Information Presentation in Ever Evolving Cyberspace

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Evolving Cyberspace

Michel Maas

Tulpstraat 84 4711HJ Sint Willebrord E-mail: michel@michelmaas.com Website: www.MichelMaas.com Student number: 120721

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Information Presentation in Ever-Evolving Cyberspace Page 2

Acknowledgements

Firstly, I would like to thank my thesis advisor Mark Meeuwenoord for his support and guidance in the process of making this thesis. He often guided me in the right direction, giving me insight and ideas I didn't have before the guidance sessions.

Secondly, I thank my fellow students in my thesis workgroup, especially Kerim Satirli and Sharon Bindels, for their advice and tips.

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Introduction

Information is always around us, and everyday there's more of it. We are currently drifting in a sea of endless information, and without some kind of boat, we are sure to drown in it. Instead of concerning ourselves with the production and consuming of materials, we are shifting towards a system where information is the product, being produced by information, consumed by us, after which we produce more information out of it.

There has to be some form of filtering, sorting and presentation of this information. Every individual has their own interests, wants and needs, which change constantly due to events that happen in the user's life, and the conditions in which he or she accesses a data-source. So, to centralize and generalize the information presentation, as it has been in the past with materials and products, is impossible, and undesired. There has to be some personal choice as to what information we want to see, at what time, and more importantly, where and in what form.

We are evolving towards an information based society, which is expanding and growing at an alarming rate. We are always connected to the Internet and to some extent, to each other. We want to share what we experience (like with Twitter for example), and we want to see what other people are doing. We also want to know how our credit is doing, what time our train arrives, what the weather will be like, what's going on in the Middle-East, we have to do grocery shopping, we have appointments, tasks, to-do's, and so on and so forth. What we need, is a way to structure this overwhelming amount of

information in an efficient way.

Now that's one side of the story. Besides the shift of material-based society to an information-based society, the technological side of our world is also evolving. We surround ourselves with gadgets which do something with us, but are also interacting with each other. We have cell-phones to keep in touch, but also to browse the internet, manage our day, pay our groceries and so on. We use digital music players while on the road, and laptops dominate the school environment, in higher education and even in lower education, digital classrooms start emerging. The internet is becoming increasingly important for our society, and it is ever evolving, becoming more dynamic as well as, well, just plain bigger. So, with all this information constantly and simultaneously being available to us, how do we filter all of this? Sure, we can do it manually, but that's tedious and requires a lot of work. Like I said before, we

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Information Presentation in Ever-Evolving Cyberspace Page 6 can't have it being filtered by someone with more authority than ourselves, this would be censorship and everyone has their own personal information needs, which change according to a lot of factors. We must have some kind of toolset we can use to filter the information we meet.

Besides that, the information needs to be presented. Is the current system of information presentation really the best there is? Flat and static, as we are used to? Or is some form of 3D presentation better? A lot of people are experimenting with 3D presentation, such as Google, with O3D, an open-source, rich, interactive platform for 3D presentation within a web-browser. Could this be the future of cyberspace? A 3D presentation of information, where the user has decided which information should be presented, and where? This I have explored in this thesis, and I present it to you, the web-developer and -designer. You are the ones which will shape the future of the internet, and you will need some directions for developing and designing in a way which can present information the user wants (or needs), which is difficult with the amount of data available. Of course, you will not decide which way the internet and cyberspace will evolve. This has always been in hands of the user. There are certain signals which come from the user, which you, as developer and designer, have to accommodate. I try to give you an insight in the past, and what I feel is a positive development for the future.

My research question is this: How do we have to present information in the future, when there is too much new information available every second of the day?

Some sub-questions I have answered in this thesis are:

 What technologies are available in the near-future which simplify data selection, and how do they do it?

 Will information change in the near future?

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Chapter 1 Evolution

"First there is water, then it looks for the mother, which is silicon. And it always is in geo-thermal active volcanoes, where there is pressure, and a lot of heat. This creates and forms a quartz crystal, in six sides. It grows right-handed and left-handed according to the largest face. It has positive and negative qualities on each of its faces. So that's where we can have our modern radios, televisions, computers, watches, sonar, radar. Everything that's communication, comes from quartz crystals."

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Information Presentation in Ever-Evolving Cyberspace Page 8 Our information based society didn't magically appear out of thin air. We have moved through some major (technological and social) evolutionary steps, in order to reach the point where we now are. In this chapter, I give a brief overview of the current state of what I call cyberspace (or rather, how I redefine it), the internet and, in part, our society.

Section 1: Dawn of an age

Let us first describe the current state of cyberspace. Note: I use the term cyberspace, because the Internet has grown out of the boundaries that it was designed for, as I explain further on. Cyberspace is also a term I (re)define in the coming sections.

The Internet was first intended as a tool for universities to research more efficiently, and to distribute software. When it was later on opened for access to the general public, the first generation of the internet was born1.

Primitive internet was nothing like the internet today. It was limited, there were no graphical browsers available yet, and the total amount of information available on it was nothing compared to the

information available today on single websites, such as Wikipedia, which at the time of writing this thesis, had 2,910,485 unique articles available2. As the Internet grew, so did its capabilities. Graphics, audio and video are standard nowadays, and there are even more innovations just around the corner. We used to access the Internet only through our browser, on a personal computer. As technologies developed, we were beginning to access the internet from our televisions, video game consoles, mobile phones, digital media players and so on. This created cyberspace.

