CTO Articles
Published in IT World
May 29, 2007
Give a link. Take a link.
From time to time in convenience stores I come across "Take a cent, leave a cent" plates at the checkout counter. You buy something for 9.99. Leave your cent change behind you for the next guy. You buy something for 15:51. You need a cent. Just take one from the plate.
The city of Copenhagen in Denmark has a bicycle renting scheme[1] which allows you to take a bike for about 3 dollars and just leave it back at one of the many bike racks around the city when you are finished.
Ain't humanity great! Let's get warm and fuzzy for a moment before we get colder and more pointed. Humans do indeed give cents and take cents in these convenience stores. Humans do take city bikes worth way more than the deposit and leave them back when they are finished.
There are thousands of years of thought behind why these sort of things sometimes do - and sometimes do not - work out. Theories ranging from the metaphysical; the deontic[2], the consequentialist[3], the contractual[4]. Not to forget the humdinger of pure unadulterated selflessness. Fascinating territory that we are not straying in to here.
Now, if you ponder the title to this article you will get an idea of where I am going with this. I build a website. In doing so, I create my own web pages (think "give a link") and I link to other websites of interest (think "take a link"). The combination of giving and taking makes the Web as a whole so much greater than the sum of its parts.
Ain't humanity great! Let's get even warmer and fuzzier for a moment before we get colder and more pointed. Humans do indeed create links and use links on the Web. There is a small number of decades of thought as to why this is so. Having said that, all the thousands of years of thought already mentioned are obviously directly applicable. Are you giving linkable resources to the Web, are you being selfless, enlightened in your self-interest, influenced by peer pressure? Something else?
There is an extra dimension to the Web case that I'd like to highlight. In the case of give-a-cent/take-a-cent, the option always exists to take a cent but never, ever, leave a cent. On the Web however, it has historically been well nigh impossible to take links without giving some back. When you create a web page you cannot help but create a resource that others may in turn link to.
I think that is very interesting. A possible explanation for the warm and fuzzy, one-happy-family aspects of the Web, without recourse to categorical imperatives[5] or metaphysics. Come to think of it, that gives me a third dimension for my growing fascination with design constraints[6].
Hmmm. Okay. Now we need to go colder and more pointed. Give-a-cent/take-a-cent schemes do not work everywhere. Neither do Copenhagen-style city bike schemes. We live in a world where community and commerce interact in a complex balancing act we call 'society'. The Web is part of that world. What would happen if the Web design constraint whereby taking something inevitably involves giving something back, is taken away?
Would the forces of community outweigh the forces of commerce to ensure that the acts of giving and the acts of taking are still balanced somehow? Would the Web cease to be a commons[7] and become more like a huge industrial estate with endless walled gardens[8]?
I do not know, but what I do know, is that the design constraint whereby taking inevitably involves giving is being eroded over time. It can, for example, be argued that emerging Rich Internet Application[9] platforms give you everything you need to take cents without ever giving any cents back - if you see what I mean.
One could look at this trend and say "shame!" but that would be a simplistic analysis I think. The other side of the argument is that businesses are really struggling to find ways to participate on the web profitably because of the obligatory give-a-link-to-take-a-link model. Perhaps the most striking example is content publishers. Content publishers put lots of content on the web in order to attract customers and sell them things. However, they can end up finding that the links that they give the web are appropriated by search engines and categorizers and mashup creators who end up taking the advertising revenues.
With all the hair pulling about viable business models on the Web, increased tension between community and commerce is inevitable. The days of "Give a link. Take a link." may be numbered. In years to come, we may look back on the birth of Rich Internet Applications as the moment when community finally had to give way to commerce: for good or ill.
[1] http://members.aol.com/humorme81/citybike.htm
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_logic#Deontic_logic
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialist
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative
[6] http://www.itworld.com/Tech/2327/nlsebiz070501/pfindex.html
[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
[8] http://blog.cre8asite.net/bwelford/2006/11/walled-gardens/
[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Internet_application