What will constitute Web 3.0

The following text is an outtake of an essay written in Introduction and theoretical foundations of new media.

Introduction
This essay will focus on different ideas all benefiting to the discussion of what will be the pillars of Web 3.0. To better understand the term, one is extracted from Wictionary, which states the following: “The predicted third generation of the World Wide Web - usually conjectured to include semantic tagging of content” . Definitions vary from source to source, but this peer-to-peer portal has managed to sentence the core value of the new phenomenon.

The development of web-based services and content has been rapid over the years. Ever since the Great Internet Explosion (Jargon File 2009), all of the factors (speed, content, users) defining the internet have increased tremendously.

In this essay, the focus will be on the tendencies which are taking place already today and by many expert users are thought to be what will constitute web 3.0 tomorrow.

To better comprehend where one will evolve to, it is important to see his or hers origins. While there are many opinions about what is web 3.0, experts have agreed that web 1.0 was the readable web (Cormode & Krishnamurthy 2008) and 2.0 was the writable web (O´Reilly Media 2005). Readable web in this context means that all of the content in the internet was one-way communicated: author published his or hers work on the internet and the readers could only consume. Web 2.0 brought the ability to alter that content, either by republishing it interactively (sharing), giving instant feedback to the author and or making the author’s role universal – everybody is a content consumer and provider today.

This tendency has brought internet users to a problem. Since everybody is now a content provider, the amount of information is too much to browse through using the old ways. It is believed by this author that web develops hand in hand with the flow of information. When more information is made available, then the more need there will be for it to be sorted out for the consumer. The need for the web to be not only a platform for information, but also as some sort of assistant to the browser, is the main idea, which goes hand in hand with definitions about Web 3.0. This study will go on citing factors that arise from the need for a “smart browser companion” and list them as follows.

Access from anywhere
The tendency to access one’s content from anywhere and from anything is cemented each day onward. Different technical gadgets available today play a vital role as the user will be linked to the web from different peripherals – laptop, mobile phone, home computer, game pod etc (New Digital Decade 2009). Also the widespread of such technical gadgets will force the liberation of content. Content has to be free – storage capabilities will be more and more web-based, eliminating the need for a personal HDD. This, among with mobile internet access solutions will cement the situation, where access to your personal info from any part of the world will be common.

Google CEO Eric Schimdt refers to the web 3.0 as the peak of cloud-computing. This will mean the inhalation of computers (stationary home computers), paid software etc (Daleisphere 2009). Everything would become web-based.

Expected is that sharing will be even more common. To picture the future in that field, one could take parallels from today’s http addresses: if today you expect to see content only by entering the http address, then tomorrow the majority would expect the same action to also enable sharing. This means that when a person browses the internet, everything will be shared in his or hers social networks, applications etc.

Widgets and the importance of them will also rise, as APIs turn out to be a standard in websites, therefore allowing its consumers to create gadgets to better the surfing experience (ReadWriteWeb 2007).

Semantics is the next big thing
Berners-Lee, the creator of WWW, sees the web 3.0 as a semantic web, being based on software agents, ontologies and metadata (DCL 2009). Tagging is not mentioned by him, but it can be concluded as a more archaic view of ontologies (user-created vs. computer-originated). The need for a semantic web is imminent, as we face now every day the need for information. But this need for information has its limits – today we search for it with the help of search engines. These engines however are too automated and lack the ability to take account factors affecting one’s browsing. For example – when John and Tom search for news about Limp Bizkit, John might want to see only news about their concerts while Tom wants to read, why their lead singer is a bad person and that the band should be banned. Today these search results can be achieved, but the price to achieve it is too high for us. We are expecting that the browser, or the search engine or something else would know our background, therefore not encumbering us with ongoing search words or irrelevant results. Semantic web is the answer to that problem, as it would address factors common to the current browser, offering therefore only comprehensive information to him or her (Siegel 2007).

However there is a small threat what might manifest in that tendency. To be exact – this sort of development of internet would further the concept of minorities over the internet, hardening the task to keep a society together. If one dislikes rap-music, Russia and classical music, then he or she would never ever see any content consisting of these factors. It is a censorship, but it’s purported by the user. However, over the reach of time, it has been always understood that censorship eventually destroys the society.

AI to be common
As the author stated in the begging of the essay, Web 3.0 will mainly lay on the need for assistance when browsing. This sort of assistance cannot be found in today’s systems as many experts distress. The creation or widespread of today’s options of Artificial Intellect use will be parallel to the spread of web 3.0. Internet users are getting tired of “dumb systems” (today’s search engines e.g.), which lack the ability of creative thinking. The creation or rope in of AI in one’s web-browsing experience will be inevitable when discussing the possibilities of developments in the internet.

Wired magazine creator Kelly goes on describing web 3.0 as not merely a semantic web (that knows its user base and serves them), but as a perfect machine, who sees (webcams), hears (podcasts) and knows (our entries) everything. He goes one saying that web 3.0 will be reached, when everything is on the internet (Wired 2008). May it be the bread from the grocery store, my cat or tires from the garage (RFID technology plays an essential role in benefiting that future outcome) (Eesti Ekspress 2009). In ideal, the computer will then be a partner to a internet user - a partner who speaks and thinks alike.

