Web 2.0 five years on

I recently discovered this white paper by Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle – two of the major gurus of web 2.0 and search respectively. Plenty of interesting information and ideas to chew on, but what really caught my attention is their discussion of the notions of information shadows and deep context learning by database algorithms. It is fairly banal to observe that each of us consists of multiple identity-layers, but how do you teach a database to make the meta-connections between these disparate pieces of data? And what happens when you teach it that? I need to think more about this but it seems an argument could be made that at a certain meta-level the subject-object divide becomes inconsequential; in other words, the difference between a human and an object is a function of their ‘entanglement networks’.

O’Reilly & Batelle – Web 2.0 Five Years on [White Paper]