Author Archives: Marco Barnig

Influential People

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Last update : July 23, 2013

Social media are changing at such a pace that attracting vast numbers of likes and followers are no longer enough to stand out from the crowd. The challenge is now to identify key influential people.

Time : 100 Influential People

Time : 100 Influential People

First published in 1999, Time publishes since 2008 each year the 100 most influential people in the world (see Wikipedia). The books that inspired the Tech’s most influential people are listed on the web site Business Insider. 55 Speeches by Influential People of the 21st Century are collected on the Trendhunter web site. The 20 Most Influential People in Social Media are presented on Income Diary. Forbes published the Top 50 Social Media Power Influencers in 2013. Tom’s Hardware listed the 10 most influential people in IT of 2011. And there are more and more such lists.

Klout (The standard for Influence) aims to quantify social media presence and makes its own list of influential people. Kred Influence Measurement, or Kred, is a similar tool launched by Jodee Rich (see Wikipedia).

The following list shows links to websites with statistics about the top users of social networks :

More informations about social influence are available at the web sites listed below :

Divide the Web Timeline in nine epochs

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Last update : January 25, 2022

In many domains like cosmic evolution, big history, art history, timelines are segmented in well defined epochs. As changes happen gradually over time, it’s not absolutely necessary to link the dates where one epoch ends and another begins to a precise event.  A Web Timeline should reflect the main trends and have a sufficient granularity to cope with the main changes in Web technology. A Web Timeline should take into account that the evolution of the Web is not linear, but exponential and comply to Ray Kurzweil‘s Law of Accelerating Returns.

I am keen to propose in this contribution a division of the Web Timeline in nine epochs, from Web 0 to Web 4.0. I am not aware that a global and comprehensive timeline division exist already for the Internet or the World Wide Web. If anyone else has already proposed this somewhere, I would be happy to give him credit.

Web 1.0

There is a common agreement that the Web (Web 1.0) started on December 25, 1990, when Tim Berners-Lee implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and a server via the Internet. This was the start of the World Wide Web (www). I like the term read-only web for this early Web, starting in 1990.

Web 2.0

The term Web 2.0 was popularized by Tim O’Reilly in late 2004. Web 2.0 describes web sites that use technology beyond the static pages with minimal linking and search capabilities of earlier web sites. Wikipedia defines the Web 2.0 as web sites that allow users to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators of user-generated content in a virtual community. Other names for the Web 2.0 are social web, participative web, personalized web. I prefer the term collaborative web for the epoch starting early 2005 until end 2009 (5 years), even if Tim Berners-Lee argues that the Web was supposed to be all along a collaborative medium and that the Web 2.0 is nothing else as jargon.

Web 1.5

In my opinion something is missing between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. The evolution from the read-only web to the collaborative web was smooth, gradually and rich in events. I suggest to introduce an intermediate epoch, the read-write web or interactive web, for the period 2000 to 2004 (5 years). Let’s call it Web 1.5 as it was coined by Ardell DellaLoggia in her post WEB 2.0 vs. WEB 1.5 and Blogwars, published in February 2008.

Web 3.0

John Markoff, senior writer for The New York Times, popularized the term Web 3.0 in late 2006. Web 3.0 is where we found ourselves in 2013. Definitions of Web 3.0 vary greatly. I join the numerous authors considering that semantic standards are the outstanding features of the current Web 3.0. Nova Spivack is a renowned expert of the semantic web and the founder or investor of several ventures related to semantic web applications. He promotes the concept of the stream – the next phase of the Web. He compares streams as something new emerging on top of the Web, just as the Web once emerged on top of the Internet. Nova Spivack claims that influence becomes more important than relevance in the future. Daniel Burrus thinks that Web 3.0 is the 3D Web. I am a great fan of 3D Web and virtual worlds, but I don’t agree with this view.

Web 2.5

As for Web 1.5, I think we need an intermediate epoch between the milestones 2.0 and 3.0. Jeff Sayre came up with Web 2.5 in his post What is Web 2.5?. He said it is somewhere between the pathetically overused Web 2.0 and the mystical, yet-to-be-realized Web 3.0 realm. In my opinion Web 2.5 should refer to the emergence of tablets and mobile devices. It’s the beginning of the ubiquitous web with responsive design. My proposal is to call it the mobile web and to cover the period from early 2010 to mid 2012.

