Introducing Web Science “Rough Guides”

The World Wide Web is a pretty big thing. Just how big no-one is exactly sure, but in 2008 Google hit the milestone of indexing 1 trillion pages. That’s a lot of information. Add to that all the metadata, all the ways of commercialising information, all the data analysis, and all the ways we think about these things and it becomes clear that knowledge of and about the Web is simply extraordinarily vast.

Therefore, its not really surprising that a number of people on the MOOC have told us, “I thought I was an experienced IT person but I’d never heard of X, or Y or Z”. We’ve also heard the same from some of the people on the Web Science MSc.  So, we’ve started a series of blog posts which are simply Rough Guides to some of these interesting web concepts, models, theories or products. Hopefully they will be a thought-provoking, stimulating, entertaining and slightly random but essentially enlightening adjunct to the course.

If you have suggestions for subjects we should cover in the Rough Guides  – or you would like to write one yourself –  please let us know in the comments.