All these years, we the people are trying to create an super high technology – artificial intelligence (AI).
What comes to your mind when you hear the words “artificial intelligence” ? Some kind of supercomputer? You might be right, but I disagree with this..
Professor Wesch video “WEB 2.0 The machine is Us/ing Us”
There is an other thing which we “teach” everyday how to make decisions alone – this is the web.
What is the internet? The internet is an international computer network which consists of smaller networks. The computers inside it communicate between each other, using different technologies and protocols. Internet includes all those millions of computers, that are connected to it all over the world.
The term internet differs from the term WEB. What is web?
Before we define this term, we must say a few others..
Hypertext document – simply (the first main idea) this is a text document, that can link to other documents. Today we are far away from the main idea, because the hypertext documents can include pictures/sounds/videos/applications but this is going to be discussed later in this article.
To open a hypertext document, you need to “request” it somehow. And you must know it’s exact location. All this environment, that lets you work and serf with different hypertext documents is called the web. Its main idea was to copy all the books from the libraries and make them available online (that’s the reason advertising in the internet to be forbidden in the beginning).
The communication in web is based on the client-server method. The server (a serving computer) keeps all the hypertext documents on its hard disk and sends them to the clients (Internet explorer, Firefox) when requested.
How does it work?
In the moment you tell your browser (the program you use to view web pages) to open a web site, it will connect to the web server using the http protocol. Than the browser and the server will start communicating. Your browser will ask for the frontpage of the website, you requested (the request should be something like “GET / HTTP/1.1”). Than the server will give it to your browser and it will display the page. From then you can start clicking on the links.
What does a web developer work/do?
As you saw, we have hypertext documents, stored on a web server, and browsers, used for viewing the pages.
But can you imagine that the hypertext document, which you are reading right now does not exist? Yeah, right! There is no such hypertext document on my web server, which contains this text. The next thing you are going to ask is “Than how did I get this page?”
I will try to answer that question in the simplest way. In the moment your browser asked my server for the page, my server created it, send it, and destroyed it. (And this happens for less than a second, impressive, isn’t it? 🙂
How does this happen? The web server has been “instructed” to do all this actions. The instruction has been written by the web developer (in this case it’s me, Alex Ivaylov). The instructions have been written in very strict syntaxes on special programming language. These instructions are called scripts and are saved in special script files. This type of programming is known as web script programming. These scripts are executed by the web server. In the moment you requested this page, the web server connected to the database server, requested the text you are reading now from it, processed it, created a hypertext document and send it to your browser.
Every hypertext document is a set of instructions for the browser, how to display the text/images/menus etc. So this means that the web server sends instructions to the web browser, and the browser follows them and displays the web page.
In general there are two types of web programming: server-side (the scripts are executed by the web server) and client-side (the scripts are executed by the browser).
So the my job (the job of a web developer) is to instruct the web server and your browser to show just this text, right here, no matter where you are.
If you were patient enough to read all this (congrads!), now we are entering the spicy part of the topic, things that most of you might not now..
While your browser and my web server were communicating, your browser told the server a lot of things about you, it told us your IP address (as you know every computer is unique on the network and has its own IP) , so it will not be hard for me to find you, if I want to. Other thing it it told me is that you are still reading this text, yes, I know how much people have read this, which of them have closed the page, when they saw how big the text is (by now 80% got scared of the text and run away at the 1st second). I also know your operating system (which can a very big security problem for you, if you have a static IP address). I also would know which comment is yours, if you post one. Your IP address information shows where you are (which town and country) and shows your ISP (internet provider).
I have instructed my web server to keep this information into a special database. So I know much about the visitors of my web sites. I am not the only one who has done this with their website, most of us do it.
I know that the people, who closed this webpage before reading this are more than the people, who didn’t.
Every time you click on a webpage you share information about you with somebody.
Think of the 100 billion times everyday humans click on web pages.
Every time you click on a web page you teach the machine, what a real human will do, and what will not do. When you click on a key word, you tell it “I am interested in this”, When you stay in a webpage for a longer time, you show it, that you like it, every time you google something, you tell the machine exactly what you are interested in.. While you are reading this text, millions of people have told the machine what they are interested in, and the machine is “learning”.
Do you know that when you tag images on flickr, you actually teach the machine to recognize images, just like a real human (just type something in images.google.com and you will be scared)
The web is no more just linkin web pages,
Web 2.0 is linking people.
I guess now, you understood the main difference between web and web 2.0, and that is the fact that web 2.0 is user-driven. You and I, everyone of us, we have been using web 2.0 for ages. These are Google, Wikipedia, Youtube, WordPress (this site is driven by this CMS).
The machine learns from us everyday because We are the web 2.0!
We can’t tell how far this can go, but the web experts are saying that digital devices with internet connectivity will be even in the clothes we wear, by the year 2015. Other colleagues predict huge increasing of social network websites, “Where you will be able even to merry somebody online.”
Even now, some people prefer to Google for something 2,3,4,5 times, because it’s easier than remembering the URL address of the web site. This fact shows how dependable on the machine we are. We even let if thing and remember for us.
TO BE CONTINUED….