Synthesis

A short history of the web

The first application that opened up the net to the common person was email. It was simple in concept and nearly universal in applicability. Email is just a letter that takes no time to post and doesn’t require a stamp or a physical address. Following that, the Web browser is really what brought the Web as we know it today to the common person. No longer did you have to wait for information to come to you over the radio, TV, or in printed media, you could now go looking for what you personally were interested in, or if there wasn’t anything out there, publish it yourself for other people to find. However, the people who were the early adopters here were still mostly technical. Maintaining a website required an expensive internet connection, maintaining large amounts of complicated code, and lots of time FTPing files around. The only people for whom the effort was worthwhile were computer scientists and physicists who needed to share huge datasets that required large computing resources to process them. Even as late as the mid-90s, the web remained largely by nerds for nerds.

How it’s different, and easier, now

In the past couple years, there have been extremely rapid and important changes occurring in the way people communicate and share information. Most scientists, spending most of their time at the bench doing experiments, or the desktop writing grants, have missed these changes. The truly amazing thing is that the basic infrastructure has been laid, the heavy lifting has been done, but the space hasn’t become crowded yet. The purpose of this next series of posts is to discuss these changes, what they mean for the average scientist(and I know that’s none of you), and how and why to use the new technology to advance your career.

Continue reading ‘What’s the killer app for the scientific web?’