Internet Changes Everything

Web 3.0 and beyond: the next 20 years of the internet

Web 3.0 and beyond: the next 20 years of the internet - Times Online

Silicon Valley has painted a picture of the web in 2030, and it is very powerful – and very smart – indeed

In the heart of Silicon Valley, at what is referred to, somewhat romantically,
as the 'web's edge', something is stirring.

A new type of internet is being imagined, far more powerful that the one which
lets you link up with your friends or watch a video uploaded by a stranger.

Facebook, YouTube and the other social networks and blogs that fall within the
scope of 'Web 2.0' may be beginning to penetrate the mainstream, but to
those whose Cassandra-like vision lets them see the web in 2020 and beyond,
they are but a pixel in a much larger picture.

In a little over a decade, according to the engineers building the internet of
tomorrow, the web will be able to connect every aspect of our digital lives
- be it a website, an e-mail, or a file on our PC - to every other aspect.
It will know, for instance, when you are typing an e-mail, what the subject
of the e-mail is, and be able to suggest websites and books as well as
documents, photos and videos you have saved that may be relevant to that
topic.

It will be achieve this by virtue of the inherent 'intelligence' in the
underlying architecture of the internet, they say. In other words, the web
is becoming smart.

Nova Spivack is an evangelist of the next phase of the web's development -
what Silicon Valley, with its expansionist zeal, has taken to calling Web
3.0, or 'the semantic web'.

Broadly speaking, Mr Spivack says, Web 3.0 refers to the attempt by
technologists to overhaul radically the basic platform of the internet so
that it 'understands' the near infinite pieces of information that reside on
it and draws connections between them.

If Web 2.0 was all about harnessing the collective intelligence of crowds to
give information a value - lots of people liked this story so you might too
(Digg.com), people who like Madonna also like this artist (last.fm), lots of
people linked to this site so that makes it the most relevant (Google's
basic PageRank algorithm) - then Web 3.0 is about giving the internet itself
a brain.

For those still a bit lost, Mr Spivack, the founder of Radar Networks, a
leading Web 3.0 company, says it's useful to think about the web's
development in ten-year cycles.

"We have had the first decade of the web, or Web 1.0," he says,
which was about the development of the basic platform of the internet and
the ability to make huge amounts of information widely accessible, "and
we're nearing the end of the second decade - Web 2.0 - which was all about
the user interface" and enabling users to connect with one another.

"Now we're about to enter the third decade - Web 3.0 - which is about
making the web much smarter."

Each decade in turn corresponds to an engineering focus on either 'the front
end' or 'back end' of the web. Web 1.0 was a back-end decade, focusing on
the web's basic platform, its link structure and navigation system. Web 2.0
was front end, with a heavy focus on users and usability, clean-looking
sites, and people making connections with one another.

In Web 3.0, the emphasis will revert to the back end, with a renewal of the
web's key index - the essential data that is catalogued by search engines
like Google. That in turn, Mr Spivack says, will make way for Web 4.0,
another 'front-end decade', only with more advanced programs than the likes
of Facebook.

A prime example of a Web 3.0 technology is 'natural-language search', which
refers to the ability of search engines to answer full questions such as
'Which US Presidents died of disease?'. In some cases, the sites that appear
in the results do not reference the original search terms, reflecting the
fact that the web knows, for instance, that Reagan was a US President, and
that Alzheimer's is a disease.

"Our engine reads every page of the web sentence by sentence and returns
results by drawing on a general knowledge of language and what specific
concepts in the world mean, and their relationship with one another,"
said Barney Pell, chief executive of Powerset, which is developing
natural-language technology. The firm, based at the prestigious Palo Alto
Research Centre, in California, is sometimes talked about as a
Google-killer, should its offering - which is not yet widely available -
become popular.

It's not just search that will be overhauled in the web of the future,
however. One of the recurrent themes in the presentations at the Web 2.0
Summit in San Francisco was 'open platforms', the idea that a website or
device, like a mobile phone, should be able to accommodate whichever
features or applications its user wants. Think of the iPhone as a folder
into which an owner could 'drag and drop' any application - a weather
forecaster, an e-mail service - without Apple having to approve such an
action.

Some of the world's largest technology companies - Nokia, Apple and MySpace -
all made announcements embracing the idea of open platforms, suggesting that
the web will become a place where much more mixing and matching of different
services will be permitted.

