[Chapter-delegates] Balance Interactive to Redevelop Website for The Internet Society

[Marcin Cieslak]

(This is a reply to an old email by Siva, not to the Khaled's
  unrelated recent inquiry)

On Tue, 2 Feb 2010, Sivasubramanian Muthusamy wrote:
>> On Tue, 2 Feb 2010, Sivasubramanian Muthusamy wrote:
>>> One more suggestion would be to make this new website rich with
>>> collaborative interfaces and integrate visual links to isoc's official
>>> facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc. presence.
>>>
>>
>> Oh, come on.
>
>
> What is wrong with what I have said? Is it just that what is stated is
> naturally bound to be there, so unnecessary to have made a mention of, OR,
> that it is a bad idea to think of collaborative interfaces and links to
> ISOC's official presence elsewhere on the Internet, which are suggested for
> ease of participation?

Siva,

I still owe you an explanation for this.

If you ask me, what's Web 2.0 - stripping lots of buzztalk - this basically
comes to two things:

1) improvement in Web technology, dating back to the Microsoft Outlook
Web Access component and related ActiveX control (from 2000), that
brought more dynamic Web experience, bringing technologies
like AJAX or Comet on board. Interesting technology, sometimes 
very useful, with some issues (i.e. accessibility etc.).

2) model of distribution of copyrighted works - where original authors
licence their works for free to some Internet-based aggregation
service, that in turn redistributes them to a wider public.
Most of the aggregators generate advertising (or similar) revenue
riding for free on the material provided by the contributors (notable
exception: Wikipedia).

I will focus on the latter. In my opinion, "ease of participation"
is not everything - the real question is what's the model behind
the participation.

We need to ask ourselves how do we (as the Internet Society) want
to position ourselves against the new developments. If we want to
stay ahead and re-acquire the leading edge (something IMHO we don't
have), we should explore new directions and follow-ups on the
existing technology.

For example, we could possibly be investing in the creative use of
the federation technology, that - in my opinion - fits the original
Internet model better than Facebook or Twitter, both being huge
single points of failure.

Still somehow HTML 2.0 guy when asked:

-- Marcin Cieślak