Guidebook
Middle of Nowhere Web
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Guidebook Middle of Nowhere Web |
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Middle of Nowhere is a large web (~150 mB) with paradoxical goals. Like a museum, it collects, studies, organizes and presents diverse material for diverse interests and is continually expanding and evolving. This page describes the regions in terms of this museum analogy. Material is organized for different interests; the general public, students in GMU courses, museum staff, technical specialists, and so forth.
Warehouse The warehouse stores information until it can be organized into a proper exhibit. Just as in a museum, the best material is usually in the warehouse awaiting time to exhibit it properly. Feel free to walk in and browse.
Courses The Taming the Electronic Frontier course is the largest and best developed area of this web, largely because of the organizational learning projects in which they are tasked with choosing a breakdown and eliminating it for 30% of their grade.
Administration The procedures and tools I use for administering this web.
Brad Cox Information about me and students in the courses I teach.
Find Tool Since browsing endless shelves isn't everyone's
idea of fun, most pages provide a tool to find just what you want. Just type a phrase
and press the "Enter" key to run the Excite
search tool on the contents of this collection.
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The Paradoxical Goals of this Project |
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"Those who dine from dumpsters don't complain of the smell" |
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I pursue the impossible because this gives me insight into why the depth, breadth and quality of web-based content is so inferior to paper-based content, and why it will remain that way regardless of infrastructure improvements and of how much effort individuals like myself might expend on content.
Why? Because paper is made of atoms which we know how to buy, sell and own. Web pages, clipart and computer software is made of bits and we still haven't figured out a sensible way to do that with bits. For a more detailed explanation, see my IEEE article, Objects as Property or my book, Superdistribution: Objects as Property on the Electronic Frontier.
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Superdistribution; Objects as Property on the Electronic Frontier by Brad Cox; Addison Wesley 1996; ISBN 0201502089; at Amazon.com and IBM InfoMarkets. |
If you doubt my claim that internet is broad but not deep, try this experiment. Pick any firm with a presence on the web. Measure the depth of the web at that point by simply counting the bytes in their web. Contrast this measurement with a back of the envelope estimate of the depth of information in the real firm. Include the information in their products, manuals, file cabinets, address books, notepads, databases, and in each employee's head.
The problem of achieving real depth is deep-seated indeed. It originates from the differences between goods made of bits versus atoms as commercial objects. Since mankind hasn't yet decided on a socially robust way to buy, sell and own goods made of bits, or worse, even realized that it needs one, there's a breakdown in human motivation.
Hard-working property-conscious settlers, as distinct from us wild and wooly explorer types, don't move in to tame a frontier until it is clear how to earn a living at it. Explorers aren't primarily motivated by money and are averse to tamed environments. We suffer from the illusion that other people are the same, forgetting that explorers are just a tiny minority and possess only a fraction of the world's knowledge.
For more on this issue, see my book, Superdistribution: Objects as Property on the Electronic Frontier or the review of this web by Mike Swaine in the inaugural issue of Web Techniques magazine.
