22nd
The Open Web
Brad Neuberg asks:
Do you toss the term Open Web around? Ever wonder what the heck it means? Me too.
One sentence version: The Open Web is a networked system of people and processes that lets those people and processes create, manage, own, give and learn from socially accessible information without requiring allegiance to one or more central controls.
That’s much too abstract. I think the crux of the biscuit is twofold:
- What’s on the Open Web are information artifacts.
- What makes it open is that the information is accessible in a social fashion: people can and do “play” with it.
Brad’s post adds three questions for bonus points. Here are my efforts:
If Adobe and Microsoft were to open Flex/Flash and Silverlight, that would not be the open web (in and of itself) because those systems have a tendency to encapsulate information artifacts, limiting diverse social access. On the open web, in the ideal, the information is just out there without requiring a specific set of rules to be followed in order to make some use of it. I can use wget, or a browser, or a desktop app or whatever to get at a picture on flickr because that picture is itself loose on the open web with its own URI.
So an open web needs things like URIs, and granularity on those URIs is good.
Developers should care about the Open Web because developers make tools to process (i.e. play with) information. The more information there is to process the more interesting development work that can be done. The more that information is accessible in a straightforward fashion, the more creative the things developed can be.
Users should care about an Open Web because the Open Web is a fabulous crucible of learning, where learning includes both formal learning and the growth that comes from play, interacting with people, and that fun thing that happens when you go to Google to find something or Wikipedia to read about something and take a left turn into a universe of loose goosey browsey discovery.
The current web is and can be the Open Web, with care.