Alongside this will come more mature virtual worlds, or what Silicon Valley's
faithful - perhaps to get away from connotations of the computer game - have
started referring to as 'immersive environments'.

"The web is going to be a much more immersive, a much more
multi-dimensional environment," said John Doerr, one of the founding
board members at Google and a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield &
Byers, which invests heavily in the tech sector.

Mr Doerr's presentation touched on a range of areas that would be affected by
the web, in particular green technologies and the energy sector, as well as
disease therapy, and he gave stark warning to any firm that was not willing
to embrace emerging trends. "In any real revolution there are winners
and losers. The internet wasn't some kind of 'kum ba ya' thing," he
said.

When the time came to pack up the projects and exchange the last business
cards, there was a sense - as there was seven years ago - that Silicon
Valley was riding a wave of seemingly limitless investor confidence, begging
an obvious question.

"Are we officially in a bubble yet?" one of the conference
moderators asked, repeatedly.

No one was willing to answer. In the meantime, the vast sums of money to be
made and the new services to change people's lives, radically and
everywhere, were both things to be celebrated.

October 28, 2007 at 12:05 PM in Internet evolution | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Facebook Expands Into MySpace’s Territory

By BRAD STONE

SAN FRANCISCO, May 24 — With an ambitious strategy for expansion, Facebook is getting in MySpace’s face.

Facebook, the Internet’s second-largest social network, was originally popular on college campuses, but over the last year it has opened its dorm-room doors to all, and its membership rolls have exploded at triple-digit growth rates.

Now Facebook, based in Palo Alto, Calif., is inviting thousands of technology companies and programmers to contribute features to its service. They can even make money from the site’s users by doing so, and, at least for now, Facebook will not take a cut.

Some of the new features, demonstrated by software developers at a Facebook event here on Thursday, will allow members to recommend and listen to music, insert Amazon book reviews onto their pages, play games and join charity drives, all without leaving the site.

The result is expected to be a proliferation of new tools and activities for Facebook’s 24 million active users, who have largely been limited to making online connections, sharing photos and planning events.

The move could foster some of the chaotic creativity that is more closely associated with MySpace, its larger competitor. It could also open the door to hazards like spam, and make Facebook’s identity less clear.

But Facebook is thinking big. In the parlance of its 23-year-old chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, the company is positioning itself as a “social operating system” for the Internet. It wants to sit at the center of its users’ online lives in the same way that Windows dominates their experience on a PC — while improving its own prospects for a lucrative acquisition or an eventual public offering.

“This may be the most important development since the company got started,” said Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist who was an early investor in Facebook and one of its three board members. “But the company is taking a massive gamble. There are lots of things that can go wrong with this.”

Facebook, which is largely supported by advertising, has gained significant momentum over the last year. Since the site opened up to nonstudents eight months ago, its membership has doubled to 24 million, according to the research firm ComScore. Users now spend an average of 14 minutes on the site every time they visit, up from eight minutes last September, according to Hitwise, a traffic measuring service.

MySpace remains nearly three times the size of Facebook, with 67 million active members — up from 48 million a year ago — who spend an average of 30 minutes on the site each time they visit. It has recently focused on entering new markets like Japan and China.

The two social networks have carved out contrasting, though shifting, reputations. MySpace, owned by the News Corporation, has fostered an anarchic aura with few restrictions on creativity, while allowing users to integrate tools from other companies into their pages, like slide show displays. Recently, however, the company has blocked the efforts of several companies to advertise to MySpace users or otherwise make money through those tools.

Facebook, on the other hand, has kept its members in something of a creative straitjacket. Users could not customize their pages or add tools created by other companies.

Those restrictions helped preserve Facebook’s clean, uniform appearance and reinforced its emphasis on offering practical ways to communicate online with friends.

It has also made Facebook appealing to some groups beyond its student base. For example, Facebook is in vogue in Silicon Valley tech circles. David Belden, a 32-year-old technology worker from San Francisco, says he checks Facebook several times a day but hardly touches his MySpace account. “MySpace is so messy and there’s so much spam. It’s not worth it,” he said.

Facebook wants to keep those faithful while turbocharging its growth by harnessing some of the magic of MySpace’s openness. It is also going one step further by allowing companies that contribute features to make money on Facebook through their own advertising or commissions on sales.

“You can build a real advertising business on Facebook,” Mr. Zuckerberg said on Thursday during his speech to more than 700 developers and journalists. “If you don’t want to run ads, you can sell something. We encourage you to do both.”

