I need to review 2 seminal CompSci papers in a chosen topic, suggestions please

Question

I come from a multimedia background as opposed to a pure-CS background so I would find a heavy CS-paper about subjects like algorithms hard to review.

I'm interested mainly in web technologies, particularly areas like web standards, push technologies (comet, web hooks etc..), social graphing, online data portability. Other topic suggestions are welcome too.

The problem is that any papers that I can find on these topics couldn't really be called seminal because they are quite recent and consequently haven't been cited by very many other papers.

I'd love to hear suggestions about research topics or recommended papers in a chosen topic.

Answer 1

Probably too late, but you never know...

Trust metrics are a topic that is fairly abstract and algorithmic, but with important applications to important trends in web services, particularly recommender networks. I wrote a brief annotated bibliography on some research on trust metrics that are relevant to Raph Levien's idea of attack-resistant trust metrics.

The original Google papers, The PageRank citation ranking: Bringing order to the Web. http://dbpubs.stanford.edu:8090/pub/showDoc.Fulltext?lang=en&doc=1999-66&format=pdf&compression=. and The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine are excellent for discussion. Levien has explained how PageRank can be seen as an attack-resistant trust metric.

Answer 2

I think the seminal paper for the hypertext concept is As We May Think, by Vannevar Bush.

Another highly influential...system? paper? is the Xanadu approach.

Of course, the Web's seminal paper is Tim Berners-Lee's initial proposal.

I think there's a vast...unacademicalness (made that word up) here. Who wrote the academic paper for Facebook or other social media? What about Mosaic? Livejournal is rumored to have been written in bits and pieces for student projects initially. Maybe there are papers that got written for them - I don't know. Doesn't seem like it tho'.