Privacy as a term forgotten
As stated partly before, the definite two common factors defining web 3.0 are semantics and privacy. Web 3.0 has to consist of elaborate semiotic capabilities, as humans don’t have the ability to filter the internet anymore (we need something to get the goods for us). The other essential factor is privacy. Nothing will be private anymore, as web 2.0 has proven, that protecting one’s privacy is an impossible task (Eesti Ekspress 2009). Therefore it is thought that the solution is transparency – everything about everybody will be public, therefore the need to misuse that information will be low or even absent (Eesti Ekspress 2009).

From the tendencies described earlier (constant sharing) it isn’t hard to imaging the ever-increasing difficulty to protect a person’s privacy in the internet . The recent wide-spread of location-based social networks will only raise the level of concern in privacy related issues. Seeing the option as web-wide democratization of private information is an interesting view. It is agreeable that privacy protection is a hard task and change of paradigm is necessary in that field, but to free all of the personal info is a troubling question – what would be the info then left private? Humans cannot simply abandon the private sphere of their personality; therefore we cannot expect that to happen in the internet too.

Also worth mentioning is that web 3.0 will be a lot more browser-based. As we can see the tendency to envision web 3.0 as a web-experience with personal assistant, then it is clear that the assistant needs some platform to work on (gather info). It could be a website, but browsers Chrome or IE seems to be more realistic. This monopoly made available to the browsers will of course further the threats to our privacy.

Beyond Web 3.0
If tendencies mentioned before will at some degree or wholly be apart of the future web 3.0 experience, some experts have argued that there are many more interesting things happening in the near future of web experience development. The author of this work nevertheless takes a more conservative stance and states the following tendencies to be futuristic and therefore fiction, that has the ability to come to life. As it is somewhat fictional, academic research on these fields has been poor if not absent at all.

Semantic web will definitely at some point make us rethink the HTML. As current system of hypertext mark-up is tremendously old, when compared to the overall “new-ity” of the internet (Nielsen 1995). We might need a new code for web, as today the web is meant for humans to use – but AI personal assistants are computer based, therefore HTML with its humane interface is obsolete, as it cannot be used by them effectively  (HowStuffWorks 2009). This change of paradigm is further supported, if programming would be automated too (today there is not as much as automated programming, as one would expect).

Another interesting and actually historical forecast is that Web 3.0 will destroy traditional media, as they will truly become part of internet, therefore eliminating the need to separate them (radio, paper, TV) as independent media. The tendency is supported by different researches stating the decrease of consumption of traditional media (Digital Journal 2009). Traditional media has always suffered under forecasts like these when a new medium is invented and later on widely used. Although we live in a Net-era, mediums like radio or television (paper-based media is affected, but still surviving) still exist and even prosper. Nevertheless it is believable that web 3.0 will at some point truly eliminate the old mediums. The reasons behind that lie in the tendency, that everything will be connected to the web – person’s car, TV-set, home-appliances etc. Today, radio has a monopoly in car stereo-systems, television in the living room and paper-based media in the mobility (read in anywhere). If everything would be connected to the web, it isn’t hard to imagine, how these monopolies will be lost. Nevertheless it is interesting to point out, that this opinion will always have strong adversaries (Tänavsuu 2009).

The last interesting tendency described of possible outcomes of web 3.0 is the virtual reality turned into real. Some experts see the web 3.0 as a “real” virtual reality – since everything will be connected to the web, everything would be on the web (DestinationCRM 2007). This can be imagined when looking at web-cites like Second Life. Web 3.0 in that environment would mean, that websites, content and web users will be real (virtually), making the browsing experience almost the same as “walking towards a mall, to buy jeans”. Recent developments in the PC hardware industry further support this possible outcome, as hardware like scent-producers (Invenia 2009) (think of a web-based bakery, which sells its goods over the internet, having consumers enchanted by the realistic smells from their PCs) or physics engines (objects etc. act on the PC as in real life) . This possible future outcome of web-experience was colourfully envisioned in a Hollywood movie “Chain Reaction” , where the main character browsed through the internet as a person would walk through a super-mall.

The main critique of this kind of web is the high entry-cost – since virtual reality demands a great amount of graphical work to be done, in the future only rich companies can create websites as small companies cannot afford to create elaborate a virtulistic (virtual realistic) “webpage” for themselves. Of course this critique can only be taken account today – it is unknown how graphic production would change over the years (maybe it will turn out to be entirely automated, so it would demand as much as coding as writing a HTML script).

Conclusion
All in all one could say that the main factors constituting the web 3.0 in the coming years are semantics, AI and mobility. Web browsers (or PCs themselves, or technological mobile accessories) will turn out to be more and more the browsers who offer assistant-like work outcomes for users to consume. This will be done by using elaborate schemes of semantics and also some degree of AI by the “automated browser”. Also it is clear, that information (content) will forsake all kinds of limits to its spread, meaning that it will be accessible from any type of machine or from any place on earth. And to add – threats to our privacy will arise, taking us at some time to a point, where a revolution of understanding towards that issue will happen. Nevertheless one has to notice, that the evolution of mediums is constant, as our dissatisfaction with the current systems thrives it (Pajusalu 2009).

