
Tim Berners-Lee on the next Web  - kqr2
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/lang/eng/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web.html
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pj
In an advertising dominated web, the product is the view of the advertisement.
The advertisement is displayed in the interface. The reason the data is not
available outside the interface, is because the advertisement will not be
seen. Facebook cannot open its data, because if its data was open, the ads on
the Facebook pages would not be seen by the users of the data, and therefore
Facebook would not make money.

We can only open data when we change the business model on top of the data.

~~~
mojuba
Good point, but I don't think TBL or whoever else started building the Web
with him at the time thought about advertisement or how content providers
could make money. Same story now. I think we can leave that problem to those
interested and surely enough ads will find their way to any new medium. It's a
technical problem literally.

~~~
stcredzero
Governments don't have this issue. Raw data from government should be posted
on the web. We've already paid for it, after all.

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pmjordan
I'm in a bad mood today, but this made me chuckle:

 _Talks Tim Berners-Lee on the next Web

You either have JavaScript turned off or an old version of the Adobe Flash
Player. To view this video you need to get the latest Flash player._

~~~
pj
Yep, ... that's why I don't like flash!

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Create
The bunch has lost the plot years ago: the hijacking of HTML and
[ecma|java]script has done already the damage to the initial "universal
access" that made the Web popular in the first place. Try browsing this web
without subordinating yourself to Adobe Inc.'s unilaterally imposed
licensing...

~~~
anigbrowl
As a beta tester for the original Mozilla when there were about 10 websites
(and I was too unimaginative to exploit it profitably), I had trouble selling
people on the idea at first, because that functionality existed (in
distributed form) with WAIS, Archie, Veronica, and something else whose name I
forget right now.

There was a parallel with the problems you mention in that the www looked like
eye candy but didn't deliver much obvious new _functionality_ ; however, the
eye candy served the important function of making things much more attractive
and accessible to an audience, whereas effectively using the services
mentioned above required a kind of command-line machismo that most people had
no wish to acquire - and so those services which delivered information of
equivalent or better quality to that available on the web withered away
because their cost:benefit ratio was too high.

I think TB-L is on the right track here because although much content of value
is silo-ed in multiple ways, once there is enough good open-source (or 'linked
data' or whatever you like to call it) material available, people will either
abandon or never get into the websites which provide it.

~~~
wheels
_once there is enough good open-source (or 'linked data' or whatever you like
to call it) material available_

As far as I understand things, _linked data_ is just a euphemism for RDF (or
RDF + microformats), and there's no shortage of open source RDF
implementations.

~~~
CaptSolo
<http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html>

