There is a short article in the August 11th issue of Science by a stable of authors, including Tim Berners-Lee who is the lead author. The article, "Creating a Science of the Web," is available on Science's website.
A couple of the points that I took away from reading it are: 1) although the Web is an engineered space humans create the pages and make the links. Since humans are involved, the content that appears is affected by "social conventions and laws." 2) because researchers are dependent on the Web it is important to develop a methodology to identify emerging trends and to develop better mathematical modeling for the Web; 3) there is a significant challenge to accessing data resources--"most of the world's data are locked in large data stores and are not published as an open Web of inter-referring resources." Therefore we face social and public policy challenges to accessing and sharing data.
There is also an interesting graph that presents the Web yesterday and today. Check it out.
It was truly a very interesting post!
I will surely check the graph out.
thanks.