Web 0.5

Internet began evolving a few decades before the Web emerged. The Web lives on top of the Internet’s infrastructure. To include the Internet network history in the Web timeline, I suggest to use the term of Web 0.5 to designate this epoch. A few people have already used Web 0.5 by back-construction from Web 2.0. As in software versioning, the number 0.5 indicates that the product has not yet the full features. It’s a sort of precursor of the Web. There is no doubt that the start of the Internet (network) epoch was on October 29, 1969. At this date, Leonard Kleinrock supervised graduate students, among them Vint Cerf, who transferred the first message on ARPANET from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to the Stanford Research Institute.

Web 0

Internet has a pre-history before the first message was transmitted on the Arpanet. I call it the Web 0. The network epoch took 20 years (1970 – 1989), the Web 1.0 has a duration of 10 years (1990 – 1999). The Web 1.5 and Web 2.0 both lasted 5 years (2000 – 2004, 2005 – 2009). Taking into account that the web is changing faster and faster and that it’s evolution is exponential, the time period of the Internet pre-history can be set equal to 40 years (1930 -1969). This way the Big Bang of the Internet is  back-dated to 1930. At this time, Vannevar Bush developed the differential analyzer at MIT. It was the most powerful computing machine prior to the electronic digital computer. Later, Vannevar Bush became one of the pioneers of the Internet. The pre-history of the Internet ends in late 1969 when the first computers exchanged messages through the Arpanet.

Beyond Web 3.0

The Web is moving towards voice driven applications, natural language search, location awareness and help engines. Virtual assistants and Global Brain are key concepts for the upcoming epochs of the Web. I know that forecasting the future of the Web is very speculative. Internet evolution is a topic at various panels organized by the Internet Society and other institutions.

I would like to share my own views about the evolution of the Web by extending the Web Timeline with the two additional epochs Web 3.5 (early 2015 – mid 2017) and Web 4.0 (mid 2017 – end 2019).

Web 3.5

In my opinion the term intelligent web is the best common denominator to group the features of the next epoch of the web, following the semantic web. Servers with weak Artifical Intelligence (AI) will be able to think and make decisions with regard to user searches and content. They will be able to give suggestions based on educated studies of how we live and what we want or need.

Web 4.0

According to Daniel Burrus, Web 4.0 is about the ultra-intelligent electronic agent. I go a step further. The next level of intelligence is awareness. Nova Spivack argues that machines will never be conscious and he set a long bet on the arena for accountable predictions : By 2050 no synthetic computer nor machine intelligence will have become truly self-aware (ie. will become conscious). I think awareness is an information process and I predict that Web 4.0 will be the conscious web.

Resulting web timeline with nine epochs

It’s now time to put the different epochs together in a chronological order. The following table shows the result :

No Version Time period Duration Epoch
1 Web 0 1930 – 1969 40 years Internet pre-history
2 Web 0.5 1970 – 1989 20 years Internet (network) history
3 Web 1.0 1990 – 1999 10 years read-only web
4 Web 1.5 2000 – 2004 5 years interactive web
5 Web 2.0 2005 – 2009 5 years collaborative web
6 Web 2.5 2010 – mid 2012 2.5 years mobile web
7 Web 3.0 mid 2012 – 2014 2.5 years semantic web
8 Web 3.5 2015 – mid 2017 2.5 years intelligent web
9 Web 4.0 mid 2017 – 2019 2.5 years conscious web

You may ask what happens in 2020? Are we close to the singularity at that date? I think it’s too speculative today to give an answer!

Conclusions

The analyser of my WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast tells me that my contribution scores 67.9 in the Flesch Reading Ease test, which is considered OK to read. Thats fine! Another advise of the plugin is to add an appropriate image. Well, here it is.

Divide the Web Timeline in nine epochs

Web Timeline segmented in nine epochs

The next proposal of the plugin is to specify the meta description and to increase the keyword density. Done! The plugin seems struggling to become my personal assistent!

I will continue to work on this Web Timeline Project which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Luxembourg License. In a next post I would like to propose one innovator which I consider the most influential for each epoch. In the meantime, your comments are welcome.

Les téléphones importables de Lionel Stocard

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L’artiste lyonnais Lionel Stocard a invité au vernissage de son exposition “Les téléphones Importables” au PostMusée à Luxembourg le vendredi 12 juillet 2013. Parmi ses 90 ‘téléphones importables’ (importables car trop volumineux et/ou trop lourds) créés par l’artiste, Post Luxembourg montre une sélection de 10 sculptures et 10 tableaux.

