Weaving the World Wide Web - The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution - page 237

deceptively so that search engines rank the pages higher than they would
without any manipulation. Web spam can take a number of forms. Term spam-
ming employs the term in question repeatedly on the web page, sometimes
using white text on a white background so that the spam is invisible to human
readers. Cloaking involves deceiving a web crawler by having different pages for
normal requests than for spiders. The spider returns a clean web page without
spam. Another way to influence the importance score is to automate the crea-
tion of a large number of different web pages with links to the customer's site.
For all these reasons, modern search engines now include many other factors
besides PageRank in arriving at their ranking of search results. For example,
Harry Shum from Microsoft's Bing search engine team has said, “We use over
1,000 different signals and features in our ranking algorithm.” 20

Fig. 11.25. The cyber power stations of
the twenty-first century. Steam is rising
from the cooling towers of Google Data
center in “The Dalles, Oregon.”

The social web and beyond

Darcy DiNucci, a consultant on information design, first introduced the
term Web 2.0 in 1999 in an article called “Fragmented Future”:

The relationship of Web 1.0 to the Web of tomorrow is roughly the equivalent
of Pong to The Matrix. Today's Web is essentially a prototype - a proof of
concept. This concept of interactive content universally accessible through
a standard interface has proved so successful that a new industry is set on
transforming, capitalizing on all its powerful possibilities. The Web we know
now, which loads into a browser window in essentially static screenfuls, is
only an embryo of the Web to come.
The first glimmerings of Web 2.0 are beginning to appear, and we are just
starting to see how that embryo might develop.… The Web will be understood
not as screenfuls of text and graphics but as a transport mechanism, the ether
through which interactivity happens. 21

B.11.12. Ward Cunningham invented
the first collaborative wiki , a website
that allows users to make changes
and add their own contributions.
Wiki is a Hawaiian word meaning
fast or quick.

The term Web 2.0 was later popularized by computer topic publisher Tim
O'Reilly at the first Web 2.0 conference, held in 2004. The term does not refer
to an update of any particular technical specification but rather to the way
in which software developers and users are now using the web, focusing on
collaboration, user-generated content, and social networking. Web 2.0 appli-
cations allow users to interact and collaborate in new ways to create virtual
communities. This development is visible through the growth in popularity of
the online journals called blogs and of wikis , websites that allow users to make
changes and add their own contributions.
The word blog is an abbreviation of web log and is usually an online diary
recording the thoughts or actions of an individual ( Fig. 11.26 ). Blogs are inter-
active in that, on most blogs, readers can leave comments and participate in an
online discussion. The growth of blogging was accelerated by new, easy-to-use
web publishing tools that did not require the user to have any knowledge of
technologies such as HTML or FTP. By 2011, there were more than 150 million
public blogs.
A wiki is a website that allows its users to interact with the site to add, mod-
ify, or delete content. The name wiki is a Hawaiian word meaning fast or quick .
Ward Cunningham ( B.11.12 ), inventor of the wiki, described it as “the simplest