Cyberspace is the fictional, but very real, space where computers and other ubiquitous computing devices communicate. You could say that this is the dimension where the Internet resides. What we see is what devices and applications take out of cyberspace, and deliver to your screen (or whatever medium you use).

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet#Creation - Wikipedia, Internet

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Section 2: Real-time information

Ben Parr of Mashable wrote about the web, and how it is changing into a real-time medium. He writes the following:

"It’s clear that the Web has altered how we as a society consume information. Not only has Internet communication made information more accessible, but social media has made it easier to organize, filter, and most of all, create. Yet with innovations like Twitter (Twitter reviews) and microblogging, we’re reaching a point where the flow of information has become so heavy that the only way to really keep track of it is via real-time web tools."

Ben Parr - Is Real-time the Future of the Web? - http://mashable.com/2009/05/09/future-real-time/

This is indeed a change we are currently seeing. Sites used to be created and published by web publishers. Nowadays, everyone can put content on the internet, and there is limited to no quality control. With over 6 billion people on the planet, of which over 1,5 billion3 use the internet, that is a lot of information. Too much for manual quality control, editing, publishing. It is done in real-time, and people have to wade through a lot of information they do not want or need, if they have no form of information management.

Sites such as Twitter, Digg and Reddit allow users to submit information, with which other people can interact (reacting to tweets, digging up submissions to Digg and Reddit et cetera). However, all this information is decentralized, and people have to visit tons of sites to keep track of the information available. In a sense, this is still the old way of dealing with the information that exists in cyberspace. What we need, is an interface which allows us to access cyberspace directly. A portal to another dimension, to stay in the metaphor I used earlier.

Section 3: A library and its librarian

Now, I don't want to sound vague, so let us describe what a portal to this other dimension would do. It would need to be intelligent, since you do not want to have to edit your preferences every time a new site emerges which has information that could be relevant to your interests, or whenever you're just not in the mood for a particular subject. No, you would want an intelligent, perhaps even robot-like device or application which does all the thinking for you.

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Information Presentation in Ever-Evolving Cyberspace Page 10 This is a feasible concept, with techniques as RSS-feeds and tags already being used. All that would be needed, is a place where every website who wants to participate in this portal can submit their content in real-time. From there, the application can send updates to registered users, saying that there is new content available for them.

I am most certainly not talking about a Digg or Reddit clone. I am talking about a place where all information converges, like a gigantic library of Alexandria, with all the knowledge and information which is currently in existence. Digg only has information submitted by users. This library would have all information by all users world-wide.

You would have a massive amount of data. Impossible to navigate by humans. This we currently have already, in the form of Google. Google has so much information available that searching it is becoming more and more difficult, lower ranking (but perhaps more interesting to you!) information being buried beneath sponsored, optimized websites. We need a solution to the problem this solution brings us. Complementing this library would have to be a librarian, selecting information and delivering it to the user, in an efficient, well-ordered way. But with so much information, what is the best way to present it? You would want to be able to view everything you want at once, but that's too much for current-generation screens, especially for ubiquitous devices such as mobile phones, which are extremely limited in their screen size.

In the coming chapters I will propose a number of solutions to these problems. I am not saying that these will be the accepted methods of the future, only that they are possible outcomes. Society decides which way we go, which is a huge strength of the internet, and modern computing as a whole.

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Chapter 2 Cyber-what now?

"We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and

fair than the world your governments have made before." John Perry Barlow (American poet, essayist, political activist and former lyricist for the Grateful Dead)

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Information Presentation in Ever-Evolving Cyberspace Page 12 Before going any further with my proposed solution, I have to explain certain concepts and how I see them. In this chapter, I have taken some terms and I elaborate on them, which is necessary to understand the coming chapters.

Section 1: Cyberspace

Science fiction novelist William Gibson coined the term Cyberspace in 1982, in his novel "Burning

Chrome", and was made popular in his novel "Neuromancer". It is usually quoted as following:

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.

William Gibson.Neuromancer:20th Anniversary Edition. New York: Ace Books, 2004.

Another writer named Bruce Sterling writes in his non-fiction book "The Hacker Crackdown: Law and

Disorder on the Electronic Frontier" the following about cyberspace:

Cyberspace is the "place" where a telephone conversation appears to occur. Not inside your actual phone, the plastic device on your desk. Not inside the other person's phone, in some other city. The place between the phones. ...in the past twenty years, this electrical "space," which was once thin and dark and one-dimensional—little more than a narrow speaking-tube, stretching from phone to phone—has flung itself open like a gigantic jack-in the- box. Light has flooded upon it, the eerie light of the glowing computer screen. This dark electric netherworld has become a vast flowering electronic landscape. Since the 1960s, the world of the telephone has cross-bred itself with computers and television, and though there is still no substance to cyberspace, nothing you can handle, it has a strange kind of physicality now. It makes good sense today to talk of cyberspace as a place all its own.

Sterling, Bruce. The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder On the Electronic Frontier. Spectra Books, 1992.

I propose a different meaning to the word cyberspace. One updated for the current generation of society.

