Week 3 Reading Guide: By Matt Diamond, Nicole Cua, and Lauren Bruins
Professor Lipkin
CNTP 350: Digital Culture
29 January 2009
We Are the Web By Kevin Kelly
Vocabulary
Database-a comprehensive collection of related data organized for convenient access,
generally in a computer.
IPO- Initial public offering- a company's first stock offering to the public.
Transclusion-in computer science, transclusion is the inclusion of part of a document
into another document by reference. It is a feature of substitution templates. Nelson
coined the term "transclusion," as well as "hypertext" and "hypermedia", in his 1982
book, Literary Machines. Part of his proposal was the idea that micropayments could be
automatically exacted from the reader for all the text, no matter how many snippets of
content are taken from various places.
Link- an object, as text or graphics, linked through hypertext to a document, another
object, etc.
Hypertext- a method of storing data through a computer program that allows a user to
create and link fields of information at will and to retrieve the data nonsequentially.
Intertwingularity- a term coined by Ted Nelson to express the complexity of
interrelations in human knowledge.
Hyperlink- a reference in a hypertext document to another document or other resource
Marginal- (economics) selling goods at a price that just equals the additional cost of
producing the last unit supplied.
Prosumption- a term created by futurologist Alvin Toffler, that the role of producers and
consumers would begin to blur and merge (even though he described it in his book Future
Shock from 1970).
Transistors- A small electronic device containing a semiconductor and having at least
three electrical contacts, used in a circuit as an amplifier, detector, or switch.
Web OS- describes network services for internet scale distributed computing. Extends
across the internet, like the web.
Outline
"10 years ago"
•1945-Vannevar Bush outlined the Web's core idea - hyperlinked pages
