CS73N Meeting 00: Introductory Notes
Class of Thursday 3 April 2008
Entered by Gio Wiederhold, updated 9, 14, 25 Jan 2004, 1 April 2005, 7 April 2006, 10April 2007. Updated by Sgt 3 Apr 2008, by gio 4 April 2008.
You'll have additional resources, especially to help you fulfill the writing requirements. Stanford [Resources] will appear on a webpage for the course. There will also be a course assistant to help you practice your presentations. More on presentations in Notes01. Joyce Moser <moser@stanford.edu> will be available for questions. We are all best reached by email, but appointments can be made around our class times.
Topics Covered briefly
What is the Internet? It is a technology that connects networks, using a hierarchy of resources (see Internet), but is also a base for business communication, and a means for social interaction. Scale is an important issue, since it multiplies the effect of ones contribution to the web, a phenomenon know as Metcalfe's law, often debated in terms of how much better is being large. However, there are tradeoffs, and it is good to be aware of them. You can try to produce something of great value to a small community, or something of modest value to a large one. Of course creating content of great value to every of your readers would be marvelous. Selecting your readers is important to achieve the benefits.
What is the wisdom of groups? Does it increase proportionally to their size? What is the meaning of the name college for an educational institution?
Your project is crucial to the class. You have to select your topic earlier, otherwise your ongoing efforts will not have the right focus and not contribute. Nearly all your writing in this class will contribute to the project. To be effective select a topic you can be passionate about and that you are somewhat familiar with. Then you won't have to expend as much effort to do base research, but you can search for complementary materials. The value of your contribution is the content you provide, presentation quality. Technology and tools are minor factors. Look at projects from prior years to see what your project might look like.
A business plan for project will help you understand what makes a web site sustainable. An example discussed is the change imposed on publications as newspapers. Read the 31 March 2008 New Yorker article: Out of Print; by Eric Alterman. The business of politics and the Internet is also drawing much attention this 2008 election year.
Objective
Understand how the Internet-linked business world -- which will be your world when you graduate will look a few years hence. The term business has a broad interpretation for us, and covers also enterprises as government, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and certainly health care and education.
Generate on-line documents that will help a reader navigate, motivate action, and best of all learn something. Content is more valuable than being cute.
Learn to write for readers of the future.
Earlier Discussions
We started with the question: what will the world, and its Internet be like by the time you graduate, or farther into the future. Where do you get your information now? The answer indicated, largely on-line. We need to write for readers as us, who will read on-line, not in proscribed sequence, often unaware of when the on-line material was created, and who created it.
Would books, as we know them, disappear? When will that happen? Consider the divide-and-conquer approach. For each of these publication types the answer should have a narrower range :
- Shakespeare plays
- Essays
- Poetry
- Reference books, and their subsections, as obtained by Google scholar
- Technical writings (as now produced by TeX, that allow pretty typesetting to be controlled in a source document produced by the author) [note for me, replace these terms with links to examples]
- Newspapers
- Not mentioned, but already undergoing radical changes, are scientific journals. Since articles tend to be specialized, most articles are read by very few readers, so that the print overhead per use is high. Most journal copies are distributed to libraries. The overhead of going to a library is higher than locating articles. on the web. Why aren't they all on-line now?
- Wikipedia-type articles, replacing an encyclopedia
- subdiscussion: should Wiki articles you used be cited?
- Yes? You should be honest about the sources you used
- No? The articles may not be reliable and you don't want to send your readers to risky material
- And you don't want to admit that you used Wiki information
- New subdiscussion: what kind if Wiki information can be trusted, or not?
- Note on Trust is an important issue for any business
(generalization: can printed material be trusted, or not?)
On-line publications have potential advantages: links to prerequisite information, links to detail, ability to have dynamic material as graphs that represent equations, web cams, .... .
Economics (only hinted at in class)
There is an economic interplay between writers and readers. The writer spends time and effort in writing, the reader spends time and effort in reading to gain a benefit. If writing is done well, the reader's cost for the same benefit is reduced. Then there will be more readers, and the author's benefits (fame, fees) increase.