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Information Presentation in Ever-Evolving Cyberspace Page 13 I define cyberspace as a fictional dimension where all information currently in existence resides. It has no measurements such as height, width, weight or time, and it cannot be seen as an object we can grasp. To access this dimension, we need to use portals or gateways which allow us to take a sip of the enormous pool of information contained within this space. An example of a gateway could be the Internet, but also text-messages get sent through cyberspace, and once sent, they will forever reside there. Every piece of information ever written lives in cyberspace. I agree with Sterling that cyberspace is the place where devices communicate with each other. But unlike Sterling, I expand this place to be not only a place for communication, but a data-source. It is a place which is ever expanding, and it has no boundaries. In the future, every service which needs data in whatever form, will connect to this cyberspace, and extract that which it needs from it. This is possible, since every information source is connected to each other, creating one massive sphere of almost unending information.

Section 2: Ubiquitous Computing

Ubiquitous computing is the term to describe devices networking together, exchanging information without the user having to be aware of these devices doing so. For example, you enter your house, and your PC picks up your presence, via your mobile phone being in range. The mobile phone and pc connect, data gets synchronized, your Google Calendar gets updated, and your text messages are stored. Ubiquitous Computing requires little to no user-interaction. It responds to events, rather than interaction.Ubiquitous devices are often stand-alone computing devices, such as mobile phones, portable media players, but also refrigerators with a smart display built-in, or environmental controls which monitor the user and adapts accordingly. You could say these are technologies which display intelligence. Artificial Intelligence, so to speak.

There is even a term for this kind of artificial intelligence. We speak of Ambient Intelligence, since devices are aware of the presence of people. Ambient Intelligent devices can be tailored to specific persons, to suit their wants and needs. They are adaptive; they will change to your changing wants and needs. They are anticipatory; they can anticipate what you want or need, without you having to tell it what to do. They are embedded and do not grab your attention unneeded, and they are aware of the context in which you are situated.4

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Bieliková, Mária; Krajcovic, Tibor (2001), "Ambient Intelligence within a Home Environment", ERCIM News (47), October 2001

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Information Presentation in Ever-Evolving Cyberspace Page 14 Such a smart technology is what we need in the future. I for one am not looking forward to endless Google browsing. I'd much rather have a piece of software which knows me, and displays results which are sure to be the ones I am looking for, or at least the ones I need at that time, for example.

Section 3: Types of Information

What types of information are there? I see information as everything which provides data to the user (or smart device) is information. This can be text, video, images, audio, tactile and so on. Within those groups there are a lot of subgroups. Take text for example. There's informative text, such as research papers, news items, discussion boards, but also entertaining text, such as jokes, funny e-mails, 'fake' news articles (for example, TheOnion.com). Images are no different. You can have graphs, statistics, scholarly pictures. But also artwork, illustrations, etc.

This provides an extra hardship for any search engine or the like. Is the user looking for serious information, or does he or she want to be entertained? What is his or her current mood? This is something we can also take into account, via Ambient Intelligence. More on that in a later chapter.

Paragraph 1: Text

Text is the most abundant form of information available. Data, statistics, news, communiqué's, and so on are all text based, sometimes accompanied by other types of data, such as images.

The daily newspaper, blog updates, Twitter tweets, e-mail and so on, all add to the amount of text available in cyberspace. This is an enormous load of textual data, which can't be read by a normal human in his entire lifetime.

Karl Fish, in his YouTube hit "Did You Know 3.0", said that "a week's worth of the New York Times contains more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th century"5. He also estimates that "4 exabytes (4x100000000000000000000 bytes) of unique information will be generated this year. That is more than the previous 5000 years."3. This was about 2008, and this number keeps growing. According to WolframAlpha, a computational knowledge search engine, this is comparable to three times the total knowledge of the entire human race6.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpEnFwiqdx8, Did You Know 3.0, Karl Fish, modified by Scott McLeod

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Information Presentation in Ever-Evolving Cyberspace Page 15 The advantage of textual data, is that it can be indexed, cached and searched through easily. No real need for tags or categories, because any modern search engine can crawl through the data. The only set-back here, is that indexing takes a lot of time.

Paragraph 2: Images and other data

Then there's images. A web-crawler, used by most modern day search engines, can't really tell what's in a picture. It relies on the content in which it appears, and tags the content publisher attached to it. Even the filename gets taken in as reference, but how much does a filename like PIC00032.jpg tell about an image? Not much.

Even harder is audio/visual data, such as YouTube clips. Those cannot be indexed by web-crawlers, so they cannot get listed in search-engines. In order to accommodate those search engines, the videos need to be tagged and categorized. This doesn't happen automatically, so the search-engine relies primarily on the content publisher to tag his or her video properly. More often than not, this doesn't happen. Also, this system is sensitive to malicious use, like for instance, some illustrious company who tries to sell their products by adding false tags to a video about their product.

Now, audio on the other hand, is something entirely different. There are not a lot of websites which offer direct-download of audio. Most of the time, this happens through some third party application, like Limewire, which facilitates peer-to-peer file transfer. This means, that users connect to each other, which allows them to download and upload files directly. How on earth are you supposed to index every file on every person's computer? This is impossible using current search-engines, and, an even bigger issue, privacy laws.