In its new effort, which was to be unveiled on the site Thursday night, Facebook will be relying on the work of entrepreneurs like Ali Partovi, the chief executive of iLike, a company in Seattle that gives users the opportunity to hear and buy the music their friends are listening to.

Facebook does not have a music feature, but iLike, which along with Amazon and Microsoft was one of 65 companies that appeared at Facebook’s event, is one of several that plans to make music-related tools available on the site.

If users choose to add iLike to their Facebook pages, the software will automatically see where they live and what bands and songs they say they enjoy. It will then recommend songs and local concerts.

ILike will get a commission if the user acts on either recommendation, and it will also show its own ads. “We are truly building an entire business within Facebook,” Mr. Partovi said.

The companies now working with Facebook assert that it is facilitating a deeper level of integration in the social network than MySpace currently allows.

PicksPal, another company that will work with Facebook, lets users predict the winners in sporting events and awards them points for being correct. The points can be cashed in for prizes. If Facebook users add PicksPal to their pages, their “bets” will be sent as a short message (“George has picked Cleveland over Pittsburgh”) to everyone in their network via Facebook’s news feed, which keeps users constantly updated on their friends’ activities.

“It’s exciting to build something that works so well in their world and to really engage in what was heretofore an off-limits, walled garden,” said PicksPal’s chief executive, Tom Jessiman.

Facebook hopes that thousands of outside companies will eventually build features for its site. One inevitable drawback is that Facebook pages will no longer all look the same. To preserve some of its uniformity, the company is asking developers to stay within certain lines — for example, preventing images from blinking or music from automatically playing on a Facebook page unless clicked on.

There are other potential pitfalls for Facebook as well. Spammers and other online miscreants might crack Facebook in the same way they have infiltrated MySpace, where many profiles do not represent real people and entreaties from attractive women mask advertisements for pornographic Web sites.

Facebook might also inadvertently turn itself into a launching pad for other companies that could eclipse it — in the same way that YouTube rose to prominence because MySpace users found it an easy way to add video to their MySpace pages.

MySpace continues to face that challenge and is now acquiring the photo-sharing site PhotoBucket for $300 million, according to two people familiar with the ongoing negotiations, because so many of its users have come to rely on it to store images for their MySpace pages.

When asked about Facebook’s plans, MySpace painted them as nothing new. “From MySpace’s first day, our members have had the freedom to create the experiences they want,” the company said in a statement. “We have always offered our users a blank canvas for their creativity and self-expression.”

Nevertheless, Facebook clearly has Silicon Valley-size ambitions that are pushing it to take big risks. Last year, according to published reports, Facebook turned down a $900 million acquisition offer from Yahoo.

“Although a lot of companies continue to approach us, we are not for sale,” said Jim Breyer, a venture capitalist who invested in Facebook and is a board member.

May 25, 2007 at 12:08 PM in Internet evolution | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Creating a database to organize the Internet - International Herald Tribune

Metabase envisions a repository that is like a digital almanac By John Markoff Published: March 9, 2007

Source: Creating a database to organize the Internet - International Herald Tribune

SAN FRANCISCO: A new company founded by a veteran technologist is setting out to create a vast public database intended to be read by computers rather than people, paving the way for a more automated Internet in which machines will routinely share information.

The company, Metaweb Technologies, is led by Danny Hillis, whose background includes a stint at Walt Disney Imagineering and who has long championed the idea of intelligent machines.

He says his latest effort, to be announced on Friday, will help develop a realm frequently described as the "semantic Web" — a set of services that will give rise to software agents that automate many functions now performed manually in front of a Web browser.

The idea of a centralized database storing all of the world's digital information is a fundamental shift away from today's World Wide Web, which is akin to a library of linked digital documents stored separately on millions of computers where search engines serve as the equivalent of a card catalog.

In contrast, Hillis envisions a centralized repository that is more like a digital almanac. The new system can be extended freely by those wishing to share their information widely.

All of the information in Freebase will be available under a license that makes it freely shareable, Hillis said. In the future, he said, the company plans to create a business by organizing proprietary information in a similar fashion.

Already added into the Freebase system is descriptive information about 4 million songs from Musicbrainz, a user- maintained database; 100,000 restaurants supplied by Chemoz; extensive information from Wikipedia; and Census data and location information.

