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62 Are We Developing an Informative Internet? - Information Theory (Information Research)




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This article is from the Information Research FAQ, by David Novak david@spireproject.com with numerous contributions by others.

62 Are We Developing an Informative Internet? - Information Theory (Information Research)

Several serious glitches have delayed the further improvement of the
internet as an effective information resource. Oh, sure it is the
world's largest library and thousands of new webpages are published
every hour. But this trite statement disguises how slow the informative
value of the internet is developing.

Vision:
The internet holds so very much promise. Marketing mantras tell us so,
but few of us grasp this technology will completely rewrite the rules
of community, government and the exchange of intellectually valuable
information.

One of the hurdles is vision. We are not yet delivering the information
pertaining to community, government and the exchange of intellectually
valuable (improved) information. We are only proceeding quickly with
market information and computer-related information. We are still
toying with further ways the internet can transform other areas of our
life.

We should have achieved more by now.

Organization:
The net is still very disorganized. A number of developments promise to
eventually make the internet less confusing and better organized. To
date, we have several cumbersome techniques, a large collection of
search tools and a great deal of potentially interesting links.

Publishing:
As mentioned, thinking about who is publishing assists us with our
search. Applying this to where information is emerging - and we learn
much of the best information is not reaching the internet. Certainly,
the commercially generated information is not reaching the internet
(covered below). The large research studies paid for by public funds
and slowly aging on the shelves of government and non-government
organizations are also not coming online. Government, institutional and
commercial organizations primarily publish brochure-ware - as befitting
the presentation of market information. (Even offering to publish such
documents freely does not appreciably affect this trend as the
restrictions are not financial, but mindset. See our past work.)

We should recognize few of the more valuable documents emerge online.

Further Reading: Socially Responsible Publishing on the Internet ('97)
(Available on request)
A Census of Regionally Important Documents on the Web ('96)
(Available on request)

Discussion:
The internet excites me with the promise of a real community rebirth
arising from this technology. For the first time in history we should
be able to discuss in an informed manner any number of issues from
crime to taxation. Tied into this are issues of government
transparency, international assistance, anti-corporate market reform
and community involvement. Unfortunately, my experience with mailing
lists and more recently with a newsgroup confirm the difficulties in
developing discussion. Discussion groups function as notice board.
Unfortunately, the difficulty in developing participation, and in
moderation, are just a little too cumbersome to be successful. For many
discussion groups, the chaff overwhelms the wheat, and the information
content is far from considerable.

The financial rewards are also minimal for establishing and maintaining
discussion groups. Dramatic improvement to the informative value of the
internet is unlikely to emerge here.

Further Reading: How to build a discussion on the Internet (by David
Novak - available on request.

Rewards:
We have alluded to the importance of editorial and organization on the
internet. There are several severe limitations to this - first and
foremost the difficulty in gathering financial rewards for meaningful
work improving and organizing information.

I am being circumspect here. There is money available - just not where
it is needed. The most important resources in professional research are
the contents of the commercial information sphere. This sphere existed
decades before the internet, is far better funded, and is far larger.
To compare commercial and internet information is almost heresy. A
bridge between these two, internet and commercial, emerges slowly.

Digital money should grease the exchange of information by dropping the
cost of exchange considerably. Today, credit cards provide this
service. This works, at times, but digital money would allow for small
amounts of money to change hands. This appears to be a critical
threshold for bringing much of the commercial information to the net.

About 5 years ago I was introduced to the Thesius Model - an economic
model to pay the intellectual investment in publishing and organizing
interactive multimedia. Years earlier there was Xanadu. While I have
serious reservations about both, they do illustrate the intellectual
foundations for effective use of a tool for exchanging small amounts of
money. It opens the doors to direct delivery of copyright work - which
in turn opens an effective economic model for publishing improved
information on the internet.

Without digital money, proprietary information can only be exchanged
digitally by gift (that is free - the initial driving force of the
internet information sphere, or by credit-card purchase of access to
passwords to external networks - the current method of accessing
database retailers.

This has the unfortunate effect of limiting the interest both of
internet users in the commercial information sphere and the commercial
information retailers in the internet. Oh, there is movement in both
directions, but not at the scale experienced in other industries.

Further Reading: The UWA Theseus Project
(http://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/TheseusWWW/)
The Xanadu project (http://www.xanadu.com or concise summary -
http://www.sfc.keio.ac.jp/~ted/XU/XuPageKeio.html)

 

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