Also widely popular nowadays, is the use of BitTorrent for file distribution. BitTorrents is different from Limewire in many ways. First, you do not browse the files on someone else's computer. BitTorrent acts through the use of Torrent files, which are hosted on a website. The advantage here is, that those files

can be indexed and archived, so this way of file distribution is search-able. This can be used in the future

by companies to distribute files, which is already happening.

Microsoft distributed the beta and release candidate of its new operating system, Windows 7, via BitTorrent. Blizzard Entertainment distributes patches to their game World of Warcraft through the BitTorrent protocol, and offers downloadable versions of their games via this way. I believe this will happen more often in the future. The biggest advantage of this method, is that bandwidth usage gets

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Information Presentation in Ever-Evolving Cyberspace Page 16 spread over each downloader. In the past, users would have to download those files from a single server, and its bandwidth is limited. With BitTorrent, this problem is solved.

BitTorrent functions in the same way as Limewire, in the sense that one user has the file other users want on their computer. Through the use of a torrent file, which has the information about the user which hosts the file, other people can download the file from the user. When one user completes his or her download, he or she automatically begins seeding this file as well. So now we have two people hosting the file. Exponential growth is reached this way, so it is a very effective way of distributing files and data in a fast and efficient way.

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Chapter 3 Current methods of information

presentation

“Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders.”

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Information Presentation in Ever-Evolving Cyberspace Page 18 In this chapter I will explore several current generation methods of information presentation. I will look at some popular web-based services and tools, and explain how their methods work. I will then explain why their methods are going to fail in the (near) future.

Section 1: Twitter

The most popular, hyped up web-based service today is Twitter. About a year ago, no one even heard about Twitter, nowadays everybody uses it. Politicians, schools, companies, all of them use Twitter to publish news updates. While Twitter was originally meant to be a service for friends and family, to tell them what people are doing. Now, it is that, and much more.

Twitter uses short messages with a maximum length of 140 characters to tell the world what someone is doing. People can 'follow' other people, which means that they receive updates on their Twitter page from people they are following.

This sounds pretty simple, and fool-proof. But what happens when you follow 100 people, who all post messages every hour (or even more, which is often the case)? You get 2400 updates daily, which you'll want to read. This is not even a far-fetched scenario. Many people have over a 100 people they follow, and a lot of people update more than once an hour.

There are a lot of web services which build on Twitter. Most of them allow users to post tweets (Twitter updates) more easily, others enhance the functionality of Twitter, and some use Twitter's data to do things, like animation, games and the like. In order to cope with the massive amount of Twitter updates, there has to be a web service which displays the tweets in a view which is compact, modular (so it can be integrated in other services or devices) and adaptable to the user's current needs.

Section 2: Search Engines

Current generation search engines use cached, indexed pages as their source of data. This has worked fine for about 20 years, since new content was added slowly, pages weren't updated regularly and the pages were not that dynamic. Nowadays, pages are dynamic, content changes daily or even more frequently, and certain content is real-time.

Our current search engine technology cannot search in real-time data. Something just happened in the world and you want more information about it? Even market leader Google cannot help you there.

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Information Presentation in Ever-Evolving Cyberspace Page 19 Google themselves stated that "real-time search is our biggest challenge"7, which is something they will have to overcome in the near future to stay competitive.

Section 3: Browsers

Modern browsers are limited to 2 dimensions to display information, horizontally and vertically. This limits the amount of data we can display and view simultaneously. Of course, this method has worked very well for the last 30 years, so no real innovation was needed.

Browsers started out to be text-only, but that was soon changed to include the ability to display images. After that, the innovation kind of stopped. Sure, video and audio playback were added, but video is really only moving pictures, and audio has no real impact on the displaying of information. Reading is a more efficient way to get information than hearing.

With the information overload coming, we have to evolve further. This might be with 3 dimensional browsing, or some other form of browsing the web.

Section 4: Computing in General

We have been using personal computers for almost 30 years now, and it has evolved into something so integrated into our society that our world cannot be imagined without the PC. So much which we do in a day is done with a computer, and even more is done automatically, without us even knowing it. For instance, the mail you send is sorted by computers, the telephone calls you make are redirected using computers, the internet you use is organized by millions of computers.

In the past, computers were stand-alone devices. Everything we did with it happened on the local hardware you had at your disposal. It might have been connected to a network, or even the internet, but every operation you did, for example word processing, was done at your local hardware.

When computers weren't as complex as they are now, this was sufficient. But with our current need to share data, and to collaborate, as well as with the technological advancements we have experienced in the past, this is becoming obsolete. We can develop the hardware needed for web-based computing very cheaply, which is interesting to companies and even for personal use. Almost everyone in the

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http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/12/google-launches-search-options-declares-real-time-search-biggest-challenge/, Techcrunch, Google Launches Search Options, Declares Real-Time Search Biggest Challenge

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Information Presentation in Ever-Evolving Cyberspace Page 20 Netherlands alone have access to broadband internet8, which allows us to utilize the web to do our computing.

We are seeing a development in web based computing. Google, for instance, has an entire office suite available online. No need to install anything on your computer, except for a web browser. I believe this trend will continue to develop. Web-based applications can be very handy for companies, since they don't need to invest in expensive hardware, or software packages. A lot of web-based applications are also modular, a term which I will delve into in a later section.

