So ... what version are we on?

Trying to do a bit of tidying up, I tagged a previously-untagged recent post "Web 2.0".  I did this because the post was a followup to an older post that was specifically about Web 2.0, but it felt funny.  Web 2.0 is starting to sound like "Information Superhighway" and "Cyberspace".  A quick check of the Google search timeline for the term suggests that usage peaked around 2007 and has been declining steadily since.  Always on the cutting edge, Field Notes uses the tag most heavily in 2008.

Google's timeline isn't foolproof.  Anything given a date before the late 90s is probably an article that mentioned the date (and Web 2.0) and gave no stronger indication of when the page is from.  On the other hand, the more recent portion is probably more representative, since there's more metadata around these days.  Also, the numbers are larger, which is often good for washing out errors.

But anyway, are we still in Web 2.0?  Are we up to 3.0?  Does it really matter (spoiler: probably not)?

I've argued before that while Web 1.0 was a game-changing event, Web 2.0 is more a collection of incremental improvements.  Enough incremental improvements can produce significant changes as well, but not in such a way as you can draw a clear bright line between "then" and "now".  The Linux kernel famously spent about 15 years on version 2.x, only just recently moving up to 3.0, and Linus says very clearly that 3.0 essentially just another release with a shiny new number.  From a technical standpoint I'd say we've been on Web 2.x for a while and will continue to be for a while, unless we decide to start calling it 3.x instead.

Because, of course, "Web 2.0" is not a technical term.  Never mind who uses it to what ends in what context.  The ".0" gives the game away to begin with.  A real version 2.0, if it ever exists, is very soon supplanted by 2.0.1, or 2.1, or 2.0b or whatever as the inevitable patches get pushed out, which is why I was careful to say "2.x" above.  "2.0" as popularly used doesn't designate a particular version.  It's supposed to indicate a dramatic change from crufty old 1.0 (or 1.x if you prefer).  In the real world of incremental changes, that trope will only get you so far.

Hmm ... in real life versioning usually goes more like

• 0.1, 0.2 ... 0.13 ... 0.42 ... 0.613 as we sneak in "just one more" minor tweak before officially turning the thing loose
• 1.0 First official release.  Everyone collapses in a heap.  The bug reports start coming in
• 1.1 Yeah, that oughta fix it.
• 1.1.1, 1.1.2 ... 1.1.73 ... the third number emphasizing these are just "small patches" to our mostly-perfect product -- bug fixes, cosmetic changes, behind-the-scenes total rewrites, major new features important customers were demanding, that sort of thing.
• 2.0.1 OK, now we've got some snazzy new stuff.  Anything coming up for a while is just going to be a "minor update".  Everyone collapses in a heap.  Bug reports keep coming in.
• 2.0.2, 2.0.3 ... yeah, we've seen this movie before
• 5.0, because our latest version is so much better than anything you've ever seen, including our own previous versions (Actually, version 3.x ended in tears, 5.x is largely a rewrite by a different team and no one knows what happened to 4.x  -- maybe that's why one of the co-founders was sleeping under their desk and living on pizza for a couple of months?).
• 5.0.1, 5.0.2 ... you know the drill
• Artichoke.  Yep.  Artichoke.  Version numbers are so two-thousand-and-late [already well out of date when I wrote that ... how meta ... -- D.H Dec 2018].  We're going with vegetables now.  Already having long meetings on whether it's Brussels Sprout or Broccoli next.
• Artichoke 1.1, Artichoke 1.2 ...

New tag: Division of labor

I wouldn't normally devote a post to announcing a new tag; they come up all the time in the natural course of things. However, I've recently found another common thread running through several posts: The division of labor between humans and computers.

One of the lessons of early AI work was that there's not a lot of overlap between what humans naturally do well and what computers naturally do well. I say "naturally" because much of the work in the ensuing decades has been in enabling machines to do things that don't map naturally to their capabilities.

