Future of the Bottom-Up Internet

Welcome

Introduction

In our group, we discussed the future of Bottom-Up Internet. Bottom-up is part of what is called Web 2.0. Bottom-up Internet is all about user contributions to the Internet and the development of it. By using availanble web resources, driving forces, diagrams, matrixes and group discussions we developed 4 scenarios of where these developments might take us.

Group Members

• Jim Harders
  
• Andrew Li
  
• Robert Sparnaaij
  

Research Questions

To research the bottom up internet we had to set up some research questions. The questions have been set up together and briefly discussed in the group. The Q&A have been grouped in who formulated the final answer.

Jim

1. What is bottom up internet?
   • The “bottom up internet” is a descriptive term meaning a collection of techniques / services / products that make it possible to transform normal internet users into content providers. This can be with the purpose of providing leisure but also with the purpose of sharing and creating knowledge.
2. What techniques are used for the bottom up internet?
   • A combination of standards that are available to the public but combined to provide a better user experience, for example: AJAX (Javascript, (X)HTML, XML, DOM, XMLHttpRequest), RSS, CGI.
   • Additional technologies that can also be used are the Server based scripting languages, JAVA and databases.
   • In short everything that can be used to provide internet content.
3. What services are used for the bottom up internet?
   • Offerings of: Blogspaces, Webspaces, Forums, Wikispaces, Podcasts, Open source participation and support for all the previously mentioned development techniques.
   • Also additional services related to improving the surfing quality of the individual users like identification services and content generation based on the user profile.
4. What products are used for the bottom up internet?
   • There are a lot of products relating to the bottom up internet, they are provided by different companies but all are related to the techniques and services offered: BitTorrent, Wikipedia, Napster, CU2, SNARFER, SharpReader, NetNewsWire, Straw, Bloglines, www.blogger.com, www.podcast.com, www.ipodder.org,
5. How many blogs are there?
   • More than 80 million blogs created online in 2005 (http://www.blogherald.com)
   • Currently http://www.technorati.com/ tracks more than 30.8 million active Latin/American blogs.
6. How many users are blogging?
   • Around 30% of internet users read blogs
7. Is there an increase in blogs / users?
   • The amount of blogs to track doubles every 5 months
   • The amount of bloggers increases a little less fast than the blogs.
8. How big are blogs?
   • The total number of messages on tracked blogs is 2.1 billion.
   • The number of blogs tracked is 30.8 million.
   • 2.1 billion divided by 30.8 million is around 70 messages per blog. However there are blogs which are for personal use only and others that have more than 100 posts a day.
9. How big is the bittorrent community?
   • 1/3 of the internet traffic now a days is due to bittorrent usage.
   • At any time there are more than 2.5 million transfers going around.
10. How big is the open source community
    • It consists of more than millions of developers ( http://sourceforge.net/docs/about ) and the OSTG of which almost all open source creaters are a member from has more than 18 million unique visitors a month.
    • More than 100.000 open sourceprojects are currently registered and underway.
    • http://asay.blogspot.com/2005/09/analyst-nature-and-size-of-open-source.html

Robert

11. What techniques are being used to attract visitors?
    • For websites web 2.0 helps to attract visitors and/or make them return to the website. An important web 2.0 development for this is RSS support
    • Websites that use web 2.0 components are highly interactive and more powerful than regular websites. In some cases they can actually replace locally installed applications. We cab see this by the new web based mail clients like from Gmail and Windows Live Mail.
12. How are these products/sites/services funded?
    • Sites that offer content or tools for free are mainly funded by means of advertising and donations. Funding is dependent on the success of the website/tool.
    • Since web 2.0 websites are highly configurable lots of sites offer a login. Some services are only available when you take a paid subscription.
13. Who are the big players in the bottom-up market?
    • Google
    • Microsoft (Windows Live)
    • Yahoo
14. Whereto are big players in the market moving?
    • Offering web based versions of applications that are normally installed locally. Currently these are mainly tools like RSS readers, web mail and portal pages. Microsoft is moving towards bigger applications with offering Microsoft Office Live.
15. How will content be checked/authorized?
    • There are three main methods to check and authorize content. These are by consensus, voting and finally the site owner.

Driving Forces

We have identified the following driving forces:

Jim

• Customer expectency: People are becoming accustomed to the fact that products are specialised for their needs. In areas in which the customization doesn't fit their needs they try to find solutions of their own. The internet is a very good place to share those customizations.
• Improved user friendliness of web based publishing services: Because it has become easier to publish content online most of the borders preventing publishing have fanished and thus more users publish.
• ICT accustomed society Improved integration of IT into the current society: More and more people are growing up with computers or know how they work because of having to work with them at a company. This makes the group of internet and thus also bottom up internet users bigger and better.

Robert

• Experiences with current technical solutions

The founders and executive management of the first batch of companies have moved on - either joined one of the big players, left to join VCs, or start or join a completely new thing. This means a lot of experience of what did and didn't work is in the mix.

• Increase in people going on-line

More people go online; bottom-up is all about delivering content to people and also make them (individual) the source for new content. The more people go on-line the more gets contributed

• Network Bandwidth

Increase in broadband; P2P and POD casts are just some of the bottom-up techniques that require a lot of bandwidth to perform optimally. Increase in broadband will also aid in bringing more powerful web applications and services to the client.

Map

This map shows the relation and effects of outside forces on the development of the bottom-up Internet. These forces have been categorized in;

• Political
• Technical
• Economy
• Social

Solid lines indicate a positive relation or effect and a dotted line a negative relation or effect.

Scenarios

Scenario 1: Big Brother pulling the strings


Scenario 2: Life goes on


Scenario 3: I can do computers me


Scenario 4: We are the Borg. Resistance is futile!