Self-organized web regularities
is the name of a subhead in “Toward Nature-Inspired Computing,” from CACM 49.10. A snippet:
Users are viewed as information-foraging entities inhabiting the Web environment or as a collection of Web sites connected by hyperlinks. When an entity finds certain Web sites with content related to its topic(s) of interest, it will be motivated to search sites deeper into the Web. On the other hand, when an entity finds no interesting information after a certain amount of foraging or finds enough content to satisfy its interest, it stops foraging and goes offline, leaving the Web environment.
- “An entity”: this makes me think the authors are thinking about web surfing as an activity not restricted to humans. Good. Multiple folks have suggested Googlebot is the most important user of the web, and certainly there are whole disciplines of site design and encoding devoted to supposed optimizations. But of course, other bots crawl and scrape the web, and it’s possible to envision an entire site like del.icio.us or Digg as one of these entities.
- Who goes offline when done browsing? Users may bounce to different sites, but the issue of interest, being done with a topic, and going offline seems more complex than that.
- In some ways this strikes me as a meatspace conception of browsing, or an encyclopedia: the web is an organism/thing designed for storing and finding knowledge for retrieval. Hrm. We all know that it’s a lot more than that; it’s a destination in itself (e.g. webmail).
Gotta get another piece this cites and see what all this is about.