"To date, only a select group of cloud-wielding Internet giants has had the resources to scoop up huge masses of information and build businesses upon it. Our words, pictures, clicks, and searches are the raw material for this industry. Humanity emits the data, and a handful of companies—the likes of Google, Yahoo! (YHOO), or Amazon.com (AMZN)—transform the info into insights, services, and, ultimately, revenue.

"http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_52/b4064048925836_page_2.htm

"Today, we're acknowledging the dark side of the Internet – (…) about how to grow an Internet that has a solid basis, that is respectful of privacy, copyrights and people." Loic Le Meur 

“Despite continuing political and economic uncertainty, the Internet's extraordinary stability, resiliency, and ever increasing utility will push the global market for ecommerce spending past $10 trillion by 2010"  Carol M. Glasheen, IDC program vice president, Global Market Models and Demand-Side Research.

“Youth are growing up in a society shaped strongly by networks. Networks of information, networks of people, networks of objects. Networks themselves are not new, but the role that they play is more significant now than in the past. Much of this has to do with technology because technology has made networks essential. To understand youth's interactions with information today, you need to understand the networks in which youth inhabit. You also need to situate their information activities within those very networks. At the most simplistic level, information is acquired in three ways: push, pull, and osmosis.” Danah Boyd, "Information Access in a Networked World", Presented to Pearson Publishing, 2 November 2007

Exploring the social dynamics and challenges of World Wide Web is paramount if you / we really want to interact with the world. There is no escape. Knowledge is search and web. A kind of big new way of living dimension new in history a we-web living way, one can say. The World Wide Web is a living organism feeded by the paradoxes of a civilisation drown in contraditions, technology, lack of technology, data, feeds, emotional disfunctionalities and history. A complex and paranoic society (nevertheless living with more than anytime in human history) going through paths of delirium and fear. Just see the powerful Black Swans, (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) from the last years and the new one, the financial "hecatomb", this financial meltdown ( not anymore the blood sacrifice offered to Greek or Roman gods consisting of exactly one hundred oxen or cattle; later, any large-scale sacrifice…) we presently live in the end of 2008.

The World Wide Web is a Networks and economics, content and business working and walking together hands in hands with intelligence, research and social dynamics. And while the growing cloud-wielding Internet giants corporations store up huge masses of information content, image, clicks performance and analytics, and searches feeding this growing machine that is the net. Humanity, the "WE" emits, (breathes) the data, and this handful of companies, mostly based in the sunny Sillicon Valley: Google, Amazon (AMZN), Yahoo! (YHOO), News Corp, transform all this data in business intelligence to monotorise our consum habits and then afterwards sell us new products and new needs… The simple  activity one  does in the net, even the "we" performance knowledge, that is the living clay of internet gets somehow, somewhere stored and analised. This data is then feeded in the CRM and datastorage of internet companies and ultimately creates a complex spider of industries services, and in some cases revenue.

But there is in the other hand the starfish feature of the web. The spider walking side by side with the star fish, that if you cut one harm creates one other harm and ultimately multiplicates itself… As Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom puts it admirably in the book The Starfish And the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations. The fact is that internet lives in a balanced complex game of the exploration and implications of centralised and decentralised organizations  such as Wikipedia, Grokster, MySpace, Facebook and YouTube. As in the contrast between the metaphors of the spider and starfish analogy the contrasting biological nature of the internet organism, a decentralised platform such as Alcoholics Anonymous and the Apaches has multiple regeneration features that interacts precisely with the relation between powerful organisations and corporations and in the other hand the paradox of non for profit organisations such as Creative Commons, Mozilla, centres of knowledge, education, e-learning, Universities and so forth… Other strenght of the internet is the powerful cloud of the voices, the authors, the blogosphere of the "catalysts", who with their adaptative qualities and skills manage to create and maintain decentralized organizations where the we manages almost living machines…. 

These are some of my present Research Items::

1. We-Web:

• Publishing, Search, Social Networks, History and background

 
2. We-Learning: Education + Social + Economics

•         Social Networks and Education
•         Schools, Universities, E-Learning Projects and the birth place of influential corporations and organisations 
•        Projects: Public, Private; national, international; multi-lingual…

 3. Web-Social: Dynamics and chalenges of social networks in the Internet

•         Emotional relations: Exploring feelings and the use of gratifications
•         Privacy, copyrights and people
•         Social Graph: interoperability between social networks
•         How to: create, innovate, rate, network, participate, cooperate?

 4. Financing and Business Models and Platforms

•         Search Engine Markting PPC, SEO, Display Ads, Affiliate Marketing…
•         Open Society: open business and sofware
•         Creative Commons
•         Economy and Markets
•         Business Models
•         Advertising
•         Companies, Startups, Entrepeneurs

 
5. Web 3.0: "Semantic Web"

•         Data on the Internet with "meaning" built in and shared.
•         Users would not have to label or tag each photo, video or blog entry themselves to make it findable
•         Institive platforms that interact with wishes, desires…