Tag: web

Web 2.0: A “Sociological” Point of View

Complex SystemsNo Comments

A Web 2.0 “Sociological” point of view is probably the most interesting analysis, mainly because it can be really considered as the very network revolution. Web 1.0 could rely only on a kind of link: the one obtained from <a …> tags; its purpose was (and still it is) to allow the connection between two different documents according to their content or other criteria (they’re often marketing-oriented). Thus the resultant network was made up of several (pseudo-)static or slowly changing nodes which connectivity was always bound by lots of limitations (first of all a spare knowledge about similar resources). The pure hypertextual technology was certainly great, but its weaker point was that of hiding the human beings, with their mutable nature, who were always behind the origin and development of each document (or web page). Web 1.0 was just like a geographical network (like a city map, for example) where human action […]

Time for Emergence

Artificial Intelligence, Complex Systems, Computational NeuroscienceNo Comments

When Sir Tim Berners-Lee had his stroke of genius and invented the World Wide Web, he didn’t surely think about its extraordinary present developments, just like a father normally hopes his children’s wellbeing, but he can’t seldom figure out every particular detail of their future. Such a behavior strikes everybody as a strange kind of myopia, like a bewitched gold-digger who stops in front of a slight glow and forgets its source. Even if there could be a strong temptation to believe it, several studies showed that its deep nature is quite different and probably no suitable attitude may avoid it. The first time I studied the concept of Emergence, I was attending a Complex Systems course at university, and my very first thought was that of a pure “scientific skepticism”: a sparkling description for an idea that had soon gone up in smoke… When I realized its immense strength, by then lots of its […]

Small Worlds… A little bit larger

Complex SystemsNo Comments

Yesterday I tried to answer a question on LinkedIn about the value we can assign to high-level connections (3rd or greater): a quite good question from several points of views. I think that the main problem of “Small Worlds” theory is brought about the huge amount of information needed in order to get a fast propagation through a certain social network. A world can be really small, but such a property may be easily tested by its members only if there’s a global and widespread knowledge about both the structure and the nature of the majority of nodes which a network is made up of. Thus the value of a 3rd level connection has to be considered not only from an intrinsic point of view (a person we can contact directly just like other “nearer” friends) but also as an additional set of information that we can exploit in order […]