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http://www.telecompaper.com/news/article.aspx?cid=675788, Telecompaper, Dutch broadband market to reach six million in 2009

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Chapter 4 The future of information presentation

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

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Information Presentation in Ever-Evolving Cyberspace Page 22 In this chapter I will describe some possible outcomes of the oncoming information overload, some technologies we can use, and how we will cope with it all.

Section 1: 3D Internet

Some companies, including Google, are experimenting with 3D internet. Adding this extra dimension to the internet can be a huge step forward in the design, look and feel, and overall presentation for the internet, but it has its advantages and disadvantages, which I will explore in this section.

First of all, in order to navigate the internet in 3D, there has to be some software written for this. After the software has been written, designers have to (re-)design the internet. Normal, standard pages as we use them today are not compatible with 3D techniques. Presenting those in a 3D environment is like printing out a page of a script and displaying that in a movie theatre. The information is the same, but the context and medium is not compatible. The medium is the message, remember?

No, in order to have a successful 3D Internet, it has to be redesigned to be compatible with this technique. In the coming paragraphs, I will explore some possible design outcomes.

Paragraph 1: A Forest

Say that you are a young student, and you have to do research on the forest, and forest-dwelling animals. You could navigate Wikipedia, by following regular hyperlinks. Which is boring to a young student, and it does not really connect with his world, or his research subject. Much more interesting to the student is navigating an actual forest, where he sees his research subject. Perhaps in the future, with Experience Enhancing Web Design you could really have a connection with this subject. Back in the forest, the young researcher can discover the animals he needs, and they can lead him to more interesting information. This might not be the easiest way of information presentation, but it can grasp the attention of children, and allow them to delve deeper into the subject.

For this to work, not a lot of technology is needed. All we need is a plug-in for browsers to display a 3D environment (which exists, see Google's O3D, for example). That plug-in needs to communicate with a data source, say Wikipedia, to get the needed information. From there, with hyper-linking through the data, the student can navigate through the 'forest' of information. This could even be expanded to allow the student to roam through the entire animal kingdom. All we need is someone who designs this, the technology exists already.

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Information Presentation in Ever-Evolving Cyberspace Page 23 This is a perfect opportunity for parents and teachers to educate their children in a fun and exciting new way, with the help of the computer and internet.

Paragraph 2: The Businessman

You are a business man, and you need to have everything organized and handled in an easy and fast way. 3D Internet can help here.

Imagine a hallway, with pillars color-coded for each section of data. Like your agenda, e-mail and contacts in one, news updates, stock information and other RSS feeds in another, and recreational information on a third. If this were to be done in a 2D environment, you would need either a very long or wide page, or multiple pages. In this 3D setup, you have one hallway, where you can navigate to each section of information which you need at that time.

Paragraph 3: Navigation

3D information presentation calls for a new way of navigating. The mouse and keyboard can be used for this, but maybe a new way of interfacing should be used here. Maybe gesture based interfacing is the way to go here.

Microsoft has recently released details about a project which they are working on for the game

industry. With this technology, named Project Natal, people control games with their voice and their full body, no controller required. Walk towards the screen and this is reflected in-game. Wave your hand in one direction, and this again affects the virtual world. I believe this technology can also positively impact the 3D internet world.

It is much faster to point at a pillar and go to it, or rotate it with your hands as you would rotate a real life pillar, to use my businessman example once more, opposed to clicking your way to it, and rotating it with your mouse. It feels more natural when you perform natural motions. This, I think, is the way to go if society decides that 3D internet is the way to go.

I say society, since nowadays more than ever, society decides which direction developments take. There are so many people on the internet now, that they have the power to make something big, or smash it into oblivion.

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Section 2: Ubiquitous Computing

Of course, the personal computer is not the only device we use to access cyberspace. Nowadays we have palmtops, cellular phones, television, game consoles, radio's, advertisements and so on connecting to cyberspace through the internet. What can we do with these devices? I will explore certain options in this section.

Paragraph 1: Cellular Phones

Cell-phone, like the personal computer, are integrated into modern day society. I cannot imagine a life without them anymore, which is strange, since the first 15 years of my life I was perfectly happy without one. That's how fast our society changes through technology.

Modern cell-phones all have access to the internet, albeit a bit mediocre in certain cases. But with the arrival of the iPhone, and other smart phones, this is changing rapidly. You can navigate the internet from those phones as easily as you would on your computer, and this brings up opportunities never before possible for mobile communication. All modern cell-phones can connect to a computer in one way or another, making syncing of information very easy.

Cell-phones have a lot of advantages, as described above. But they are still limited by a small screen, slow internet reception (compared to computers) and the interaction is not as easy as on a computer. Granted, the iPhone's gesture based multi-touch interface is rather innovative, and it can be used alongside the 3D interface described in the preceding section. But on such a small screen, is that really helpful? Won't it affect readability, accessibility, and such?

In my opinion, it will. In a 3D environment, the letters would become too small to read (easily), and the 3D world would easily be too complex to navigate with say, your thumb while walking. No, for mobile devices such as a cell-phone, a different approach to 3D navigation is needed.

A possible solution might be the usage of cubes, or other geometrical forms which has sides, to present the information. Information gets grouped in those forms and given a distinctive color. After clicking, rather, touching one of those forms, you get a zoomed in, full-screen view of the form, and with a flick of your thumb, you can navigate the facets of the form. Much like the pillar idea for the computer, except that this is more easily read on a limited screen-size.

