OK...what is the future of the Internet? My stock answer is:
"Darned if I know."
Oh I may have some thoughts on it, but I have never really sat down and analyzed it closer so that I could come up with some intelligent answers. But, thank God some other people have. And you can find their thoughts on-line.
Imagining the Internet is a joint web site done by Elon University and the Pew Internet & American Life Project. They have taken great care to survey knowledgeable people to get their views and record them in a database. You can read the results of their most recent in-depth surveys.
But even more fun is to look back at predictions made in the 1990's. Some are right on and some missed the mark completely. But, best of all is that you can participate in the project and enter your views.
Take some time to glance at this web site and see what the future might possibly hold. Go to:
http://www.elon.edu/predictions/
1 comment:
It's a vast question that on a superficial level, seems reasonable to ask, but once you begin to think about it, it's just too complex to tackle in a single pass.
I went to a seminar late last year that hoped to tackle a number of topics. There were some eminently smart people present. One of the guest speakers was the head of future projects at British Telecommunications, while another guy was from the university of Sheffield, a Dr Paul Clough, who was a very pleasent -- and I might add, surprisingly / depressingly young with it. He heading up a team who were researching into better information management and collation.
Inevitably, this research of theirs was bringing them into the headlights of the juggernaut that is Google. But there angle was slightly different: they were dealing more with managing, storing and retrieving images, not simply through keywords, but through image analysis, also.
Having had time to speak to him, the theme seamed clear: the future of the infrastructure of the internet seems to be a semantic one. One in which data and information [which I'm sure you're aware of are not the same thing] are stored intelligently by way of metadata describing data which in turn can be transformed into information.
This seems logical, and in using such an idea, it would really begin to open up the potential of the internet in ways that the likes of Google are only giving us a glimpse of right now.
Another worrying idea was one put forward by the man from British Telecommunications, one in which the internet is divided between a clean, managed and secure environment built purely for intellectual and commercial pursuits, and the world beyond which is pretty much what the internet is now, but just a little faster -- relatively speaking -- and a lot dirtier.
This seems to make sense. The internet was never designed to be secure. The likes of security really weren't initial considerations as well you know, they were afterthoughts.
I've discussed various technology-related topics on my own 'blog, so there may well be more depth there should you choose to explore my thoughts further. But it certainly seems that these two threads seem to form the backbone of much of what the internet is about, and what other things either extend from or add to.
About the only thing that can be said with unwavering certainty is that there will be change...
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