Jargon & Hacker Ethic

Jargon File
I browsed the Jargon File for a specific entry, as I always have known that there is a distinct difference between hackers and crackers. In Estonian language, people still use "häkker" as a negative word (web-based criminal, "breaking-and-entering), although it's incorrect. As Jargon File explains, cracker is the correct word for describing these kind of pc-users, therefore I would hope, that someday, when journalists or the common man speaks about cybercriminals, they would refer to them not as hackers, but as crackers ("kräkker").

link to the definition

Hacker Ethic
When searching for examples of Himanen's new "seven", that'll shape the Information Age, I see resemblances in many fields.

Passion as a thriving force at work is now not only for the hackers - more and more personnel-trainees stress the importance of one's passion towards his or hers job.When discussing of tendencies in the field of freedom, there are many opinions but we can at-least agree, that freedom in workplace has grown (work-hours, superior-related communication). Work-Ethic and the "battle" between monastery and academy is an ongoing battle, and I would say, that the hacker-preferred academy system is universally better. In this era of information-flood we sometimes must respect the knowledge "carved in stone". When talking about Money Ethic, I disagree with the tendencies pointed out in the study text, as I feel, that everything web-related is more and more coming to under influence of profiteering. Tendencies to earn more and more money are sadly not slowing down in the world also. Also views on nethics are going "against the stream" as centralization is not only gaining ground in the internet (major search-engine, operation-system, social-community etc.) but in the world too (media conglomerates, car-producers). I don't have any specific view on how the society feels or is about the caring factor, so I'm just going to skip to the creative part of hacker ethic. Creativity today has been turned to a necessity - not only in terms of work, but in relations-ships, consumerism and so on. As the information and visual flow of bits is forever increasing, people feel the urge to be more special. Sadly this battle cannot be won and I expect that any time soon we shall fall back a great deal in terms of expectancy on creativity.

Estonia's Russians Making a Difference

Speaking of Russians living in Estonia we sometimes cannot describe them as minorities (they are a majority in places like Ida-Virumaa and Tallinn), but I still wanted to describe an idea, where this minority would publish opinions, news and statements on different subjects currently under public discussion in Estonia.

Currently there appears to be no neutral platform for that minority to express their ideas and problems concerning the life in Estonia. Here's how I see one option of dissolving that gap:

Academic (non-political) alliance of Russian-speaking people would create their own interactive web-portal, which is updated in three languages and has modern graphical interface. At that portal Estonian people could read of different opinions by Russian readers and also there could be a platform for polite discussion.

This portal would reduce the information and understanding gap between the two nations or at least help towards that goal.


Written on the task "Choose a minority group and describe how they can make use of Internet to reduce alienation and prejudice."

Digital Divide in Estonia

Example of a digital divide
The best example of a Digital Divide in Estonia is between our parents and children. The situation is more astonishing as you think of all the painstaking changes the parents have had to live through already, and the government (society, etc.) forcing yet again this new - all-whelming digital world acceptance.

I'm not saying, that the gap is wide. Mostly all of the parents know how to use the internet, how to work there and how to apply the net as an entertainment source. But knowledge on scams, phishing, on-line-threats etc. is not equal between the two age-groups.

Availability of internet
This summer I had a huge fight with some of my girlfriends, whether or not internet is as common as air by it's availability. I was then convinced that there isn't a cottage in this country, where you would not at-least get GPRS service. Apparently I was wrong. My friends violently argued that in some villages in Estonia there is not even mobile service, more less internet. I still do believe though, that there is some sort of internet capability - whether KÕU, or WiMax or Elion-related services, but it is true, that in case the connection haven't been brought to the village by the provider, the cost to do that for the people living there is too expansive. This situation however widens the digital cap between our citizens.

The spread of internet in Estonia is good compared to countries in western Europe. But we can't compare us with them, because we a smaller country (easier to cover with net) and we have a different view on e-services (everything must be dealt with in the internet). Therefore I would say, the spread of internet over Estonia is not as good, as it should be, taking to account, what do we expect to be in terms of e-Estonia.

The solution? Government-subsidised country-wide wireless fidelity, with download capabilities as far as 0.5 Mbps (for now).

Comparing Current to Estonia 2010

Grand Slam
IN my point of view, Estonia is moving towards the "Grand Slam" scenario (the best realisation of both geographical location (transit) and innovative and educational potential.). I´m saying that despite the fact, that current economical situation in our country isn´t worth praising. But From the four scenarios described, I can see only this one truly having examples from different fields to support it. We haven´t really adopted anything Finnish like in our ways of dealing with the economy or society (social equality, higher taxation, stronger well-fare system), so I would argue with the South-Finland scenario. Also little angry country isn´t quite our way (no extensive militarism in here) and we can´t talk about Ferryman situation, while Ust-Luga port is being built behind Narva in Russia.