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Paragraph 2: Ambient Intelligence Devices

Developers are currently researching technology which registers the body's wants and needs, and emotions experienced by the user. If this trend continues, and I believe it will, then we will be able to tailor the user experience even better to the user's needs than ever before9.

Again, in the gaming industry, people have been researching using the user's vital signs in-game, as well as the user's emotions. In the game Milo designed for Microsoft's Project Natal, the virtual character Milo responds differently to you if the system sees an emotion in you10 (as well as recognize what you say). This same technology could be used to select which data to present to the user.

Nintendo, the game developer, is developing an add-on for the Wii-mote, the controller for their game console the Wii, which register's a person's vital signs. Now, Nintendo hasn't really announced any project which use this technology, other than saying that they want to help people relax11.

Nevertheless, I think something can be done with this technology which was previously impossible. I give you now an extreme example, one which might quite possible never see the light of day, but a possibility nonetheless. Say for example, that you are stressed out, and can't handle any bad news. This vitality sensor would pick this up, and all bad news would be filtered out of the data you receive on your screen (or other medium).

Another possibility could be the following. Picture a student who has trouble focusing on tasks at hand (myself, for example). I could wander off into my browser, and do something not work related. The system could pick this up, and present only information which is related to the task at hand. This sounds a bit like some totalitarian, Orwellian company which forces their employees to work, and only work, but still, it is a possible outcome. Although, again, I doubt this will happen. Nobody wants a device which eliminates relaxation, people would rather buy something which makes their work more pleasant.

9_{Cook, D. J.; Augusto, J. C., Jakkula, R. V., " Ambient intelligence: Technologies, applications, and opportunities"} 10

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDvHlwNvXaM, Microsoft Project Natal: Milo demonstration, E3 2009

11

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Information Presentation in Ever-Evolving Cyberspace Page 26 As soon as the technology exists which enables devices to register our wants and needs, without our interference, we can begin filtering the data we receive and tailor it to our current needs. When we want to relax, we only see things which help us do so. When we need to be productive, or are working on something, we only get to see information regarding that project or assignment. This helps us, because we do get distracted by useless information. We can always access that information at a later date.

Paragraph 3: Ubiquity

Alright, so now we have devices measuring our vitals. This information needs to be passed onto other devices, we can hardly have these vital checkers in each and every device we have around us. This would push prices up for those devices, and it is pointless to have multiple devices which have the same technology.

With Ubiquitous Computing, we have devices which work fine stand-alone, but work even better when paired together. Ubiquitous devices are in fact tiny computers which perform the function for which they were designed, and communicate with other devices in its neighborhood. This allows data to be shared, and interaction is possible.

So, a vitals checker picks up that you are tired, and need to relax. It sends this data to your computer, and the RSS feed checked installed there selects data marked as entertainment, and displays this for you. No work-related data should be displayed then, in order to allow the user to relax.

Amazon's e-Book reader, Kindle, would also work perfectly with this. It has a network connection, so interfacing is easily possible. Imagine this: A system which is integrated into your house, reads your moods, and delivers data directly to your Kindle device, which you then can read from the palm of your hand. Sounds a bit like science-fiction, but a lot of this is actually possible right now.

Paragraph 4: Software

All of this hardware I described above is all nice and fancy, but it's the software that empowers it. Developers have to develop the software needed in order to let the hardware function. That means that we have to index and catalogue moods of people, in order to build software which acts on those moods. With the current shift towards web-based applications (see Google Apps, for example), I believe we will see more of this in the future. Especially since the application is the same no matter where you access it, your own personal settings get saved. This is a huge advantage over old-fashioned, desktop

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Information Presentation in Ever-Evolving Cyberspace Page 27 applications, where you have to install everything on your own computer, and that's the only place you can access it. With broadband internet being available to everyone in the coming years, it is feasible that the desktop computing environment will shift towards a more modular, web-based set-up. This presents opportunities for adaptable software, and the data that it presents. When devices start communicating ubiquitously, and data about the user gets picked up intelligently, the software experience of the user can be adapted to this fully automatically. No need for the user to interact with the setting, in order to get the best experience possible.

Of course the user could still set up different options. The system should be entirely adaptable to the user's own preferences. This, again, is something new. In the past, our experience was defined by the companies and developers that brought us our operating systems and software packages. Nowadays, people want to be able to customize the look, feel, and overall functionality of the application. When we look for instance at the layout of Google's iGoogle, we see a perfect example of software which is entirely customizable to the user's wants and needs. People can add tabs, and fill those tabs with modular content, such as a notepad, the latest weather or RSS updates, GMail inbox, and so forth.

Figure 1: iGoogle, as I use it

This is a trend which, in my opinion, has a lot of potential. Microsoft has announced that they will be using a modular approach in their operating systems, Vista and onwards12, which is a huge step forward. No longer do you have to wait for major releases. Do you like a new functionality? Why, just

12

http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2006/03/6295.ars, Ars Technica, Windows Vista to support upgrades on the fly - Ars Technica

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Information Presentation in Ever-Evolving Cyberspace Page 28 add it! This is hard in desktop-based environments, but for the web, it's a simple as a click on a button, if the application is developed correctly.