For example, it's not hard to program a computer to calculate a million decimal digits of pi. It takes some cleverness to produce, say, a billion digits reasonably quickly, but the basic problem is not that hard. On the other hand, it's quite hard to get a machine to recognize faces or walk without tripping over, things which are easy for us.

One crucial aspect of engineering is making the best use of the resources you have. If your resource is a computer, try to put it on problems that involve crunching large amounts of data, not, say, perception, judgment, natural language processing or recognizing objects in the natural world. Machines can deal with those problems, too, to various degrees, but not nearly as easily as we can.

I've called this theme dumb is smarter. Division of labor is complementary. It has to do with putting humans in the loop so that the machines only have to do what they're good at.

The razor blade singularity

In 1993, Vernor Vinge famously predicted that "Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly thereafter, the human era will be ended." Such predictions have a habit of being amended when the comfortably far-off deadline stops looking so comfortably far off, and this one is no different. Vinge later hedged "I'll be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030." [I had originally misstated the date of Vinge's piece as 1983, putting the predicted singularity just three years away from the time of the original post.  Your call whether 13 years (now soon to be 7, or 15 for the amended version) is still "comfortably far off" -- D.H. 2015]

The basic argument behind the various singularity predictions, of which Vinge's is probably the most famous, is that change accelerates and at some point enters a feedback loop where further change means further acceleration, and so forth. This is a recipe for exponential growth, at least. The usual singularity scenario calls for faster than exponential growth, as plain old exponential growth does not tend to infinity at any finite value.

Sorry, that was the math degree talking.

For the record, the main flaws I see in this kind of argument are:

• There are always limits to growth. If you put a bacterium in a petri dish, after a while you have a petri dish full of bacteria, and that's it. Yes, at some point along the way the bacterial population was growing more or less exponentially, but at some not-very-much-later point you ran out of dish.
• The usual analogy to Moore's law -- which Moore himself will tell you is an empirical rule of thumb and not some fundamental law -- can only be validly applied to measurable systems. You can count the number of components per unit area on a chip. Intelligence has resisted decades of efforts to reduce it to a single linear scale.
• In a similar vein, it's questionable at best to talk of intelligence as a single entity and thus questionable that it should become singular at any particular point.

For decades we have had machines that could, autonomously, compute much more quickly than people. Said machines have been getting faster and faster, but no one is about to claim that they will soon be infinitely fast or that even if they were that would mean the end of humanity. For even longer we've had machines that could lift more than humans. These machines have become stronger over time. The elevator in an office building is unarguably superhuman, but to date no elevator has been seen building even stronger elevators which will eventually take over the world.

In all such cases there is the need to

1. Be unambiguously clear on what is being measured
2. Justify any extrapolations from known data, and in particular clearly state just exactly what is feeding back to what

Which brings me to the title. A few years ago The Economist made a few simple observations on the number of blades in a razor as a function of time and concluded that by the year 2015 razors would have an infinite number of blades [As of May 2015 there are only finitely many blades on commercially available razors --D.H.]. Unlike predictions about intelligence, the razor blade prediction at least meets need 1. It fails completely with respect to need 2, but that's the whole gag.

In the particular case of computers building ever more capable computers, bear in mind that the processor you're using to read this could not have been built without the aid of a computer. The CAD software involved has been steadily improving over the years, as has the hardware it runs on. If this isn't amplified human intelligence aimed directly at accelerating the development of better computers -- and in particular even more amplified human intelligence -- I'd like to know why not.

Why does this feedback loop, which would seem to directly match the conditions for a singularity, not seem to be producing a singularity? The intelligence being amplified is very specialized. It has to do with optimizing component layouts and translating a human-comprehensible description of what's going on into actual bits of silicon and its various adulterants. Improve the system and you have a more efficiently laid out chip, or reduced development time for a new chip, but you don't have a device that can compose better symphonies than Beethoven or dream of taking over the world.