The main factors supporting Grand Slam choices right now are the E-Government system (when you think about it, one has to be proud of e-voting, e-health etc. systems that work/start to work here), the goal to built EU IT-Agency to Estonia (http://www.e24.ee/?id=176891) etc. We also have not abandoned our capabilies as a transit country - ports in Paldiski, Tallinn and Sillamäe are constantly expanding and with the cooperation from Estonian Railway the search for alternative transit-partners (China) is constantly ongoing.

Sure things are not perfect. But Estonian people really never want to be happy with everything. It is true, that too much self-admiration is despicable, but one needs to occasionally slow down and "smell the roses".

Importance of caring in reaching ubicomp in Estonia
It is important to stress out that ideologies are not limited to real life. One can have a conservative government, a conservative budget and why not - a conservative web-policies. So the question, whether or not the importance of caring in the internet (more precisely when reaching the information-based(-dependent) society) is important, comes down to one question: what do the majority of citizens (netizens) feel on the subject. Does helping the ones in need surpass the personal liberty of not caring of anyone but yourself? I, as a convinced socialist, do feel, that we cannot talk about a country-wide ubicomp, when not taking to account the differences between netizens. One cannot think that ubicomp can be reached simply by stating it as a goal. People need to be connected - Finland has made the right to access internet a human right, meaning if not able by himself, it is the governments duty to provide web access to the citizen. Caring although should not stop at that point. We then have to speak about training, hardware-providing, protection of fraud and internet-crime etc..

When a country reaches ubicomp, it simply addresses the fact, that their society now lies more on the web, when discussed about it´s functions and roles. So we cannot exclude caring as necessary factor from that system, because there has always been aid to the lesser ones. The tendency should continue, even when the system is binary.

Possibilities of nonmarket production in PR - Estonia

While not currently working, I still do consider myself a possible future representative of the field of public relations aka communication in Estonia's business environment. Basically, when asked, I would say I'm a pr-man.

So what could (or should) be the projects or worktasks produced by nonmarket methods or strategies in my field of work?

The main way work is being done in Estonia's pr-field is quite parallel to software engineering. Firstly - you have a company, who needs to succeed some goals. The one of the important ways to achieve that goal is to gain public interest, trust and support etc. To do that, we - the pr-persons gather to a workteam (or do it ourselves in case of low investment by the client) and create a project, which consists of description of the "current situation", where we want to be and how would we get there from "current situation" (steps of actions are described).

My first idea is that nonmarket strategies could be applied in two steps in the process. At first - the company could avoid hiring pr-agency, and simply post their goal/problem to some sort of pr-related online community and there specialists in that field take action, offering steps or even strategies to get there.

Another possibility is for the pr-agency, once hired, to use the same community for gathering alternative ideas on the subject how to get to the goal, thus giving the opportunity to do the some work with lesser people and therefore more effectively/profitably.

In theory - this could (and also sounds) nicely. If a community can produce a operation system like Linux, then surely a pr-oriented community can offer helpful solutions for let's say a project like "Teeme Ära" to achieve them higher level of public knowledge, -participation etc.

But there are 2 main problems which come to my mind now. Firstly - we don't have this pr-oriented community in Estonia. We don't even have a pr-related publication in Estonia. We do have a alliance of people involved in pr (EPRA.ee) but this is not a very active one and it is inward-oriented.

There also cannot be an alternative to such a community, because communities outside Estonia do not comprehend our society's peculiarities therefore suggestions offered there can't be as successful as solutions offered by Estonians.

Secondly - main revenue (therefore clients) in pr In Estonia come from business-sector. Therefore the secrecy and the need for innovative (new, copyright) solutions is very high. I have great doubt that any specialist in Estonia would reveal his or hers innovative thoughts on a subject for no monetary reward. And also - we cannot talk about secrecy in terms of business-sphere consisting roughly about 700000 workers (people with money).

In conclusion - nonmarket solutions in the field of PR could definitely work on terms regarding public or third sector, where persons responsible for communication-related work would post their problem/request on a some-sort of pr-related online community (logically it would be owned by eg EPRA) where they could receive ideas on how to succeed achieving set goals.

Until we live in a closed society (in terms of language and movement of real-estate) nevertheless I see no possibility to use nonmarket strategies when dealing with enterprise sectors PR.

Bills need paying and like a known artist Chalice raps in his song - "got to be invited to a charity concert, which later on turned out to be a business summer days (ettevõtte suvepäevad)" (Superv6imed, Mis toimub kaenla all mul"

Laptop Buying Guide

Following is in Estonian, since it has alternatives in english, just Google it ;)

NB! Enne uuri:
http://www.techspot.com/guides/150-laptop-buying-guide-200903/page3.html

Kui täna soetada rüperaali endale, lähtuksin mina järgmistest teguritest:

Protsessor Intel Core 2 Duo P9500 2.53GHz
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Processors-Benchmarklist.2436.0.html
http://www.intel.com/products/processor/core2duo/mobile/specifications.htm
Videokaart Nvidia 9700M GT
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Comparison-of-Graphic-Cards.130.0.html
http://www.nvidia.com/object/geforce_m_series.html
Kõvaketas 120GB+, 5400RPM
Monitor 13-14”
Mälu 4GB DDR3 1066MHz

Lisaks:

emaplaat	Mobile Intel® PM Express Chipset
DVD-RW	jah
USB	3x
HDMI	jah
veebikaamera	jah
klaviatuur	EST
wifi	Intel® WiFi Link 5300
LAN	jah
mälukaardilugeja	jah
BT	jah
ExpressCard	jah

Veel:
digitv-tuuner, ID-lugeja ExpressCard

kaal max 2,3kg, aku min 4h

Lisaks:
- väline kõvaketas
- lisamonitor
- lisaklaviatuur, -hiir, -usb-hub

Experiences with Blocking Software

For this assignment I picked NetNanny from the list. Probably because it was most familiar to me.

