What's the Web Coming to?

From C/Net News on Nov 2:

Representatives from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Southampton in the U.K. announced the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI), a multidisciplinary project to study the social and technological implications of growing Web adoption. The WSRI already has financial backing from Google and IBM to establish a research center that will sponsor Ph.D. students and ultimately create undergraduate curricula in Web science.

Thanks to Bokardo and to Read/WriteWeb

Web science will have both social and engineering dimensions. As the NY Times reported, it will include the emerging research in social networks and the social sciences that is being used to study how people behave on the Web. For example trust and privacy are two specific areas that can be studied more. Also Web Science will look at more technical areas, such as how huge decentralized Web systems work. ... researching the economic consequences of the Web (and "web 2" was mentioned) is part of the agenda too.

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