A number of private companies, including Encyclopaedia Britannica, have indicated that they were willing to add some of their existing databases to the system, Hillis said.

Hillis acknowledges that he is facing a "Field of Dreams" challenge of convincing people to store their information in his system, rather than elsewhere on the Web. Still, he said he had made early progress. For example, John Pickering, a zoologist who has created a database of more than one million plant and animal species, now maintained at discoverlife.org, is planning to move the collection to Freebase.

On the Web, there are few rules governing how information should be organized. But in the Metaweb database, to be named Freebase, information will be structured to make it possible for software programs to discern relationships and even meaning.

For example, an entry for California's governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, would be entered as a topic that would include a variety of attributes or "views" describing him as an actor, athlete, and politician — listing them in a highly structured way in the database.

That would make it possible for programmers and Web developers to write programs allowing Internet users to pose queries that might produce a simple, useful answer rather than a long list of documents.

Since it could offer an understanding of relationships like geographic location and occupational specialties, Freebase might be able to field a query about a child-friendly dentist within 10 miles of one's home and yield a single result.

The system will also make it possible to transform the way electronic devices communicate with one another, Hillis said. An Internet-enabled remote control could reconfigure itself automatically to be compatible with a new television set by tapping into data from Freebase. Or the video recorder of the future might stop blinking and program itself without confounding its owner.

In its ambitions, Freebase has some similarities to Google — which has asserted that its mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. But its approach sets it apart.

"As wonderful as Google is, there is still much to do," said Esther Dyson, a computer and Internet industry analyst and investor at EDventure, based in New York.

Most search engines are about algorithms and statistics without structure, while databases have been solely about structure until now, she said.

"In the middle, there is something that represents things as they are," she said. "Something that captures the relationships between things."

That addition has long been a vision of artificial-intelligence researchers. The Freebase system will offer a set of controls that will allow both programmers and Web designers to extract information easily from the system.

"It's like a system for building the synapses for the global brain," said Tim O'Reilly, chief executive of O'Reilly Media, a technology publishing firm based in Sebastopol, California.

Hillis received his Ph.D. in computer science while studying artificial intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In 1985, he founded one of the first companies focused on massively parallel computing, Thinking Machines. When the company failed commercially at the end of the Cold War, he became vice president for research and development at Walt Disney Imagineering. More recently, he was a founder of Applied Minds, a research and consulting firm based in Glendale, California. Metaweb, founded in 2005 with venture capital backing, is a spinoff of that company.

Hillis first described his idea for creating a knowledge web he called Aristotle in a paper in 2000. But he said he did not try to build the system until he had recruited two technical experts as co-founders. Robert Cook, an expert in parallel computing and database design, is Metaweb's executive vice president for product development.

John Giannandrea, formerly chief technologist at Tellme Networks and chief technologist of the Web browser group at Netscape/AOL, is the company's chief technology officer.

"We're trying to create the world's database, with all of the world's information," Hillis said.

March 9, 2007 at 01:44 PM in Internet evolution | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

comScore Networks Releases Top Web Properties Worldwide for December; Reviews Biggest Gainers for 2006 | CDTV.net

Top Global Web Properties Total Unique Visitors (000), Age 15+ * December 2006 Total Worldwide - Home and Work Locations Source: comScore World Metrix

Total Unique Visitors

Web Properties (000) Dec-06

Worldwide Total (Age 15+) 740,984

Microsoft Sites 508,659

Google Sites 494,170

Yahoo! Sites 476,761

Time Warner Network 260,387

eBay 251,423

Wikipedia Sites 164,675

Amazon Sites 151,033

Fox Interactive Media 135,730

CNET Networks 114,940

Ask Network 113,881

Apple Computer, Inc. 111,131

Adobe Sites 100,421

Lycos, Inc. 83,724

Viacom Digital 76,171

New York Times Digital 68,010

Source: comScore Networks Releases Top Web Properties Worldwide for December; Reviews Biggest Gainers for 2006 | CDTV.net

February 14, 2007 at 11:56 PM in Internet evolution | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense

Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense - New York Times

By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: November 12, 2006

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 11 — From the billions of documents that form the World Wide Web and the links that weave them together, computer scientists and a growing collection of start-up companies are finding new ways to mine human intelligence.

Their goal is to add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide — and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion. That level of artificial intelligence, with machines doing the thinking instead of simply following commands, has eluded researchers for more than half a century.