Before heading on to the task results, I want to state out that I basically hate these kind of software as their ethos sucks: why should I filter the internet? Let the government filter the internet based on what the public decides (aka Reformparty promises that porn will go under .xxx or dissappear at all, when one would vote for them).

Filtering the internet personally just wastes my time and usually brings errors, which I have to deal with.

But on to the results. As expected, NetNanny was fierce with porn. Google porn results were all blocked. And some "not-so-legal" cracking sites banners (filled with porn too) or the sites themselves were blocked also.

While the blocking part was as expected, what disturbed me was the spy-functions (logs about IM use, website traffic etc.). It is truly fascist of a parent to get this kind of information (demand it) from anybody, specially one's children.

With that revelation, I un-installed the whole thing and hopefully I will never have to deal with net-spying again.

About Internet Scams

Internet fraud (scam) scheme
The most typical scam scheme I could think of are the one's already many times practised in Estonia. Sites like Hinnavaatlus, Kuldne Börs etc offer it's customers to exchange used goods for money. I have witnessed users, who did the following:

Found a product with a good price. By the idea proposed by the seller (to avoid competition) the potential buyer wired a small amount of money to the sellers account. Later they did not receive the product or it was damaged. // This type of fraud has greatly reduced over the years because of the high cooperation by site-owners to catch the scammers in cooperation with the police.

It's hard to describe a perfect scam, because the easy (and first to come to mind) focus on the stupidity of a person - eg send me money so I could send you back some more. Or they stress out a person in need (help us help a child in Valgamaa, who can't walk).

Probably it would be dumb to describe a perfect scam, because then it would be put to use (if I would be interested, I would do it myself).

In conclusion, the most effective scams will always be the one's hoping for a ill-IT-literate (n00b) user to send the scammer voluntarily some money.

There is one exception - phishing sites. With the ease of reproduction almost no website in the world is piracy proof and I do fear that some day, when typing in eg. emay.com I would get the exact-looking website, buy my product there and find out, that thanks to one spell error I know am 100 dollars poorer.

Of course HTTPS etc helps, but nothing is unbreakable. Except diamonds? But you don't put times and PC together.

Review of Scam o Rama & What's the bloody points
I read couple of scam introductions in both sites. Since they are VERY long, I took the liberty not to read the majority of them. My first question was - how do they have time to re-scam the scammers? The discussions were very long and as I could understand the Nigerians (who live in Africa, where life is gloomy), I still have great trouble understanding how a person (EU, US) can have such time to deal with them.

From the ethical side of view I see no troubles. As the main idea is to let the Nigerians "have a taste of their own medicine" and no real harm (nobody has sent the rescammers money) is being done, then it is a form of people's project (Teeme Ära etc). Although the goal is questionable since there would be no greater outcome of the project.

Well - actually there is one outcome. The sites provide an exxeceltn study material on scams and hopefully will teach future maybe-victims what to expect from a scammer.

I myself just never read e-mail not sent from my contacts.

Thoughts after Inside Echelon

Review of the article "Inside Echelon" by Duncan Campbell

The idea (or fact) that we are being watched more and more by governments, is not new. Since the Cold War (maybe even before), people have constantly felt the Big Brother looking over their shoulder.

Campbell's article reviewed the system, that is one of the greatest examples of machinery committed to the creation of that feeling. Ehcelon has greatly expanded during the last decades, which is somewhat phenomenal, because there seems to be now no apparent threat to the countries involved. I believe it is happening because of the constant technological development and the cost-reduction of a surveillance system like that.

To other countries disadvantage - the system is owned mainly by US and secondly it's allies UK and other English speaking western countries. From gathering military information during the Soviet Union existing times, the Echelon has shifted to economic information gathering from western countries and somewhat lesser military information gathering from developing countries (North-Korea, China).

Since the surveillance system is being more and more automated, it is apparent, that from any day now, nothing will be private, since now the chance of you "missing the bot or the listener" will soon be eliminated.

Thoughts on the situation? I follow a somewhat simple code in my life. "Have no privacy". That means, that no one could shock me with their knowledge about my thoughts on some subject or events happened to me. Thus I am never worried, when hearing again ideas about governmental conspiracy. So I will not be stressing typical worries about individual right to privacy, because that's vanity. Thinking that you, a 75 year old incident to happen in this planet, are worth longtime tracing, is in my opinion short-sighted.

