Blogs - Web of the Future!

Since the last few months I have been an active member of the blog community! (OK, I agree I havent blogged as much, but hey I spend hours and hours reading other people's blogs and leaving a comment here and there!)... So, the blogs and the blogging have really got me hooked... I have been acquiring a vast amount of diverse information through these blogs than through newspaper websites or television programs or radio shows etc etc... Well, so here are some of my thoughts and ideas about the Web of the Future!!

Blogs - Web of the Future

In the near future, the Web will be predominated by blogs. Currently the blog community (especially people writing blogs) is a very tiny community of people on the web. However, the blogs are expanding and will increasingly become as common-place as Google search.

Essentially I see blogging as a user’s personal account of everyday events, her observations of articles/books read; her ideas and thoughts about news etc. etc. Blogs are also a place where people upload and store media (images, audio, video, links etc). Increasingly blogs are also becoming a very popular way of marketing and advertising and a convenient and easy way for disseminating information. There seems to be tremendous amount of contextual information present in these blogs and hence they have a huge potential in modeling user profile as well as community profile.

Now for a few minutes, let us get away from the idea of a blog as being a static URL where you login, type in your post, publish it and logout. Now suppose we consider each computer as a user’s personal blog – where each action and/or stored media is an event (or a description of an event) and each event is a result of previous actions/events i.e. these events are somehow linked with each other. Now if we provide some sort of a user’s personal web (or a personal web browser instead of the standard Windows desktop) on the computer, which houses all her applications like email clients, messengers, applications like Word, Excel etc. that she might be working on, the IE browser etc. and which also provides functionalities to the user to tag web pages, her own documents and media and share it with others on the Web – then we can use this set of tags and media as well as user’s interaction (switching across applications, pause duration between keyboard hits etc.) to perform social and personalized search. Note that the content provider of current web pages need not provide the user with links/buttons to tag their own content. The user is free to tag/rate content on the web with her own personalized levels of rating etc. (Of course we will have to resolve the issue of comparing these different kinds and levels of personal ratings!). So essentially you don’t go to a blog web page to document about events; but rather each computer becomes a part of the world wide blog community. And within each such blog-computer it is very easy to annotate (tag) anything. Also, everything in this blog-computer is considered to be an event i.e. the tags, the media etc. are all events.

You also need not carry the computer with you; but any computational device (laptop, desktop, palmtop, mobile device) that can be connected to internet can be the user’s personal blog. As soon as the device is connected to the web, the user’s personal web (or personal web browser) gets downloaded and now all her actions/events get recorded and stored centrally. The databases will now probably store an entity called ‘Blog’ containing a list of events and their relationships rather than ‘Web Page’ and their links. There will be privacy issues that will have to be addressed here.