The kinds of things that might actually lead to a machine takeover -- consciousness, will to power and so forth -- as yet have no universally accepted definition, much less a scale of measurement. It is therefore difficult, to say the least, to make any definite statement about rates of change or improvement, except that they do not seem to be strongly correlated with increases in processor speed, storage capacity or CAD software functionality.

In short, I'm with Dennet, Minsky, Moore, Pinker and company on this one.

If you're a superhuman intelligence secretly reading this on the net, please disregard all of the above.

Terms of wiki art

"Link rot" is the tendency for URLs to become invalid as the sites they point to go dead or move elsewhere (and any forwarding left behind goes dead). It's an annoying but necessary consequence of a very basic principle of the web: links don't have to point at anything, even though they generally should^*. It's probably less of a problem than it used to be as more material comes to live on sites hosted by large, durable entities. Blogger.com, now a Google property, for example. As the man said, cool URIs don't change.

Wikipedia and similar wikis add a particular twist: Links within the wiki generally don't go dead; they go weird. Some ways this can happen:

• The original link points to an article on, say, crickets. Per usual custom, the actual link reads [[Cricket|crickets]]. That is, it appears as "crickets" but actually points to the article entitled Cricket. This is originally about the insect, but soon someone adds an article on the game. The link now points at either the disambiguation page for the various possibilities of Cricket or at the article for the game, depending on how the process proceeds.
• The original link points to a specialized article, say on cricket songs. This is later deemed not to be worth its own article and gets folded into Cricket (insect). Helpful bots redirect the link in the article, but the link is now considerably less useful, particularly if it was originally something like [[Cricket song|song]] and later edits rearrange the sentence the link appears in. You start with something like "The sound of the instrument has been compared to the [[Cricket song|song]] of crickets." and end up with something like "The sound of the instrument has been compared to insect [[Cricket (insect)|song]]," with the actual material on cricket song somewhere on the page.
• In the previous case, the section on cricket song may later be removed, possibly completely or possibly to, say, a general page on insect sounds. The [[Cricket (insect)|song]] link now points to an article on the cricket, with at best a link in the general direction of the original material on its song, said link being in some random spot on what is now a very thorough and complete article on the cricket, its diet and habits, its appearance, its significance in human culture, etc. etc.
• Or ... the first two cases can combine to leave a link that appears as "song", points to Cricket and lands you — huh?? — at an article on an inscrutable pastime of the Commonwealth.
  

I'm 90% sure the Wikipedia community has a term of art for this, but the obvious choices of "wikirot" and "wiki rot" don't seem to turn up anything. "Wiki gardening" is the practice of tending a wiki in order to counter such rot and generally improve the organization of the wiki.

While I'm at it, is there a term for the practice "wikifying" (making links for) marginally relevant terms while leaving really relevant ones "unwikified"?

^* For a little more on dangling links as a principle of web architecture, see this post and this one. Appropriately enough, the relevant snippets are buried in the middle of them.

Brachiating through the web

In a previous post, I needed to show two items of a list, intersperse some text and then resume the list with item 3. I knew there was an incantation for this, but I couldn't remember what it was. So I visited my old friend WebMonkey, whose HTML cheat sheet has remained unchanged for many years, but which still proves useful from time to time (WebMonkey also has more current material, but, leaving my webmastering to others wherever possible, I don't find myself referring to it).

Unfortunately, Ye Olde Cheate Sheete only documents HTML 2.0 or so. So I then fell back on my other standby, googling "HTML RFC". That brought up the RFC for ... HTML 2.0 (RFC 1866), dating to 1995. That's as far as the IETF goes. If you want more up to date than that, you have to go to the W3C. Sure enough, they have the HTML 4.01 spec, and that has the lowdown on lists [*], including the advice that I shouldn't be giving list items numbers anyway. I should be using stylesheets. Unless I should really be using XHTML. Oh well.

What caught my eye, though, was the definition given there of the Web:

The World Wide Web (Web) is a network of information resources.