The problem however is big in the industrial spying between (or toward) different countries. How could we, Estonians, expect to really invent something world-beneficiary (Nokia), if big countries have surveillance systems like these. From the moment, some talented student or programmer in Tallinn writes down in digital form his or her great idea and shares it, basically it would be possible that the next day a group of IBM scientist are working on it, thanks to the information discovered and then shared by NSA, that for the greater glory of their country.

The way I see it, there is no point seeing us being anything greater than a country with nice islands to visit in summers, because never will we have such military potential to defent our economy (defending our country is somewhat questionable by certain people in Estonia) from systems like Echelon. That is of course saddening.

Towards the Information Society

3 assignments on the study material Towards the Information Society

Mind-quake - Change of the role of USSR in WWII
When dealing with my father and his view on the events regarding the role of Soviet Union, that is the most ideal example of Theobald's 'mind-quake' and the difficulties related to the need of change to it. Of course there are different, more IT-related mind-quakes (from hacker to cracker; linear-wars to cyberwars), but the "pain" and also the disturbance of changing your views on a subject that's for half a century was perceived 180 degrees differently, is in my opinion a very good example of a mind-quake (mind-ruptures?!).

All beliefs are constructed for us. Countless semioticians etc. have concluded that everything we perceive, are perceived in that way because of our education, society, parents or other alike features of humanity. In the case described before, the belief of USSR troops being only liberators and not occupiers/terrorizers , was implemented on my father during his studies in high school, service in the military and by his parents, who had been through the same in their work-time etc.

From Theobald's view of mind-quakes, the situation is as follows - everything my father knows about WWII history, is wrong, since the model (history) has been retold by Eastern-European politicians and historians, who in some fields rule his social environment (him being a citizen and a media-consumer). Now should come the "constructing a new image of the past", that being achieved bit by bit. I could say, that this has happened. Thanks to documentaries shown on ETV, a lot of historical events have gotten sidelines for my father. What then was race to Berlin, in the goal of freeing the world from fascism, is now also series of raping, terrorizing and hooliganism towards the local people.

Of course it is always questionable, if the new model is the correct or more honest/true model. That makes it extra difficult for the older generation to live through the mind-quake fast, because they have greater life-experience and more developed sense of ignoring bullocks than the young generation. But as always, the society forces or lures us to accept the same beliefs as the majority, as the fear of rejection is strong within us.

Paradox of time - Intensification of our work-time
For me, the Handy's paradox of time is the perfect and at the same time a horrible case of a situation, where the innovation of technology has got me working on projects longer and more stressed.

I am a e-mail-a-holic. When not on a vacation outside Tallinn, I basically read my e-mail twice an hour. Even spam! (well, I don't read it, I delete it, but it's still a waste of my time). Since I am currently not working, the workload on my inbox is not so harsh, but remembering one of my last jobs, I dealed with my work-tasks far more often than only 9 to 5, 5 days a week. This lead to situations, where I had too few sleeping hours, had to say no to sports and a lot of my friends were left to be web-based buddies, not real-time mates for life etc.

I want to stress out, that my employer didn't force me work on my spear time (there were some tough dates on some certain projects, but that is common in our country), I rather got addicted to it. Himanen spoke about the race of work, that is more and more hitting our work-force all over Europe and I have to admit, it is quite bad.

I think the basis of the paradox lies in technology - exchanging letters, organizing conferences or leading a project - ALL now being web-based, have become so fast, that we can do more in lesser time. But when we do something fast, we always doubt in it's quality. I personally then try to compensate the feeling by doing more.

Why the feeling? I guess it comes from comparison - comparing my work to forerunners, colleagues from different fields of work etc. Of course this is not a truly correct thing to do, because the development of instruments supporting my work a optimized every year, thus giving me more means to work faster, more effectively than my predecessors.

Now, I control this over-working habit by not using mobile-phones and I read (theoretically, since I am currently not working) my work-related e-mails only on site (behind my office desk). Of course this leads to my employer thinking, that I'm not working as hard as my rivals would work, so the situation has a chance to become a loop.

Network society: information based economy
How to analyse something, that is apparent?

The transition to hard-core information-consuming/creating/depending economy took it's form in my belief just lately. Idea behind this is, that you will not succeed by having state-of-the-art capital, qualified labor and a good monetary health, instead you (your company) has to have the advantage of "knowing". Whether the knowing consists of policies soon to be adapted by the government or multinational organisations; knowing what your competition is doing or knowing what the market wants tomorrow - these are the aspects that will bring success to one's company today.

Example - Lenovo, freshly started laptop-producer (not so fresh though, as they took over IBM's section) versus Apple (no introduction needed). Although Lenovo - being more successful in industrial means (cheap labor, massive production availability, even a wide line of products (Apple has basically only 3 laptop-products), but still the more successful economically and socially (customer satisfaction, market awareabouts) is Apple. Why? Because of their great design and marketing efforts, which are generated by INFORMATION gathered from customers, competition etc.

This is not a rock-solid example but it gives the general idea of how a firm's success depends now firstly on the sphere of info where it lies. The bigger, diverse and exact it is, the more greater starting point the company has. Only then will the industrial-age benefits (labor, machinery) take account.

