Saturday, March 12, 2011

7 ways to think like the Web

I read this great article today and I wanted to share it. It explains some principles that people apply or should apply in order to work well all together online or like author says: computational thinking of thinking like the web.

The web has grown a lot these last years it has become an ecosystem where no longer humans are a part of it also machines. Both machines and people are responsible for this evolution of information and technology for example sometimes machines publish our data for us sometimes we publish it directly sometimes machines subscribe what other machines or/and people publish sometimes people do.

Because of this hybrid nature is that we need to teach people  the best way to take advantage of this new distributed environment and that is how they came out with this 7 principles:
  1. Be the authoritative source of your own data.
  2. Pass by reference not by value.
  3. Know the difference between structured and unstructured data.
  4. Create and adopt disciplined naming conventions.
  5. Push your data to the widest appropriate scope.
  6. Participate in pub/sub networks as both publisher and subscriber.
  7. Reuse components and services.
Some of them make a lot of sense to me and I do follow them by instinct like Pass by reference not by value which means instead of passing the whole article you pass a link to source of the article this way we avoid duplicated content and we all can share our opinions on the same topic. Another example is Know the difference between structured and unstructured data. This blog is an example of that I am not only writing posts and publishing them which is unstructured data I also have RSS feeds which is basically XML which obviously is structured data that way I allow RSS readers to subscribe it a read the information as I update my blog.

I  could explain all of them but I really invite you to read the entire article because it is really good and you will find the explanation for each one of these 7 principles and more resources for each one of them.

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