Digital Innovation - Investigating the Sustainability of New Kinds of Web

Abstract

From a technical perspective, the Web is a distributed information architecture that is based on the concepts of interaction (HTTP), format (HTML/RDF) and identification (URI) [5]. "Browsing", "navigating" and "information discovery" are the kinds of generic activities that web developers and information scientists concern themselves with, but the more common labels adopted by users to describe their online activities are Social Networking, Internet Video, Blogging, Online Banking, Open Source Development, Internet Porn, E-research and Internet Shopping. Specialist kinds of interaction (shopping baskets, playlists, blogrolls) are recognizable in all these activities, even though users may be simply "navigating web pages". Those web engineers and content providers building on the Web to provide Internet Shopping (e-commerce, b2b, secure financial transactions, product databases, stock control, warehouses and delivery) have different concerns to those dealing with Internet Video (rights acquisition, media streaming, content licensing, bandwidth negotiation, format transformation). Following the socio-technical perspective described by Law [7], we can see the Web as a loose affiliation of semi-independent content networks (each a web in its own right) with their own practices, technologies, business models and ecology of producers and consumers. The Web is a network of networks of stakeholders mutually reinforced and stabilized by each others’ success and by W3C standards and policies. Innovation in the WWW occurs either through making improvements within an existing network (better ways of delivering Internet TV, for example) or by the creation of an entirely new web of activity to supplement the existing Web. Berners-Lee describes this process as ‘magic’[1]; this paper identifies a recent Web innovation, analyses the quantitative evidence of its adoption and models the processes involved in its development in order to understand the magic of the web and to improve its chances of sustainability.

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ORCID for Les Carr: orcid.org/0000-0002-2113-9680

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