Review of Himanen's paper

Review of the article by Pekka Himanen's "Challenges to the Global Information Society"

First of all, the text was very Finland-oriented, which at some point turned a little bit annoying. You can´t write a paper recommending Finland´s economic etc model, being Finnish. That´s not being objective.

The mayor mistake the study makes, is that the society would accept "gerontosociety" (majority of elderly people). I have a great doubt in the statement, that the youth of a nation simply accepts the pensioners dictation and pays taxes happily ever after.

In my opinion the welfare society model is silly - author suggested, that developed nations should mainly focus on products made for the public sector and/or the elderly. This leads to a following situation - workforce produces products for the elderly, they in turn pay from the support from the government and the government gains it´s money from the workforce. Why this over-simplified and ineffective circle?

There were some interesting points made, when introducing the transformation from welfare state to welfare society. "... the most successful innovations are made when the users of the services or products in question are able to participate in the innovation process" - I´m sorry that the author did not give no clues of what exactly he was talking about. I do believe the statement, but I would have liked to get to know some cases exactly.

I also agree on the fact, that schools are coming more and more solely responsible for the development of a nation. "learn to learn" etc suggestions made by Himanen are all in their places, but the model in my opinion is being negatively affected by the unstandardization of school-systems. This leaves us to greater communication-errors, once the future-workforce is out of the school-benches.

Ideas about the promotion of health, runned by government, are also interesting. Again I wonder, if that is a realistic goal in western societies. Being obese nowadays seems to be turning into a choice - like as being gay, vegetarian etc. If unlucky, someone would maybe even get sued by the "Americans With Food-Disorder" etc organization.

Thoughts about "international exercise campaign" led me to think, that it is mighty weird - you work to later on exercise/relax from work. Again - not very bright system.

The affection against immigrants was also quite surprising, because no nation has yet been successful in integration - thus leaving the nation to future conflicts regarding nationalism vs. cultural freedom for the immigrants. When we think about immigration, the first pictures typically people visualize for themselves, are some Africans taking sunbathes in the middle of the workday at the city mall. I just came from Cyprus, not being racist here.

But I do agree, that the immigration is the only way to sustain western living standards. Also - why should we keep our land for ourselves, if we wont give birth and don´t want to work. Effective in this situation is to let the land be used by people who need and want to use it. Outcome of this would be ideally positive, but it will certainly destroy nationalism as a main thing to hold a country together. But nationalism is a last-century figure anyway.

Lastly, I would like to refer to "Wikinomics" - skilled labor does not have to be hired by a company - modern communicative solutions and open source support communities could give the company the ability to harness workforces all over the world, paying them project-based fees, thus eliminating the need to bring them to the headquarters. But this is a hole new story, which I would continue in my review of "Wikinomics" later on in here.

Started attending ELNM09

Hello,

This is my first post under the new subject Ethics and Law in New Media.

For the part of introducing myself I would recommend to read my previous posts but I understand that there is never enough time. So I'll be all-inclusive now:

I am 23 years old, straight from the University of Tartu, where I studied PR in BA and for my hobbies I would like to list ball-sports, dancing and everything readable about new media.

Wikinomics

Wikinomics to me was an interesting book to read, because I had not heard of the term before, although I had thought of such a business model. Before I get started with the book review and thoughts on it, I'd like to stress out, that I am not a great fan of WikiPedia (in this review also referred to as WP) and using it as a great example for collaboration. It is true, that I (and I guess the majority of internet users) use WikiPedia on a daily basis, but taking WikiPedia's operating system to be a business model (or role-model for everything) raises many negative outcomes to my mind. The majority of those negative outcomes consists of (in my mind "facts") situations, where peers are not equal in terms of knowledge, there is no common goal between them and there is a lack of motivation (therefore outcome quality) because of no monetary or social (e.g. fame) for efforts made with a project using WP model. Getting ahead of myself, I revalued my convictions on the subject as Wicinomics made it clear(er) to me, that the old business models cannot be viable soon any more.

The Perfect Storm to me was not a surprising chapter as I and I guess all of the students in IT-studies see the web as the number one (and maybe the only) social ground today and tomorrow. Therefore I wouldn't call the concept of web as a new realm (internet as the sole ground for communication and business etc.) but rather an inevitability that has happened. The most important notion however is (and I agree) that the people (the youth) who have grown up collaborating over the web, wont simply dump that habit when entering the work-force, but rather insists on taking the elements of on-line collaboration to the workplace (and ways of working).

The Peer Pioneers as expected placed a strong favouritism on WikiPedia and Linux. The fact the IBM adopted Linux as their main operating system years ago, was not new to me, but it was interesting to read, what the company thought and experienced on the subject while the switch was made and lived through. I have to agree with the authors, that in the case of WikiPedia, it is simply astonishing how fast knowledge on a fresh topic can be created, argued over and therefore optimized to be more truthful. I myself used WikiPedia to follow through Georgia-Russia war, which in Estonia's media sphere was too pro-Georgia and anti-Russia (as always). The statement at the end of the chapter (Peer production is here to stay) is a bold, but true one, as we can see how in the last ten years or so there has been a shift from enjoying the salary to enjoying the work. And when you enjoy your work, you do not deal with it from 9 to 5, but rather constantly (in this case, it is even somewhat wrong to call it work, rather field of interest).