How modular design works

It is fairly simple, really. All you need is a framework which supports adding modules.

A framework is like an empty building. It provides the basic functionality you expect from a building, but the contents define what that building will become. Add furniture and home appliances, and it becomes a home. Add tools and machinery, and it becomes a manufacturing company. A framework is the same, it provides the basic functionality needed by software (web-based or otherwise), to allow the software the most basic operations, such as file input and output, database connectivity and so on. To stay in the building metaphor, the building has access to the internet, electricity and plumbing. Whatever you do with it, is up to the modules that will be using the functions.

Now the modules are tiny bits of standalone applications which provide functionality. They can be used independently, but are more powerful when used together with other modules. To use the building metaphor once more, a module can be a refrigerator, a micro-wave, a chair, a bed, and so on. They function perfectly well alone, but together, they create a home for a family, or, with other modules, a workplace for a company.

Figure 2: Modular Design

This is the power of modular design. Add different modules and you wind up with an entirely different application. This allows users to tailor their experiences entirely to their needs. Link this with

ubiquitous devices, and ambient intelligence devices, and you have a fully functional system, integrated into the user's experience, wants, and needs.

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Information Presentation in Ever-Evolving Cyberspace Page 29 The information presented is then tailored to the current needs of the user, rather than having to wade through an enormous stream of never-ending data. Of course, the possibility of manually selecting data and viewing what you want when you want it needs to stay available. The key is just, that the user doesn't need to do this anymore.

Section 3: The Data

So, we have this huge amount of data available to us now, and even more in the future. Will this data evolve, or change? Yes, and no.

I think it will stay the same for the most part, since a lot of data is just plain and simple, text. Text never changes form. Say, in an extreme case, that our entire language changes, even the characters we use. Still, text remains the same: a collection of pre-defined symbols, that, when grouped together in a certain way, provide meaning and allow us to communicate. This has been the case for thousands of years13. I do not see this changing in the near future, of this will ever change at all. So written data will always be available, and it will be the most abundant.

Besides text data, there are the numerous other types of data which I described before. These will grow, and their usage will expand to well beyond the borders of the Internet. Digital television is on the rise, for instance. Telephone via the net, and so on.

What needs to be done with this data, is it needs to be categorized, tagged and classified. This is already happening in some cases, such as blog posts, news updates, YouTube videos and such. In the future, in order to be able to sort data and select which we want or need to view, we need to have tags and categories. This requires the user who publishes the data to tag and categorize it properly, and it is in my experience, that this doesn't happen very often. Especially not with real-time data, such as Twitter tweets, or posts on the world's largest and most active discussion board, 4chan. Actually, Gaia Online is the biggest, but since that is tailored specifically to one subject, I have skipped it and selected 4chan as largest. It is also one of the best known boards, its creator/administrator having won Time's annual World's Most Influential Person poll14.

13_{http://www.mesopotamia.co.uk/time/explore/frame_wri.html, Mesopotamia, History of Written Languages} 14

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1894028,00.html, Time Magazine, Time's World's Most Influential Person Award 2009

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Figure 3: 4chan's growth. Source: http://www.big-boards.com/board/2225/

Posts on 4chan don't usually live longer than half an hour. It is therefore impossible to index it with modern day search engines, and they aren't tagged, making it impossible to categorize them. Now are the posts on 4chan not really index-worthy, since most of them are absolute non-sense, and hardly have any informational value. Some posts however, have quite valuable information, such as posts in the food section, or automobile. These boards can be seen as categories, and the data there can then be searched through based on those categories.

The only problem that remains is this: websites need to be adapted to suit search engines that search real-time data. They need to provide a raw data-stream, to which said engine can connect, in order to be able to provide accurate, up-to-date results. Like I said, 4chan's posts usually don't last longer than half an hour (especially on its /b/ - random board), so if the data presented by the search engine is older than, say, 5 minutes, it is useless.

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Chapter 5 Summary and Conclusion

The internet is changing. Cyberspace is expanding at an alarming rate, and we are presented with an imminent information overload. The technology to manage this huge amount of data is there, the potential is there, all we need now is someone to take this opportunity and create a new way of data selection and presentation. I have presented Google as a major competitor in the field of modern data-management and -presentation, as they are experimenting with a lot of new ways of programming, and overall software design.

With the advancements in Ambient Intelligence and ubiquitous computing, we have new ways to communicate with the user and with his or her devices. This allows us to select and present information in a whole new way, a way never possible before with older technology. In the future, the user's

experience will truly be his or her own, without the need of software companies to design a standardized way of interfacing. The user will simply modify it so it fits their wants and needs.

In this paper I've described new ways of interfacing, designing and categorizing data. It is, however, up to you, the web-developer, web-designer, software engineer, content editor and everyone else who works with data, to use it and create the future of cyberspace. Of course, everything I suggested here doesn't have to happen. We might use something entirely different in the future. Predicting the future is hard, even when you research the past of the Internet and software. Even when there is hardware that is more powerful, this still doesn't guarantee that it will be the most used. The past proves that (Betamax, CD-i, HD-DVD and so on). The user will always be the deciding factor in which direction we evolve as community, and which tools we use with it.

In conclusion, I can say that we are facing exciting times. A lot of changes are imminent, as the internet and cyberspace become more and more entangled with our day to day lives. Who knows what the future will bring us, but I know one thing for sure, we will find a way to manage it all.