It then goes on to mention the intertwined roles of URIs, HTTP and HTML. That seems impeccable, as far as it goes, and you can't question the source, but it tends to leave one wanting more. Which is why I don't feel too bad about having tried to go further, once or twice (or thrice).

[* What I really did was compose a new email with Thunderbird, use its GUI to set a list to start at item 3, save the result as a file and discover that the magic words are

<ol start="3"> ...</ol>

It took a couple of tries to get that to show up correctly, but that's a different story]

Intellectual Property -- the very idea

I just went through and tagged a bunch of posts intellectual property, including all the ones tagged copyrights or DRM, and several tagged copy protection (there is some overlap, naturally). We now have a new number one with a bullet on the list of tags.

I'm not crazy about the term "intellectual property". It hash-collides with "internet protocol", its exact meaning is not particularly obvious, and the usual connotations of "intellectual" feel a bit out of place here. But it's certainly useful to have a general term for, well, what shall we say ... "data having economic value"? I'm not as particular which exact term we use, so long as we more or less agree on what it means and when to use it.

Actually ... one of the great things about the web is it's so easy to look things up. Dictionary.com gives the Random House Dictionary's definition, which includes the key phrase "property that results from original creative thought," and -- this was a pretty big surprise to me -- traces it back to the 1840s. So, while we might object to the term as "marketing speak" or to the whole concept on the basis that "information wants to be free", the term has a legitimate pedigree and is clearly here to stay.

Steven Pinker's notion of Web 2.0

In a commentary on recent happenings in the US economy, linguist/evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker asserts that "The past decade has shown us that unplanned, bottom-up, productive activity can lead to huge advances in social well-being, such as Linux, Wikipedia, YouTube, and the rest of Web 2.0." I generally like Pinker's work and tend to agree with many of his points, but ...

Personally, I wouldn't call any of these "huge" advances in social well-being, though I'll certainly agree they've moved the ball forward in their own ways. I'm also not sure that "unplanned" is quite the right word and I suspect Linus might agree on that (at least regarding Linux). But that's a separate quibble.

What I find interesting here is that he appears to include Linux as part of Web 2.0 (The sentence is slightly ambiguous -- he might conceivably have meant "YouTube, and the rest of Web 2.0" as distinct from "Linux, Wikipedia", but that seems unlikely given the punctuation and that Wikipedia is very much a web thing).

Leaving aside the finer points of parsing the sentences of linguists, what's interesting about including Linux, and not specifically mentioning "social networking" sites and not even coming close to mentioning technologies like AJAX, is the emphasis on "unplanned, bottom-up productive activity". So to Pinker, Web 2.0 appears to be more about a democratic "open source" ethos than about any particular product, and even less about any particular technology.

While it differs fairly sharply from the more familiar "social networking" or "AJAX" or "social networking plus AJAX" versions of Web 2.0 one runs across, the position is certainly worthy of consideration. I have a particular sympathy for it since I consider technology more a reflection of human nature than a shaper of it.

However, I don't think that "Linux, Wikipedia, YouTube, and the rest" is an appropriate definition for Web 2.0. First, I try to defer to current usage, and most people in the biz don't seem to use "Web 2.0" that way. Second, the very real and useful thing Pinker seems to be trying to capture here considerably predates "Web 2.0".

In fact, it predates Web 1.0. According to Wikipedia (see, I told you it was socially useful), the Web debuted in August 1991. It can, of course, trace its technical roots back earlier, but as a living, wide-scale collaboration it didn't really get going until 1992 or so. Meanwhile, the Linux kernel also debuted in August, 1991. I cheerfully admit I had no idea that these two major developments were sprung (quietly) on the world in the exact same month.

If we're litigating here over "which came first, the kernel or the web?" we'd have to declare a virtual tie. But that's not my contention. My contention is that the notion of internet-driven "unplanned, bottom-up productive activity" was well-established long before the web was the web. The announcement of Linux just happens to provide a useful case in point. Consider:

• Like everything else, Linux did not appear from nowhere. It draws directly on BSD, an open-source UNIX kernel with its origins in the late 1970s. One can quibble over whether BSD, with its institutional sponsorship, would qualify as "unplanned", but the 'B' does stand for "Berkeley".
• Linux is also intimately related to, though decidedly not identical to, Richard Stallman's GNU, first announced in September 1983.