Ideagoras introduced for the first time when reading Wicinomics strong examples of peer production that I had not heard before. Examples of scientist working in InnoCentive, the widespread use of freelance researchers by P&G and so forth were the ones, I had not or event thought of before. The idea of sharing copyright (more precisely patentable) information over web-based platforms is fascinating. And I think the authors made quite clear the benefits waiting for all the firms that adapt this kind of peer-to-peer sharing (decrease of R&D costs, increase of innovation).

The Prosumers was the chapter, were the authors truly revealed their Nostradamus-like capabilities. On page 134 (and before) there is a discussion what should (the year under discussion is 2006 I presume) do with user-iniatied supplements to it's hardware product iPod. At that time (and even today) a lot of techie-users upgraded their iPods firmware, only to widen the capabilities of the musicplayer. Apple on the other hand saw it as an infringement of the copyright guarding it's products. It was noted by the authors, that although Apple did not legally react to the techies dealing with things like that, they should have lauded this kind of user activity and implement it on their R&D. It is now clear that in some way Apple has done it, with the introduction of iPhone and it's App Store, which offers easy steps for anybody to create software, thus raising the products capabilities, while gaining revenue (as Apple too). It is one of the examples were former consumers are now producers and consumers altogether, and the producer part can only increase from now one, further implementing the role of a company as a provider of infrastructure, leaving the content to it's user base (Second Life, Ning.com).

The New Alexandrians focused a great deal on the Humane Genome Project, taking parallels from one of the worlds scientifically fruitful era (the era of Alexander the Great). It was repeatedly stressed that companies have only to gain from sharing information, even it the information is patentable and therefore easily to be profiteered from. The key factor fighting the latter is the inevitable situation - the more participants working on a common goal the more positive outcome is there for everybody. One could say that "too many cooks spoil the broth" but if the making of the product (broth) is structuralised, equal amongst the makers and common-goaled, then the difficulties relating to peer-productions are overcome by the fastness and overall acceptability of the outcome.

Platforms for Participation introduced a wide set of different user-managed platforms that are available to us today. To take an example - I use different social platforms (social networks) to communicate with my friends, I use different collaboration platforms (web-based office utilities) to co-work with my co-students and  I use different publication platforms to distribute my thoughts on things and to lead communities I am a leader to. The authors focused on this subject to the rhetorical battle between conventional wisdom vs. innovative economy, when it comes to being opened in terms of IP (e.g. free software). I think they hit the nails head with that comparison, as it is a widespread fear, that when you distribute your IP using open-source (nonmarket) principles, you only loose and gain nothing. But as described on Wicinomics, you do gain, by expanding the workforce (world wide peer production) without monetary increases, re-accelerate your company's R&D outcome and gain information from your customers (prosumers) to better evolve your product.


The Global Plant Floor focused a great deal on possibilities of peer production, now talking industrially. The example of Lifan was quite troubling to be, as Lifan is a company, who gain success by copying Japanese motor-cycles Yamaha, Suzuki etc.So is it ethical to praise a company, who's success is based on stealing? Of course we know Lifan is successful. But it isn't very hard to be a "revenue-star" in an economy like China, where labor is cheap and governmental control over companies (pollution, labor-politics) is low. Boeing situation isn't a better example - building air-planes like LEGOs is innovative at start, but we do not comprehend yet, what it will do to the companies success in the long terms. I do fear, that Boeing's Japanese suppliers will soon start to develop their own airplanes, again copying main schemes from Boeing, who is being innovative open. I as a customer would be please - more competition is better. But as a investor? I simply wouldn't invest in Boeing.

The Wiki Workplace had a terrific example with Geek Squad. When reading the text, I simply imagined the great company and how great would I feel working there. Geek Squad leader Stephens revelation about "forcing the use of wikis vs. bottom-to-management communication (Battlefield 2 online multiplayer game as a communication channel - GREAT :))" was inspiring to read. I myself have lived through repeatedly new "innovative communication channels" which have been forced on me, in different companies. I do believe that managers cannot decide, how their employees communicate in work-terms. Managers can only offer platforms, of which employees choose the best or most suitable for them. 

Collaborative Minds introduced to the biggest problem facing internet today: old media conglomerates trying to control the content of the web, by offering many authoritative control mechanisms against home user. I do admit piracy is a big problem, but I personally don't consume music at all. I listen to it in concerts or over radio, but that's it. In terms of movies, I go to cinemas (when younger, I did download over torrents, but not anymore, mainly because of the lack of time) and software - I really don't have much software on my PC, because I use company's or school's laptops. So forcing some sort of revenue model over the internet users is not only against innovation, as Tapscott says, but against my human rights.

Enterprise 2.0 to me is all of the above. But the main idea is that managers should embrace the ongoing new. Enterprise as a form is itself a "new-ity" - tendencies to stabilize one's environment, control it's consumers, employees are against the spirit of free market.


Review based on "Wikinomics" by Don Tapscott & Anthony D. Williams 2008.