Referred to as Web 3.0, the effort is in its infancy, and the very idea has given rise to skeptics who have called it an unobtainable vision. But the underlying technologies are rapidly gaining adherents, at big companies like I.B.M. and Google as well as small ones. Their projects often center on simple, practical uses, from producing vacation recommendations to predicting the next hit song.

But in the future, more powerful systems could act as personal advisers in areas as diverse as financial planning, with an intelligent system mapping out a retirement plan for a couple, for instance, or educational consulting, with the Web helping a high school student identify the right college.

The projects aimed at creating Web 3.0 all take advantage of increasingly powerful computers that can quickly and completely scour the Web.

“I call it the World Wide Database,” said Nova Spivack, the founder of a start-up firm whose technology detects relationships between nuggets of information by mining the World Wide Web. “We are going from a Web of connected documents to a Web of connected data.”

Web 2.0, which describes the ability to seamlessly connect applications (like geographic mapping) and services (like photo-sharing) over the Internet, has in recent months become the focus of dot-com-style hype in Silicon Valley. But commercial interest in Web 3.0 — or the “semantic Web,” for the idea of adding meaning — is only now emerging.

The classic example of the Web 2.0 era is the “mash-up” — for example, connecting a rental-housing Web site with Google Maps to create a new, more useful service that automatically shows the location of each rental listing.

In contrast, the Holy Grail for developers of the semantic Web is to build a system that can give a reasonable and complete response to a simple question like: “I’m looking for a warm place to vacation and I have a budget of $3,000. Oh, and I have an 11-year-old child.”

Under today’s system, such a query can lead to hours of sifting — through lists of flights, hotel, car rentals — and the options are often at odds with one another. Under Web 3.0, the same search would ideally call up a complete vacation package that was planned as meticulously as if it had been assembled by a human travel agent.

How such systems will be built, and how soon they will begin providing meaningful answers, is now a matter of vigorous debate both among academic researchers and commercial technologists. Some are focused on creating a vast new structure to supplant the existing Web; others are developing pragmatic tools that extract meaning from the existing Web.

But all agree that if such systems emerge, they will instantly become more commercially valuable than today’s search engines, which return thousands or even millions of documents but as a rule do not answer questions directly.

Underscoring the potential of mining human knowledge is an extraordinarily profitable example: the basic technology that made Google possible, known as “Page Rank,” systematically exploits human knowledge and decisions about what is significant to order search results. (It interprets a link from one page to another as a “vote,” but votes cast by pages considered popular are weighted more heavily.)

Today researchers are pushing further. Mr. Spivack’s company, Radar Networks, for example, is one of several working to exploit the content of social computing sites, which allow users to collaborate in gathering and adding their thoughts to a wide array of content, from travel to movies.

Radar’s technology is based on a next-generation database system that stores associations, such as one person’s relationship to another (colleague, friend, brother), rather than specific items like text or numbers.

One example that hints at the potential of such systems is KnowItAll, a project by a group of University of Washington faculty members and students that has been financed by Google. One sample system created using the technology is Opine, which is designed to extract and aggregate user-posted information from product and review sites.

One demonstration project focusing on hotels “understands” concepts like room temperature, bed comfort and hotel price, and can distinguish between concepts like “great,” “almost great” and “mostly O.K.” to provide useful direct answers. Whereas today’s travel recommendation sites force people to weed through long lists of comments and observations left by others, the Web. 3.0 system would weigh and rank all of the comments and find, by cognitive deduction, just the right hotel for a particular user.

“The system will know that spotless is better than clean,” said Oren Etzioni, an artificial-intelligence researcher at the University of Washington who is a leader of the project. “There is the growing realization that text on the Web is a tremendous resource.”

In its current state, the Web is often described as being in the Lego phase, with all of its different parts capable of connecting to one another. Those who envision the next phase, Web 3.0, see it as an era when machines will start to do seemingly intelligent things.

Researchers and entrepreneurs say that while it is unlikely that there will be complete artificial-intelligence systems any time soon, if ever, the content of the Web is already growing more intelligent. Smart Webcams watch for intruders, while Web-based e-mail programs recognize dates and locations. Such programs, the researchers say, may signal the impending birth of Web 3.0.

“It’s a hot topic, and people haven’t realized this spooky thing about how much they are depending on A.I.,” said W. Daniel Hillis, a veteran artificial-intelligence researcher who founded Metaweb Technologies here last year.