Not yet discussed was, but to be considered in any project: how the project will be sustained. Choices are
- It's just for the class and disappears just like most class work
- You will keep it going
- You'll find a sponsor
- You'll create a new business.
In each CS73N project we'd like to see a business plan.
The essence of a business plan is to state what the costs and benefits (could be income) if your project proposal are. Most business plans do that for many periods into the future, because initially there will be losses, only after sometime benefits.
Even if fame is the benefit you seek, you should evaluate what it will cost you to maintain your work over some period, and when you will derive fame, and what that fame will do for you.
Course History
During the years that the course has been given, the Internet world and our view of it has changed drastically. For instance, the first time it was taught the question was: would people buy things from vendors on the Internet.
Then we had the dot.com boom. We had people like Larry Page come and talk about their plans for Google. Now they don't have time to come any more.
Things heated up: a slide from an early class summarizes the prediction and the explanation that became necessary to explain the dot.com bust.
We will continue to look into the future.
A common problem of predicting the future is
- that people tend to overestimate what will happen in the short term and
- underestimate what will happen in the long term [Source-of-quote].
Resources for the class
Your background, interests, goals, passions.
Your colleagues: go to the classlist for their email addresses
These notes, linked from the class schedule web page.
A note on How to Write to the Web.
Contact
For your classmates, your colleagues, use the classlist
Gio Wiederhold, Shirley Tessler <tessler@aldo.com>, Avron Barr <barr@aldo.com>. Joyce Moser <moser@stanford.com>
Prior material
You can find more by going back to the description page for this class, and follow links for earlier years. They are similarly organized, but not maintained.
Course Goals
Mutual discussion; understanding what's going on; analysis; business trade-offs, making predictions, but not telling what the future will bring.
Student participation: reading, arguing, writing of Web pages for an enterprise, the CS73 Internet Website, for a wiki.
Reach me by email, am often on travel.
Select your topic as early as possible, but make sure you have an outline by the midterm.
Topic discussion will be driven by interests. Areas: Retail Commerce (B2C), B2B, G2C, Education, Healthcare, ...
Student introduction
Wide variety of backgrounds, expertise, goals. All names and emails should be on the classlist, please check it. Pictures?
If any participants are not or wrong on the classlist, let mailto:gio@cs.stanford.edu know soon.
Please report to us when you find errors on the current class web pages. We can't fix all errors on web pages from prior classes, but let us know that too.
Course Work and Grade
The grade depends in large part on your final creation, the web pages for your project.
But you won't have a great final creation if you don't
1. Think early about your project
Select one and stick with it. The quarter is to short to try out multiple ideas in order to determine the absolute best topic. Chose a topic you can understand well with some research investment. Consider who'd be interested in using or reading about it. The quantity of readers or hits does not count, the quality counts. A measure of quality is the benefit that your readers get from their investment in time in reading your material.
2. Collect the resources needed. You will likely find most on-line. Collect the pointers, but also save webpages you expect to refer to, just in case they disappear on you. Determine, if at possible, authorship and date of creation. That's often good information to surround your citation, as: "Gio Wiederhold wrote in 1997 that high quality personalization requires having a customer model ".
3. Write and provide incremental updates, as shown in the schedule. Nearly anything you write in this course will be part of or appended to your project pages, including a business model.
4. Present around midterm time your project, its motivation and its sustainability to your peers and to us
What you have at that time will contribute to your grade
5. Have time to create, edit, review, and get feedback about your project
Final: a web page report that could be actionable information for someone who wants to benefit from use of the Internet:
a) If it's a business create a prototype, with a specific business plan. It does not need to actually vend anything.
b) A general analysis of an issue surrounding the Internet and web-based business, but not so broad that it has no depth
c) An exposition of current or expected technology, laws, social changes, ...� that will affect such businesses
Since so much of the grade depends on it, think about now, so that you are ready at midterm time for a presenation.
Read How to Write to the Web.
We'll discuss proposals in class.
