Comments on: And the next game-changer is…

By: Aidan

Aidan — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 07:04:24 +0000

@Alex — Have you seen Tim Berners-Lee’s recent TED Talk on just that? Though he calls it Open Data… He sees the next evolution of the web as where we store all of our raw data (not just our documents) and let people play with it, make it interactive and “human”.

I don’t think that that will revolutionize our lives the way the web did, though. While it’s uncomfortable for some companies to give away their data, it’s a natural progression: first documents, then data. Data, as I see it, is just the next “version” of the web. Like you said, Web 3.0. Whereas the Web isn’t “Phones 2.0″ or “Electricity v7″.

What I’m arguing for, I guess, is a ubiquitous, universally-accessible system that connects people to each other. Instead of connecting us with our side effects (data), or our voices/thoughts (phone), the next BIG thing would be connecting us to ourselves… Being permanently plugged in to society.

Like I said before, it’s like the prospect Kevin Kelly talks about: “The One Mind”… but what’s the “next action” that will propel us there?

By: Aidan

Aidan — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 06:51:52 +0000

Someone sent me an email (not going to call them out) following up on this post. I wanted to share (a part of) what I wrote back:

Like I said on the blog (though quite a bit of it was pure, unadulterated word vomit… me just trying to figure out what I’m thinking), I think the next BIG thing will be connecting people, bringing us closer to what Kevin Kelly calls “the one mind” (which he also thinks is the BIG future ahead of us, though I don’t remember reading about if it’ll happen soon or how it would happen).

It’ll probably start off as… I don’t know, a directory? Maybe a wiki, with universal access? But it would have to be self-organizing, I would think… not just an application built on the internet. Something that becomes a part of us, ultimately… tethering our eyes and ears to our minds, our phones, and the mobile/wireless web.

Just a thought experiment I’ve been playing with recently, I suppose. I’m no engineer, and doubt I could build it myself.

By: Alex

Alex — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 06:29:52 +0000

The biggest thing, in my opinion, to come out of the ubiquity of the internet as it stands is the amalgamation of vast stores of human knowledge. The next big thing will be something that organizes and analyzes data in a way that people can understand and interact with.
Two things that stick out in my mind:

I saw a talk a few years back from an incredibly inspirational guy, Ari Gordon-Schlosberg, who’s doing cutting edge work on data analysis (http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/conference/2007/video/UIUC-ACM-RP07-GordonSchlosberg.avi) the video is about a year and a half old, but it demonstrates my point really well. The big thing here is humanizing data. Putting data that you care about in a format you can intuitively understand. Also these guys are fanatically committed – I got the demo at least a few times – at the conference, in the hallway, and later at the pub… seriously. More videos: http://www.palantirtech.com/videos/

Siftables – saw the ted video a while back, it’s now available on http://www.siftables.com These things are going to fundamentally the way we think about data. Possibilities are huuuge and exciting.

Basically, we have a near infinite well of data a very limited amount of time and attention to make it into something useful. So I think what you’re going to be hearing about in the future is humanizing data. If you want a current buzzword, it’s already starting to show in the idea of “the semantic web” and early rumblings of web 3.0.