Like Radar Networks, Metaweb is still not publicly describing what its service or product will be, though the company’s Web site states that Metaweb intends to “build a better infrastructure for the Web.”

“It is pretty clear that human knowledge is out there and more exposed to machines than it ever was before,” Mr. Hillis said.

Both Radar Networks and Metaweb have their roots in part in technology development done originally for the military and intelligence agencies. Early research financed by the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency predated a pioneering call for a semantic Web made in 1999 by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web a decade earlier.

Intelligence agencies also helped underwrite the work of Doug Lenat, a computer scientist whose company, Cycorp of Austin, Tex., sells systems and services to the government and large corporations. For the last quarter-century Mr. Lenat has labored on an artificial-intelligence system named Cyc that he claimed would some day be able to answer questions posed in spoken or written language — and to reason.

Cyc was originally built by entering millions of common-sense facts that the computer system would “learn.” But in a lecture given at Google earlier this year, Mr. Lenat said, Cyc is now learning by mining the World Wide Web — a process that is part of how Web 3.0 is being built.

During his talk, he implied that Cyc is now capable of answering a sophisticated natural-language query like: “Which American city would be most vulnerable to an anthrax attack during summer?”

Separately, I.B.M. researchers say they are now routinely using a digital snapshot of the six billion documents that make up the non-pornographic World Wide Web to do survey research and answer questions for corporate customers on diverse topics, such as market research and corporate branding.

Daniel Gruhl, a staff scientist at I.B.M.’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., said the data mining system, known as Web Fountain, has been used to determine the attitudes of young people on death for a insurance company and was able to choose between the terms “utility computing” and “grid computing,” for an I.B.M. branding effort.

“It turned out that only geeks liked the term ‘grid computing,’ ” he said.

I.B.M. has used the system to do market research for television networks on the popularity of shows by mining a popular online community site, he said. Additionally, by mining the “buzz” on college music Web sites, the researchers were able to predict songs that would hit the top of the pop charts in the next two weeks — a capability more impressive than today’s market research predictions.

There is debate over whether systems like Cyc will be the driving force behind Web 3.0 or whether intelligence will emerge in a more organic fashion, from technologies that systematically extract meaning from the existing Web. Those in the latter camp say they see early examples in services like del.icio.us and Flickr, the bookmarking and photo-sharing systems acquired by Yahoo, and Digg, a news service that relies on aggregating the opinions of readers to find stories of interest.

In Flickr, for example, users “tag” photos, making it simple to identify images in ways that have eluded scientists in the past.

“With Flickr you can find images that a computer could never find,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, head of research at Yahoo. “Something that defied us for 50 years suddenly became trivial. It wouldn’t have become trivial without the Web.”

November 13, 2006 at 11:53 PM in Internet evolution | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

A bigger bang

A bigger bang | Weekend | Guardian Unlimited

The second internet goldrush is in full swing, and this time it's all about real people, creating, editing and showcasing their own lives and opinions. John Lanchester gets to grips with the virtual universe and Guardian writers interview the smartest and the luckiest entrepreneurs who demolished the old internet and built a brand new one

Saturday November 4, 2006
The Guardian

In July 2005, Rupert Murdoch had what was widely seen as a brain-fart. He spent $580m on an internet company that was only two years old. The company was called MySpace and it was the fastest-growing new example of what are called "social networking" sites: a place where young people could post pictures of themselves, solicit friends to get in touch, let people listen to their music, answer pointless questionnaires, and in general go on at great length about the favourite subject of every young person on the planet: themselves. The company was seen as a fad by the few grown-ups who knew about it, and was notorious among geeks for its horribly irregular site design. It had no revenue stream to speak of. The "business model" for the company - the way it was eventually going to make money - was ... er ... next question. There was widespread tittering. Murdoch, who lost a lot of money on the first cycle of internet hype, had bought another pup.

In August, MySpace, which on various measures is now the busiest internet site in the world, signed a deal with Google guaranteeing it $900m in search-related advertising revenue over the next four years. Murdoch has made some big mistakes with his big bets, but MySpace isn't one of them. Instead, it is the exemplar of a new wave of innovation on the internet, an innovation focused not so much on new technology as on the way people are beginning to use existing technology. It is, I think, significant that the co-founder of MySpace, Tom Anderson, is what used to be a rarity in the net world, an arts graduate, with, instead of the computer science PhD that would once have been de rigueur, an MA in, of all things, film criticism.