Claude Strasser CEO Post Luxembourg ; Lionel Stocard, artiste français

Claude Strasser, CEO Post Luxembourg ; Lionel Stocard, artiste français

Après ses études d’architecture intérieure et d’arts plastiques, Lionel Stocard se consacre entièrement à la création plastique et sonore autour de son sujet de prédilection, le rêve. Très inspiré par la musique méditative, c’est au travers de ses toiles, ses sculptures, sa musique et ses installations sonores qu’il s’exprime. Sonorités mouvantes, notes défilantes, les installations de Lionel Stocard visent à bouleverser le mode d’écoute d’une pièce musicale par le déplacement physique des sources sonores dans l’espace.

Vernissage de l'exposition "les téléphones importables " de Lionel Stocard

Vernissage de l’exposition “les téléphones importables ” de Lionel Stocard

À l’heure de la communication à outrance, de l’invasion planétaire du téléphone portable, Lionel Stocard invite à repenser notre rapport à l’objet et sa fonction en créant des téléphones “importables”. Ces machines à communiquer, peintes ou sculptées, lourdes, encombrantes et peu pratiques fonctionnent réellement. Les Importables sont des objets rares dans un monde envahi par la technologie. Du téléphone fixe ils gardent l’électronique, pour le reste ils nous obligent à ne pas quitter l’imaginaire qui nous aide à anticiper et à réfléchir en dehors du prêt à penser.

Les téléphones importables de Lionel Stocard

Les téléphones importables de Lionel Stocard

Readability Metrics

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Last update : July 17, 2013

Readability metrics are used to evaluate the ease in which text can be read and understood. Legibility is a measure of how easily individual letters or characters can be distinguished from each other.

Easy reading helps learning and enjoyment. There are different ways to test the readability of texts : text leveling, vocabulary frequency lists, affixes, readability metrics. In 1948, Rudolf Flesch published his Reading Ease formula which became one of the most widely used. In 1975, in a project sponsored by the U.S. Navy, the Reading Ease formula was recalculated to give a grade-level score and is now called the Flesch–Kincaid Grade-Level formula.

Readability Metrics

Fry Graph Readability Metrics

There are other readability metrics : Dale–Chall, Gunning Fog Index, Coleman-Liau Index, McLaughlin’s SMOG Index, Fry metrics, FORCAST, …

Clear, succinct writing designed to ensure the reader understands as quickly and completely as possible is called plain language. Using excess of words is called verbosity. A list of plain English words and phrases which have been recommended in United States guides to writing is available at Wikipedia.

Readability tests are often integrated in word processing applications and blog editors. A few links to online readability calculators are listed below :

PAL : personalized assistant that learns

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cognitive assistant

DARPA PAL program

The DARPA PAL (the Personalized Assistant that Learns) program focused on improving the way that computers support humans through the use of cognitive systems. These are systems that reason, learn from experience and accept guidance in order to provide effective, personalized assistance. DARPA’s five-year contract (2003 – 2008) brought together over 300 researchers from 25 of the top university and commercial research institutions, with the goal of building a new generation of a cognitive personalized assistant that can reason, learn from experience, be told what to do, explain what they are doing, reflect on their experience, and respond robustly to surprise. Among the contributors were the Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Massachusetts, the University of Rochester, the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, Oregon State University, the University of Southern California, and Stanford University, as well as from SRI.

SRI International has led the PAL Framework effort to make available many of the successful machine learning and reasoning technologies developed on the PAL program for use by the broader DARPA, research, and military communities. SRI was founded as Stanford Research Institute in 1946 and is a nonprofit research institute headquartered in Menlo Park, California. The institute formally separated from Stanford University in 1970 and is now one of the largest contract research institutes in the world.

One of the components of PAL was CALO (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes), an artificial intelligence project that attempted to integrate numerous AI technologies into a cognitive personalized assistant. The CALO effort has had many major spin-offs :

  • the Siri intelligent software assistant that is now part of the Apple iOS
  • the news aggregation service Trapit
  • the artificial intelligence-enhanced calendar application for iOS, Tempo AI
  • the travel guide app Desti

D’Post huet sech een neit Gesiicht ginn

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RTL – 16.06.2013
Aus P&T gëtt ganz einfach “Post Luxembourg“. Deen neien Numm, d’Strategie an een neie Logo goufen e Samschdeg an der Rockhal virgestallt.

post1
Aus P&T, also Post et Télécommunications, ass also elo ganz einfach “Post Luxembourg” ginn. Deen neien Numm ass an der Suite vun der Strategie vun der Post, déi schonn am Abrëll virgestallt gouf, huet de Generaldirekter Claude Strasser erënnert.

post2
Et geet also drëm eng eenheetlech Mark fir de Grupp ze hunn, dofir einfach Post Luxembourg, esou de Claude Strasser.

