Tuesday 12 October 2010

Web Science Challenge, some good questions that need to be answered in web sciecne

I was thinking of some questions that really need to be answered in Web Sciences. Maybe someone has an answer. These are some of them:

1. Is there a good model of open source collaborative free working?
Giving it away seems to be the new selling it. What are the economics of this? Are participants in open source projects like Debian, Linux, Wikipedia, and other pursuing alternative revenue or is a post money economic required?

2. Why do social networks always follow power laws?
Look at friends, posts, links, anything you can count on a social network you will always get a power law with a few nodes owning most of what you are measuring and the rest in a long tail. Why?

3. Why do people blog?
Why did this formate take the world of self publishing over? Everyone seems to have a blog, why not a wiki, why not a Flickr site, why not a Flash animation? What made the world of web users in to a world of bloggers.

4. Does the 140 Character Limit add anything to Twitter?
I suspect that Twitter only works because of the limit and it alone has made Twitter the marketplace of links on the Internet, but am I right?

5. Why did Second Life flop?
It seemed that Second Life was the web of Snow Crash and the Matrix. So why did it flop? Clearly Sci Fi and films are not driving the web formation, so what is?

6. How much is Christmas worth?
I know this is a silly question, but the point is Christmas is open sourced. If Jesus was to return next week and take out a trademark on his image and name it would make him a lot of money. But having to pay Jesus say $10 to have a Christmas party would cost the overall economy how much? The key question is how the commons (say the World Wide Web) can be counted as a contribution to the economy?

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