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Literature

Books & Journals

 Bell, G., & Dourish, P. (2007). Yesterday’s tomorrows: notes on ubiquitous computing’s dominant vision. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing. 11, issue 2 (January 2007), 133-143.

 Cook, D.J., Augusto, J.C., & Jakkula, V.R. (2009), Ambient intelligence: Technologies, applications, and opportunities, Pervasive and Mobile Computing,

doi:10.1016/j.pmcj.2009.04.001

 Fortuna, C., & Mohorcic, M. (2009). Trends in the development of communication networks: Cognitive networks . Computer Networks. 53, 1354-1376.

 Gibson, W. (2004). Neuromancer, 20th anniversary edition. New York, NY: Ace Books.

 Greenfield, A. (2006). Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing. Berkeley, CA: New Riders.

 Manovich, L. (2008). Software takes command.

 Massumi, B. (1997).Interface and Active Space: Human Machine-Design.

 Sterling, B. (1993). The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier. New York, NY: Bantam Dell.

Websites

 British Museum, the, (2006, February 06th). Time - Explore. Retrieved June 1st, 2009, from Time Web site: http://www.mesopotamia.co.uk/time/explore/frame_wri.html

 Fisher, K. (2006, March 1st). Windows Vista to support upgrades on the fly. Retrieved June 15, 2009, from Ars Technica Web site: http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2006/03/6295.ars

 Time Staff, (2009, April 27th). The world's most influential person is.... Retrieved April 27th, 2009, from Time Web site: http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1894028,00.html

 Parr, B. (May 9th, 2009). Is real-time the future of the web? Retrieved May 9th, 2009, from Mashable Web site: http://mashable.com/2009/05/09/future-real-time/

 Schonfeld, E. (2009, May 12th). Techcrunch. Retrieved May 12th, 2009, from Google Launches Search Options, Declares Real-Time Search Biggest Challenge Web site:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/12/google-launches-search-options-declares-real-time-search-biggest-challenge/

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 Miniwatts Marketing Group, (2009. May 31st). World internet usage statistics news and world population stats. Retrieved June 10th, 2009, from Internet World Stats Web site:

http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

 Iwata, S. (2009, June 2nd). YouTube. Retrieved June 2nd, 2009, from YouTube - E3 - 2009: Wii Vitality Sensor Web site: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRwarxMTxZg

 Molyneux, P. (2009, June 2nd). YouTube. Retrieved June 2nd, 2009, from YouTube - E3 2009 - Project Natal - Milo Demo with Peter Molyneux Web site:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDvHlwNvXaM

 Wikipedia, (2009, June 10th). Statistics. Retrieved June 10th, 2009, from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Web site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics

 Wikipedia, (2009, June 16th). Internet. Retrieved June 10th, 2009, from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Web site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet#Creation



Telecompaper, (2009, June 11th). Telecompaper. Retrieved June 11th, 2009, from Dutch broadband market to reach six million in 2009 Web site:

http://www.telecompaper.com/news/article.aspx?cid=675788

 WolframAlpha, (2009). WolframAlpha. Retrieved June 11th, 2009, from WolframAlpha - Computational search engine Web site:

http://www01.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=4x10^19+bytes

 Scoopler, (2009). Scoopler. Retrieved June 15, 2009, from Scoopler: Real-time search Web site: http://www.scoopler.com/

 Fish, McLeod, K, S (2009). 2008 layest edition - did you know 3.0. Retrieved June 9, 2009, from YouTube Web site: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpEnFwiqdx8

List of Figures

Figure 1: iGoogle, as I use it ... 27 Figure 2: Modular Design ... 28 Figure 3: 4chan's growth. Source: http://www.big-boards.com/board/2225/ ... 30 Figure 1 and 2 are my own creations.

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Copyrights

The pictures used in the chapter title pages are copyrighted stock photographs, obtained from DeviantArt:

 Chapter 1: Crystal 1, by Brenda Clarke of Inadesign, http://inadesign-stock.deviantart.com/

 Chapter 2: Flying to Paradise, by Jamie of SimplyBackground, http://simplybackgrounds.deviantart.com/

 Chapter 3: Technical, by Serial Killer, http://serialkillerstock.deviantart.com/

 Chapter 4: Crystal Ball, by Carri of Rivendell Studios, http://rivendell-photostock.deviantart.com/

 Front page: Dawn of Cyberspace Society, original stock image by Johnny OToole, http://johnnyot.deviantart.com/, edited by myself for use in my thesis.

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Information Presentation in Ever Evolving Cyberspace

Evolving Cyberspace

Michel Maas

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1

Evolution

Section 1: Dawn of an age

Section 2: Real-time information

Section 3: A library and its librarian

Chapter 2

Cyber-what now?

Section 1: Cyberspace

Section 2: Ubiquitous Computing

Section 3: Types of Information

Chapter 3

Current methods of information

presentation

Section 1: Twitter

Section 2: Search Engines

Section 3: Browsers

Section 4: Computing in General

Chapter 4

The future of information presentation

Section 1: 3D Internet

Section 2: Ubiquitous Computing

Section 3: The Data

Chapter 5

Summary and Conclusion

Literature

Books & Journals

Websites



List of Figures

Copyrights

License