D’Post ass ee vun de gréissten Employeuren am Land, mat haut 4.000 Beschäftegten.

WordPress taxonomies

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In WordPress, a taxonomy is a grouping mechanism for posts. WordPress has three built in taxonomies : categories, tags and links. WordPress allows to create your own custom taxonomies which are an extremely powerful way to group various items in all sorts of ways.

I created the custom taxonomy Family for my family blog. The WordPress plugin Custom Post Type UI, developed by Brad Williams and Michael Beckwith, is a useful tool to manage custom taxonomies.

Additional informations about WordPress taxonomies are available at the following links :

WPtouch 3 Pro WordPress Taxonomy Support

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Last update : July 20, 2013
I use the WPtouch 3 Pro plugin for my WordPress Family Blog, together with the User Access Manager (UAM) plugin, created by Alexander Schneider. I noticed that the taxonomy support of WPtouch 3 Pro does not work as expected. All categories and tags are displayed on the mobile without respecting the restrictions defined by the UAM plugin. The reason is that WPtouch retrieves the taxonomy informations directly from the database with an SQL request, instead of using the wordpress functions get_categories() and get_tags(). For categories WordPress even offers the function wp_list_categories() with formatting support.

Usually I don’t like to modify the core code of WordPress themes and plugins, but in this case the only feasible solution to solve this problem was to change the two functions wptouch_fdn_ordered_cat_list() and wptouch_fdn_ordered_tag_list() in the WPtouch 3 Pro theme foundation file plugins/wptouch-pro-3/themes/foundation/root-functions.php.

function wptouch_fdn_ordered_tag_list( $num, $include_count = true )

I changed the following code :

echo '<ul>';
$sql = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT * FROM {$wpdb->prefix}term_taxonomy INNER JOIN {$wpdb->prefix}terms ON {$wpdb->prefix}term_taxonomy.term_id = {$wpdb->prefix}terms.term_id WHERE taxonomy = 'category' AND {$wpdb->prefix}term_taxonomy.term_id NOT IN ($excluded_cats) AND count >= 1 ORDER BY count DESC LIMIT 0, $num");
if ( $sql ) {
foreach ( $sql as $result ) {
if ( $result ) {
echo "<li><a href=\"" . get_category_link( $result->term_id ) . "\">" . $result->name;
if ( $include_count ) {
echo " <span>(" . $result->count . ")</span></a>";
}
echo '</a>';
echo '</li>';
}
}
}
echo '</ul>';

by the new code :

$args = array (
'orderby' => 'count',
'order' => 'DESC',
'exclude' => $excluded_cats,
'number' => $num );
$categories = get_categories($args);
echo '<ul>';
foreach ($categories as $category) {
echo '<li><a href="' .get_category_link($category -> term_id). '">' .$category -> name. '';
if ($include_count) {
echo '<span> (' .$category -> count. ')</span>';}
echo '</a></li>';}
echo '</ul>';

function wptouch_fdn_ordered_cat_list( $num )

I changed the following code :

echo '<ul>';
$sql = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT * FROM {$wpdb->prefix}term_taxonomy INNER JOIN {$wpdb->prefix}terms ON {$wpdb->prefix}term_taxonomy.term_id = {$wpdb->prefix}terms.term_id WHERE taxonomy = 'post_tag' AND {$wpdb->prefix}term_taxonomy.term_id NOT IN ($excluded_tags) AND count >= 1 ORDER BY count DESC LIMIT 0, $num");
if ( $sql ) {
foreach ( $sql as $result ) {
if ( $result ) {
echo "<li><a href=\"" . get_tag_link( $result->term_id ) . "\">" . $result->name . " <span>(" . $result->count . ")</span></a></li>";
}
}
}
echo '</ul>';

by the new code :

$args = array (
'orderby' => 'count',
'order' => 'DESC',
'exclude' => $excluded_tags,
'number' => $num );
$tags = get_tags($args);
echo '<ul>';
foreach ($tags as $tag) {
echo '<li><a href="' .get_tag_link($tag -> term_id). '">' .$tag -> name. '<span> (' .$tag -> count. ')</span></a></li>';}
echo '</ul>';

The new code provides the same WPtouch features and functionalities as the old one and is fully compatible with the UAM plugin.

One disadvantage of core changes in a plugin is the need to replace the modified files when an automatic update of the plugin is done. This was the case in July  2013 when the new versions 3.0.5 and 3.0.6 were loaded.