The Web is Turned Off Today

Taking a quick look at Google or Wikipedia shows us that all is not well on the web today. Other key sites and many smaller one are also deliberately disabled or showing a different logo today in protest.

These protests are in response to the proposed Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) legislation before Congress. Much of the opposition to this legislation centers on the overwhelming amount of control that the acts give to copyright holders and the possibly unpredictable effects this could have on the development of the Internet.

Leaving aside ethics debates for now, what do we do if we need a wikipedia article today? Well, we can just access it by Google or by directly knowing the URL, for instance since Wikipedia doesn't seem to have shut down there entire site. It's also a good time to talk about how informatics systems catalog the web for us. Google maintains cached copies (which is useful for research, but how useful is it for your online privacy?) and there is something called the Wayback Machine whose very purpose is to catalog how websites change over time. In each of these cases, a vast, vast amount of data in a data warehouse is holding this information until we ask for it. It has also processed this information to make searching over it possible in the first place.

Finally, here is an interview with Conrad Wolfram on the Knowledge Economy. Conrad is the brother of Stephen Wolfram, who created the software Mathematica. Wolfram Research, his company, is also the driving force behind the natural search engine Wolfram Alpha. Informatics centers on the interactions between people and technology, and natural search is a way to attempt to enhance these interactions. Another example is through gesture based interfaces which is the subject of a recent LA Times article and something we'll talk more about later this semester. Note the use of the term disruptive innovation.