On 10/03/10 13:08, Chris Dennis wrote:
> I'm an octopus -- which probably translates as a sad loner who spends
> too much time with computers :)
I'm an elephant, thought I suspect the arbitrary pigeonholing of users is a
social carrot for people to complete the experiment. Smells of false dichotomy,
and at the very least, little explanatory or predictive power.
I have yet to see anything approaching real science come out of any group that
has been talking about "web science". Sir Tim's "Web Science Trust" has a
pathetic list of papers[1] that I would summarise as saying approximately "hey,
maybe someone could try to explain something about these here internets".
The group that put together this test is only slightly more productive[2], with
some analyses of existing research and a few papers particularly focused on
internet use in academia.
I get the impression that there are no practical results from web science
outside of web usability, which is really an established branch of psychology
applied to web use rather than a new or revolutionary subject.
I'm still not convinced there really is a subject here, or if there is, that
there are fewer answers than there are sites on the internets. And they've had 3
years[3] to come up with something already.
Dan
[1]
http://webscience.org/publications.html
[2]
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/infostudies/research/ciber/downloads/
[3]
http://blog.mauveweb.co.uk/2007/03/14/sir-tim-inaugural-lecture/