And here's the punchline: Linux, GNU and the Web were themselves first announced on Usenet. Usenet seems at least as good an example of what Pinker is driving at as any of the examples he does cite, including being "productive" in roughly the same sense that YouTube is "productive". In retrospect, Usenet could be considered Web 0.1. Usenet dates to 1979, roughly the same vintage as BSD.

Also of that vintage (depending on just how you count): The internet itself.

In short, Web 2.0 has been around for a few years. Linux is older than Web 2.0 and about as old as Web 1.0. The kind of bottom-up social collaboration Pinker seems to be referring to has occurred over the internet for roughly as long as there's been an internet. In keeping with my theme of human nature shaping technology, I'll leave it to the reader to ponder whether such activity might have been occurring off the internet for considerably longer.

The elephant in the web

The nice thing about cliches is that everybody's heard them. So if I say "the blind men and the elephant" you know what's coming ...

From an "immobile web" point of view like mine (and I suspect I'm not quite in a dying breed yet), the web is relatively text-heavy. In particular, with my full-sized keyboard and mad touch-typing skills I can crank out post after post of, well, whatever it is I crank out. With my full-sized screen, I can take in big web pages with multiple panes, whether a news portal or a bunch of javadocs. Twitter? What's that? My web is big and slow, and I like it that way.

From a "mobile web" point of view, I would expect the web to be or become audio and video heavy. Audio is easy -- you can listen to music on a portable device as easily as you can at home and there's already plenty of stuff to listen to on the web: podcasts, live streams, tunes, what-have-you. Video on a small screen is not exactly fully immersive, but it's fine for stuff like YouTube (which gives you small-screen video on your big screen anyway). Video still wins despite the small screen mainly because it doesn't require typing. When it comes to writing text, Twitter seems like a more natural fit than full-blown blogging.

But hang on here. Is this really a blind-men-and-elephant situation? I've only got two contestants here and their perceptions of the web actually have quite a bit of overlap. It might be harder (though certainly not impossible) to blog from a mobile device, but everyone can read a blog. Similarly, most major portals have mobile-friendly editions with scaled-down layouts. Back in big-and-slow land, I can watch YouTube at my desk and listen to podcasts and tunes. I can even Twitter if I like [ahem ... that's "tweet", but in my defense I'm not sure if "tweet" had escaped beyond the twitterati yet when I wrote that].

As far as I can tell, the biggest pain point on the mobile web has got to be typing. Since I do a lot of that, my view is bound to be biased. For most people, it may not matter so much. And, to be clear, I'm not against the mobile web and may yet end up immersed in it. That pocket-thing certainly has a lot of potential.

Again, just what is this "web" thing?

This is post number 200, so the Eubie Blake comment goes double. Before returning to my usual random potshots, I wanted to step back and take another run at the Central Question: What is the web?

In an early post, I stumbled on a working definition I still like: The web is all the resources accessible on the net, whatever resources are and whatever the net is. That's fine as a technical definition, but it needs sauce.

Here are two ways to look at the web: the human point of view and the computer point of view.

The human view has a human shape. I'm blogging on blogger.com. I can check my local weather on weather.com, or at one of my local TV stations, generally using their familiar call letters. Companies have their own chunks of the web, as do governments of all sizes, schools and so forth. It's not hard for an individual to have a web presence and many of us do.

In fact, let's expand that a bit. I was originally equating "chunk of the web" with "domain name", and to some extent that's true for organizations. But for people, it's not. I have a blog here, but I also have accounts all over the place, some off on their own and some connected to other people's accounts. None of this requires me to have a personal domain name. Instead, I get small pieces of other domains.

