Notes for 15 minutes of my very own

Begin with the now famous YouTube video

1. I am going to borrow liberally from We Are the Web by Kevin Kelly. Wired, August 2005
2. The term Web 2.0 was coined in 2004
3. Bart Decrem: Web 2.0 is the “participatory Web". Web-as-information-source is regarded as Web 1.0.
4. Digital Text is no longer just linking information. It’s about linking people.
5. 2005: The total number of Web pages, including those that are dynamically created upon request and document files available through links, exceeds 600 billion. That's 100 pages per person alive.
6. 2006 estimates puts Google at having indexed 20-30% of existing pages at 20+ billion.
7. What we all failed to see was how much of this new world would be manufactured by users, not corporate interests. Amazon.com customers rushed with surprising speed and intelligence to write the reviews that made the site's long-tail selection usable. E-Bay became a success thanks to 1.4 million people uploading photos, descriptions, rating buyers and sellers. The corporate E-Bay put in place a system. Users did the rest, for free.
8. Blogging: Near instantly 50 million blogs erupted, a new one created every 2 seconds. One more person doing what AOL and ABC - and almost everyone else - expected only AOL and ABC to be doing.
9. Each time we forge a link between words we teach an idea.
10. We are the Web, we are teaching the machine
11. 100 billion times per day humans click on a Web page
12. The Machine is us, We are using the Machine.
13. Each device is a differently shaped window that peers into the global computer. Nothing converges. The Machine is an unbounded thing that will take a billion windows to glimpse even part of. It is what you'll see on the other side of any screen.

How does this relate to our job?

To paraphrase: Each word we write, each story we publish, each photograph we push out to the Web is a differently shaped window that peers into our College. Nothing converges. This institution is an unbound thing that will take a billion windows to glimpse even a part of.

Who will author this mass of communications? We all will. Anyone who the College has touched in any way; as an learner, as a parent, as an employer, as a litigator, as a son or daughter, as a displaced Aurarian, we will all contribute to the windows into this institution.

Certainly our efforts will continue to inform our publics. However, like Amazon and E-Bay, we need to put the system in place for our users to do there share.

Another interesting facet of the Machine:

According to Kevin Kelly “We already find it easier to Google something a second or third time rather than remember it ourselves. The more we teach this megacomputer, the more it will assume responsibility for our knowing. It will become our memory.”

How do we respond to that? What is our role in providing our constituents their second memories? Do we make our services more easily available on line? Do we make information about our institution more accessible? In what forms? In as many ways as possible? Are we to become the Shepard of our institutional history?

Key Concept: Microcontent

Web 2.0 sections of the Web (blogs, RSS, feeds) break away from the page metaphor. Rather than following the notion of the Web as book, they are predicated on microcontent. Blogs are about posts, not pages. Wikis are streams of conversation, revision, amendment, and truncation. Podcasts are shuttled between Web sites, RSS feeds, and diverse players. These content blocks can be saved, summarized, addressed, copied, quoted, and built into new projects.

Enables collaborative information discovery.

One last thing (from that Kelly guy again)

"There is only one time in the history of each planet when its inhabitants first wire up its innumerable parts to make one large Machine. Later that Machine may run faster, but there is only one time when it is born.

You and I are alive at this moment."