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Technology

Web science: Exploring the network without guesswork

By Rebecca Thomson

5 May 2010

New Scientist. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

From tweets to the streets

(Image: NYT/Redux/Eyevine)

A FEW hundred people travelled to Raleigh, North Carolina, last week for an international meeting intended to bring academic scrutiny to bear on a seemingly unstoppable force. For more than a decade it’s been shaping our lives, transforming business and rewriting the rules of social interaction. That phenomenon is the World Wide Web.

The Raleigh meeting was only the second conference on the emerging discipline of web science. The web is clearly one of the most significant technologies of recent decades, but does it need to be treated as a field of study…

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