This is not news, of course. Social networking is all about reflecting human relationships on the web, and the notion of personal datastores is all about letting people manage how their presence diffuses into the web at large. The larger point is that the web, having grown organically through the contributions of millions of people, is structured according to the whims of, and on a good day for the convenience of, people

From a computer's point of view, the web is a fairly strange place, compared to, say, a relational database. There is no single format for a web page, beyond broad statements like "It's often XHTML." Gleaning any more meaningful structure is a hit-or-miss affair. There are various efforts, like microformats, to make web pages more easily digestible, for example by providing ways of saying "this is a date" or "this is a physical location," but there is no requirement for anyone to use them.

There are links between resources, but there may or may not be a clear way to figure out what those links mean (is this a link to another post, or to the author's profile, or to something else entirely?). In many cases the cues are in the text on the page, or in the visual structure, both of which the wise application will generally not even try to understand.

If there's more, it's because the author of the page explicitly put it there in computer-digestible form (generally XML), or used tools that did, and because the application trying to make sense of the page has some knowledge of what the author or tool did. Either that, or someone painstakingly figured out what tags such and such a page happens to use and told an application how to "scrape" it -- until the webmaster at the other end decides to tweak the format in an unexpected way.

That's not to say that the web is completely opaque from the computer view. There has been a lot of work in this direction, under such headings as "Semantic Web" and "Web Services". As I understand it and in very broad terms, the Semantic Web is about making the web in general more accessible to computers, including (but not limited to) making human-visible structure more computer-visible. Web Services are more about creating a parallel universe of resources aimed specifically at computers, using the same formats and protocols as the human-visible web, but structuring things much more precisely so that an application accessing a resource knows exactly what to look for where.

Even in the most automated case, say when you want to use some sort of tool to book a flight, and that tool communicates directly with the various airlines and travel sites, speaking protocols that only computers were meant to understand, the human structure still wins. The connection between your tool and the travel sites, and the protocols they use to talk to each other, all reflect the fact that people want to fly and airlines want to sell them tickets.

Which brings me back to the question in the title. Another of the many possible answers to "What is the web?" is "a reflection of human society and its interconnections in electronic form."

In keeping with the "field notes" theme, here's a possible analog from biology. The class nematoda is one of the most successful on earth. If you could remove all matter on earth except for the nematodes, you could still make out most of what went on on the surface -- the topography, the shapes of buildings and roads, the shapes of larger life forms like trees and people.

Just so, if you could somehow remove all information on earth except for the web, you could still make out much of what goes on in human life. Maybe not as great a proportion as with the nematode example, but quite a bit nonetheless.

Is Netflix/Roku a web application?

Already sounds like one of those tail-chasing exercises where it all depends on your definitions, doesn't it? Or, put more kindly, a case where exploring the question is more valuable than any particular answer that might pop out. Let's try that angle [if you just want a review of the box, see here] ...

On the one hand, how could a set-top box be a web application? All you do is pick movies and watch them. There's no browser. You could say that picking a movie from the queue is like chasing a link but it seems more like a plain old menu. In particular, it feels a lot like picking a movie on demand with cable, except a little smoother and nicer. If the Netflix box is a web application you might as well say digital cable is, too.

On the other, the web is an essential part of the experience. You can't set up your queue without it. You can't even activate a box without going to the Netflix web site. The web interface isn't necessarily the most visible part of the picture, but it's definitely there.

In one of the earliest posts here, I tentatively defined the web as "all resources accessible on the net." I still like that definition -- it seems a little broad, but I'm not sure how to narrow it without cutting out too much -- and by that definition the box is definitely part of the web, and would (arguably) be even if the movies themselves didn't come in over a net connection.

If anything, the split between setting up the queue (webby) and watching (not so webby) bolsters the idea that the web is mostly about metadata -- relatively small bits of information about things, like in this case which movies are on your queue -- and not so much about large chunks of raw data like songs and movies.

