Look how far we’ve all grown with the web over the last 15 years, since its birth. Amazing. Think in terms of people looking up information or how people keep in contact or how people track the news or the time they spend watching TV versus reading the news or how people decide to buy or do buy. It’s quite amazing how fast and far the web has impacted our lives. But as Tim Berners Lee–the co-creator of the world wide web points out, this is only the beginning. The web is in its infancy.
What might come next? As I’ve blogged about several times before, I see a growth in the amount of information we publish not constructed from words we type into an editor, but that gathered from sensors, which will give us an opportunity to automatically retain more of the context of the information and hence make it more discoverable and valuable later–not just by us, but by the computer. Yes, the computer will become even more of our coworker and companion on the web than it is today helping us to organize, collect, and communicate, and distribute what we want. We’ve only seen the beginning.
I also see that simultaneously as we push more and more content to the web, making it bigger and bigger, we’ll also see the web integrate into our lives in smaller and smaller ways. We’ll see connection points to the web that previously we would have considered too complicated and combersome to create. This will reach into cars, phones, radios, cameras, televisions, and so on. The trends are already there for all of these, setting a strong trend for the next 15 years.
I think we have a long way to go to transpose several publishing businesses to the web. They all have established business models that are unfortunately holding them and us back. Whether it’s music, movies, books, or proceedings from a conference, or the conference itself, we all need to work towards spreading more content, further. We will all benefit. How we use this content will expand too. For instance, I can see where if professional organizations unlock their control of conference proceedings and manuscripts, we’ll see an explosion of professional content impacting us all. Currently the print-and-publish oriented model is too locked down, too controlled. It shouldn’t be. Some schools are beginning to adapt to the way it should be, such as MIT’s online experiments with classroom content. I think their direction is good although I wonder where the sweet spot will be. The fact is simple: the economics is changing whether they want it or not. It’s going to happen. Which side of evolution do you want to be on?
