[Sigia-l] TBL reading too much SIGIA-L?

[Ziya Oz]

The Web has become such a force in commerce and culture that a group of
leading university researchers now deems it worthy of its own field of
study.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Southampton
in Britain plan to announce today that they are starting a joint research
program in Web science.

Web science, the researchers say, has social and engineering dimensions. It
extends well beyond traditional computer science, they say, to include the
emerging research in social networks and the social sciences that is being
used to study how people behave on the Web. And Web science, they add,
shifts the center of gravity in engineering research from how a single
computer works to how huge decentralized Web systems work.

³The Web isn¹t about what you can do with computers,² Mr. Berners-Lee said.
³It¹s people and, yes, they are connected by computers. But computer
science, as the study of what happens in a computer, doesn¹t tell you about
what happens on the Web.²

NYT - Group of University Researchers to Make Web Science a Field of Study:

<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/02/technology/02compute.html>

Just when you thought you could tell your IA from an ID, comes Sir TBL in a
lab coat to create a "science" out of, well, you'll have to define it
yourself. Venn diagrams and books to follow. :-)

Would Martha Stewart consider this A Good Thing?

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Ziya

Usability >  Simplify the Solution
Design >  Simplify the Problem