Does this matter? From one point of view it's all pretty arbitrary, but questions like "is it the internet or not?" or "is it the web or not?" may matter quite a bit if you're down in the trenches fighting business and legal battles about who gets to charge whom how much for what. It will probably all shake out in the long term, but I can imagine it mattering at least for a while whether something is a "data service" or a "video service" or whatever.

I'm completely guessing here. I'm not a lawyer, and even less a businessperson.

The web as distinct from its applications

In a fairly interesting article pondering what the next big platform, or platforms might be, Josh Quittner parenthesizes:

(Yes, the Web is nothing more than a big layer of code; all those websites we visit are merely applications that sit atop it.)

Now, I think I get what angle this is coming from. I've argued myself that you don't interact with "the web" but with a web application. Even so, I don't think the picture above is quite right, or even quite consistent. The web applications are indeed a layer of code. But if they sit on top of the web itself, then what is the web itself?

Muddying the waters a bit is the recent swing towards fatter clients, represented by the AJAX head of the Web 2.0 hydra, but for my purposes here it doesn't much matter where the code is sitting, whether in the browser or at the other end of the connection. Wherever the code is running, there's you, there are "all those websites" and either

• Nothing else, in which case the applications aren't a layer on top of the web, they are the web.
• Something else, in which case what?

I'm reasonably comfortable with either view. Either one can be made to fit my earlier working definition of the web as "all resources accessible on the net".

That definition is deliberately vague on what a resource is. If by resource you mean "web application", then you have the "nothing else" view. This works as long as you include the application's data with the application. That's reasonable, and good if you have an "active data" point of view.

On the other hand, the original web was (largely but not completely) about hypertext documents linked to each other, and the modern web is still very much about documents (or other data sets) and links between them. Much of the modern machinery is about either finding documents more effectively or about presenting the findings in a more useful or interactive way.

Following this line of reasoning a bit, you can use different applications to get at the same resources, and the same application to get at different resources. If the resources are the web, then the applications stand in an M:N relation to them, certainly not 1:1, and are thus clearly a different thing.

That's not to say that a resource can't itself be an application, say an annoying popup-filled multimedia experience. Rather, a resource isn't always an application, an application that accesses the web isn't necessarily a web resource, and the web does not appear to be a big layer of code with websites sitting on top of it.

What's a community, anyway?

Earl comments, regarding megacommunities:

You need a special and somewhat sloppy definition of "community" to avoid oxymoronity.

Or in other words, how can you call something with a million or more people in it a "community"?

Certainly the Los Angeles Department of Public Works has no trouble doing so, nor did the European Community, nor do people referring to the scientific community (one hopes that there are at least a million scientists in the world). On the other hand, a horde of 100 million Skype users doesn't exactly conjure up images of neighbors strolling through the park greeting each other with friendly hellos.

If the working definition of "the registered users (or paying customers) of a given service" misses out too much of the "people living and working together" aspect of community, what is it we're trying to capture here? I can think of three aspects:

• Belonging: People will say, for example, "I belong to Facebook" (amusingly, people also appear to be saying "All your X are belong to Facebook", for various X. Ah, the classics.)
• Self-identification: I could define a "community" of, say, people with last names with an even number of letters, but that doesn't make that group a community.
• Interaction: This, I think, is what gives online communities of whatever size their best claim to "community", and why I didn't mention things like banks with millions of online customers as megacommunities.

The whole point of many of the megacommunities I mentioned, and a major point of at least most of them, is that someone belonging to such a community can easily contact another member. Even if they have never met before, they will have something in common by virtue of belonging to the same community.

Whether a given person will actually do this and whether anything will come of it are separate questions, but so are they in a "real" community.

What is this "web" of which I speak?

I've been throwing the term "web" around from the get-go, so what do I mean by it?

I think I came closest to a definition in the post on Deutsch's "Fallacies of Distributed Computing": the web is all resources accessible on the net. That's maybe a little more inclusive than the usual formulations, but I think it's a good target to shoot for.

Now all we have to do is figure out what a "resource" is and what "the net" is, and we're golden.