LeWeb, I had the opportunity today to attend a speech of David Weinberger about the Internet and how it affects and reinvents our lives.

It was not at all a technical speech but one of these speech I enjoy listening to, that help us put things into perspective. The only little problem was that David Weinberger's Macintosh crashed badly before the speech so he had to speak 'slideless'. This is why I thought it might be an interesting experience to publish the notes I took to see if what I got from his speech corresponds to what was effectively in the slides (I don't despair to see the slides one day ). So here are my notes of the speech. As I'm not a native english speaker, please note that I may have altered some of his thoughts.

First, he began by reminding us that the web has not been designed for anything in particular but only for "moving bits from one place to another" and that it is this designed-for-nothing-in-particular aspect that makes it so revolutionary and a perfect playground for innovation today.

The core purpose of the web being "only" to move bits resulted in 3 characteristics:

1. Abundance. The consequence of digitalizing (transforming into bits) everything: videos, books, music, images and so on... The only limit being today's "insane" (I quote) copyright laws.
2. Unalienation. The end of the 'broadcast' era, the content on the internet is our content, understand made by people like us. Everybody is a source of information.
3. Connection. Hyperlinks defines the Web, they link content.  In today's Internet, a lot of value has been put on top of these hyperlinks so that, through sites like social networks, it not only content that is being linked but people.

David then developed the implications of these 3 principles:

Unrealism has become realistic. Wikipedia, Linux or simply the web were all projects that people said to be utopist, unrealistic and bound to fail at the beginning. No managers, no hierarchy... this just could not work!  But today they are realizations that will make the Renaissance look 'pale' in comparison.

Include everything paradigm. Whereas we used to use experts to sort / organize every piece of information, this is not the rule anymore. Today, the rule is to include everything by default as we are unable to anticipate what information will prove to be relevant to the users. Deciding what to include, what to exclude, how to organize, is a political decision that may prevent users to find what they're looking for. He illustrated his saying with with Sarah Palin: everybody was so surprised by her nomination that the most relevant piece of information we could find at that time was a page on her on Wikipedia. Had this information (her wikipedia page) been rationally analysed before her nomination, it would had been probably filtered out...

Superior collective knowledge. The Web provides the tool to leverage collective knowledge through user participation. David took an example of photos taken during of World War 2 that were held by the Library of Congress and that they decided to put on flickr (note: I found it). These photos are a good illustration of how users can significantly contribute to add valuable (or not) information that the Library of Congress experts themselves did not have (the photos were tagged more than flickr would allow).

Fading frontier between data and meta-data. Whereas we used to use meta-data to find what we are looking for (ex: find a book thanks to its ISBN), the frontier between data and meta-data is now fading. With today's abundance of information, you can now find items through data (ex: find a book because you remember its first sentence). The only remaining difference between data and meta-data being that meta-data is what you know and data is what you're looking for.

Authority by transparency. Institutional authority and credibility is slowly losing ground. Transparency is becoming the real way to establish authority. David took a relevant example using the traditional comparison between Wikipedia and Britannica. Coming back to the page of Sarah Palin, he said that the neutrality of this page is simply striking considering the extreme feelings (love or hate) that exist on Sarah Palin. But what is even more striking is how this neutrality was achieved by looking at the discussions that took place: the 2 camps after long fights and debates finally came to an agreement on a text that both sides think is neutral. Above all, everybody can see how this page was disputed and how it has been elaborated, something unthinkable with Britannica. Wikipedia, on the contrary to Britannica, takes its authority, legitimity, credibility from its transparency. In the Internet world, the more transparent, the more legitimate.

End of my notes! Clearly, it is very likely that the articulation of my notes is far less coherent than the original presentation but anyway.... I hope you got the substance-full marrow ("la substantifique moëlle" in french, I found the translation in Wikipedia, I hope it is correct and neutral ).

Cheers,