Written on October 1, 2008 – 11:40 am
Guest blogger, sharing views on The Next Web
Written by Mircea Goia
Although the World Wide Web was invented in Europe (Tim Berners-Lee - CERN), the Internet was growing faster on the other side of the ocean (ARPAnet - USA). The innovation in our industry still comes mainly from the US, but Europe is catching up.
Web 2.0 events throughout Europe
Web 2.0 represents the new wave of Internet companies and technologies born after the dotcom bubble which crippled the Internet around year 2000. It’s origins are found in the USA, but is has been spreading around the world (hopefully, the recent financial crisis won’t affect it too much). Social networking, AJAX, sharing, user-generated, community, video, collaboration, folksonomies, Internet as a platform…all these terms are the mantra of the new Web 2.0 companies.
In the upcoming series of Web 2.0 articles, I want to explore the Web 2.0 events throughout Europe. It will be like an inventory of Web 2.0 festivals, conferences, un-conferences, and awards. I encourage people from different countries to write about their events here as well.
Let’s start with Romania
I’m starting with Romania (since I am Romanian), a country of 21 million inhabitants and an important market in Eastern Europe. Since my last article on ReadWriteWeb about Web 2.0 startups, things have been changing in Romania.
Now, a year or so later, I can see a jump in Web 2.0 applications and ideas originating in Romania – culminating in one startup becoming a finalist of Seedcamp: uberVU. Seedcamp is Europe’s hottest startup conference, held in London every year, and can be seen as the European equivalent of Techcrunch 50 or DEMO.
Webstock
Following the model of Seedcamp and Techcrunch 50, a new non-traditional conference took shape: Webstock (paraphrasing ‘69 Woodstock music festival).
In some ways, Webstock is more like a Web 2.0 festival than a startup conference. They call it an “unconference” because it’s not like a traditional conference where only certain people are allowed to speak). A real startup conference is Netcamp, which I will cover in another article.
Webstock started earlier this year with the selection of Web 2.0 projects (already launched, betas, private betas – all at least one month old) which will be presented in the final gala. The project needs to have at least one Web 2.0 component (they used the Wikipedia definition) and it needs to be created by Romanian companies or Romanian citizens (Romanian-foreign partnerships are accepted too). (more…)
I hope you like that post!
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Written on September 16, 2008 – 9:26 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
This is a photo of the very first Web Server. It was used by Tim Berners-Lee (Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee actually) while he worked at CERN. As you can see the first web server was a NeXT box. NeXT was a company founded by Steve Jobs after he left Apple. The company never took off and was acquired by Apple when they were looking for a new operating system. The first web browser, developed by Berners-Lee was called WorldWideWeb and was developed on NeXTSTEP, the NeXT development toolset.
They (Herb Brody) say that telling the future by looking at the past assumes that conditions remain constant. This is like driving a car by looking in the rearview mirror. But I still think it is good to look back on how things got started and where they ended up since then. The first website was put online in August 1991. Just think about how much has happened since then and try to imagine how much we can expect from the next 17 years…
Written on June 15, 2008 – 8:17 pm
Guest blogger, sharing views on The Next Web
This is a guest post by New Media student Edial Dekker
Science Fiction writers, visionaries, whose books I consumed as a child, made me believe that in a few years, shiny robots would handle all mundane tasks. There are many robots today, but no funny-whistling R2-D2’s. The robots today are invisible and immaterial, reading and indexing millions of websites on daily basis. They are robots built for speed and efficiency, mapping the Internet as fast and as accurately as possible. A few years ago we thought we could find anything that was out there on the Web, today we realize the Web is fragmented, divided into four continents with ‘Terra Incognita’-islands; websites that are clustered and simply can’t be found, no matter how many times you click or how hard you try.
No round-trips
Most search-engines do not even try to reach the full Web, because indexing as many as websites as possible isn’t necessarily the best way to provide the best search results. The Web is big yet small. But the small world behind the Web is a bit misleading. The Web is a scale-free network, dominated by hubs and nodes with a very large number of links. The World Wide Web has a directed structure. Andrei Broder, Vice President of Emerging Search Technology for Yahoo!, was the first person to notice how this directed network had consequences for the topology of the Web itself. For example, if you want to go from website A to website D, you can start from node A, then go to node B, which has a link to node C, which points to D. But you can’t make a round-trip. Most likely there is a different route one would have to find for going from node D to node A.
The four different continents of the Web
Albert-László Barabási, a Hungarian scientist, famous for contributing his insights on network theories, has tried to map the Web into four different continents:A Strongly Connected, or Central Core (SCC): this contains a quarter of all websites, it gives a home to all indexed websites and is easy navigable. This does not mean there is a link between all nodes; but the paths are defined and allows you to surf between the nodes.Than there are the IN and the OUT continents: these continents are just as large as the Central Core but are much harder to navigate. From the IN continent you can easily reach the SCC, but there is no path taking you back to the IN continent. In contrast, the OUT continent can easily be reached from the SCC, but has links to take you back to the core (where all the magic happens). The OUT continent is mostly populated by corporate websites that can easily be reached from outside, but once you get in, there is no way out.
The fourth continent is made out of Tendrils and disconnected Islands; they are interlinked groups that are unreachable from the SCC and have no links back to it. These websites can contain thousands of documents. The location of these websites have nothing to do with the content, but with relation to other documents.
There’s no way you can reach it
These four continents significantly limit the Web’s navigability. Where we can go, depends on the continent you start your search at. No matter how many times you time you want to click, when you are in the Central Core there is no way you can reach the IN continent or the Islands that surround it. Ever realized why search engines are giving user the option to submit websites? It’s because then the crawlers can sniff into those isolated islands that can otherwise never be found.
Is this fragmented structure here to stay? Barabási thinks it is. As long links remain directed, homogenization will never occur. One of the founding fathers of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee has been stressing the importance of links that track back to where they are linked from, for many years. The way blogs use the track-back system, can also be used for connecting the IN and OUT continent. The bottom line is that directed networks always break into the same four continents. The only way to organize is to reorganize the relations documents have with each other, semantic web anyone?
Written on April 30, 2008 – 7:06 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Tim Berners-Lee
Two articles caught my attention today. The first is a post about a talk given by Lee Clow, global director of media arts at TBWA Worldwide at the American Association of Advertising Agencies’ Leadership Conference yesterday. The article quotes Clow: “Online advertising is still semi-nowhere. It’s very intrusive and annoying and kind of the worst of our business in terms of pop-up and flash, and jump up and down.”
But the future looks bright: “The ability to use the internet in terms of great brand storytelling is still at its infancy,” he said. “The internet advertising media, cross my fingers and hope to God, with bandwidth and with some ability, is going to become more artful; it’s going to become more interesting. … But it’s going to take creative people to embrace the possibilities of what you can do on the internet in terms of advertising and storytelling and make it a little better and smarter”. The article is worth reading as there are a few more interesting quotes.
That the web is still young is something Kevin Kelly made very clear during his keynote speech at the Next Web Conference 2006 in Amsterdam. He told the audience then that the Web was only 4000 days old and we could expect even more changes, innovation and improvements in the coming 4000 days.
The other article worth reading can be found on the BBC website. Read that one too. It is an interview with ‘the web’s inventor’ Sir Tim Berners-Lee about the 15th birthday of the world wide web today. He says that the web as we know it today is still in its infancy and expects the Next Web to put “all the data in the world” at the fingertips of every user.
If that happens, you will read it here first.
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The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