"Technology," a sage once observed, "is stuff that doesn't work yet." That sounds like a joke, and it is, but it is also a crucial truth about what technology is and does: we perceive something to be technology only when it is still new and, like most new things, not quite working the way it's supposed to. Nobody thinks that the wheel is technology, though it's as important a piece of technology as humanity has ever invented; the book is an unimprovable masterpiece of technology, and relies on another, arguably the most consequential piece of technology there has ever been, the alphabet. But because you don't often find yourself waiting 45 minutes on a helpline trying to connect to Alphabet Technical Support in Bangalore, you probably don't think of the alphabet as a piece of technology.

It is when people stop thinking of something as a piece of technology that the thing starts to have its biggest impact. Wheels, wells, books, spectacles were all once wonders of the world; now they are everywhere, and we can't live without them. The internet hasn't quite got to that point, but it is getting there. People around my age - I was born in 1962 - can remember with great clarity the first time they saw a colour television. (In my case it was in 1968, in, of all places, Harrods. Another period detail is that my parents had taken me there to buy a dog.) That means we had grown up with enough black-and-white TV for it to seem the norm, so that the new thing was an extraordinary marvel. People about 10 years younger than me don't know what I'm talking about. For them, TV was never black-and-white and colour pictures were never a miracle. Similarly, younger internet users who have never heard the whistling, chattering, hopeful-anxious sound of a dial-up modem connecting to the internet. For them, increasingly, the net is something that is always available, has always been there, and can be accessed anywhere and at any time. Wireless modems, and the omnipresent internet they permit - the internet that is everywhere, like the air - still seem miraculous to me, but to 10-year-olds they seem utterly prosaic.

People are growing up with the internet, and the internet is growing up with them. It is evolving. Email was once a marvel of practicality and utility; people under the age of 25, though, never knew a time before it was broken by spam, and prefer to use instant messaging or texting. In the corporate world, as a publisher once told me, "email's main function is as an instrument of torture". In civilian life, I increasingly notice that people don't actually read their email; they sort of skim it, and get the gist, and any fine distinctions or crucial information are usually best communicated in some other way. So the heroic period of email is already in the past. No one could have predicted that, just as no one could have predicted the extraordinary, dizzying multiplying of the number of blogs being written. (I don't say read.) That number has been doubling every six months for the past three years: there are now, as of July 31, more than 50m blogs on the internet; 175,000 new blogs are created every day - that's two every second. The dominant languages (they jockey from month to month) are Chinese, Japanese and English. There are 1.6m blog posts a day.

What does that mean? What should we think about it? It's hard to know where to start, other than to say that those figures are from Technorati, a blog-tracking and searching website that is one of the indispensable sites for anyone with an interest in the net. What is a typical blog? Who knows? Somebody wittering about what they had for breakfast, or complaining about their boyfriend, or posting terrible photographs of their dog, or how they played Pong last night and it was more fun than some of their new games, or how lousy it is being a policeman, or the sex life of an American expatriate in China. (That blog, Chinabounder, has caused a national scandal in China, and spawned a hunt for the blogger that is itself the subject of a blog, Who Is Chinabounder?) It's almost impossible to think of a subject that isn't being blogged about.

The shorthand term for what is happening now is "Web 2.0", a designation coined at a conference in 2004 by the web-business booster Tim O'Reilly, as describing "an attitude rather than a technology". The phrase is a shorthand for the second internet goldrush, to follow the one that ended in 2000 with arguably the biggest destruction of investors' capital in history. From the business point of view, the defining feature of this new goldrush is that established companies are throwing huge amounts of money at upstarts who have three things in common: they have grown from nowhere with astonishing speed; they have no revenue stream to speak of; and most of their content is provided by their users. Thus we have Murdoch's buy of MySpace in July 2005, Yahoo's of Flickr in March 2005 and its rumoured to be imminent buy of Facebook for around $1bn, and - in money terms the biggest of them all - Google's $1.6bn acquisition of YouTube on October 9. That's a great deal of money raining down on some happy, happy nerds. Chad Hurley and Steve Chen only founded YouTube in February 2005. Their creation has grown in value at a rate of more than $100m a month - which must surely be a world record. That's a hell of a lot of money to be earned by the founders of a company with no earnings.

What all these new kind of sites share is an approach to creating things: "user-created content", in the jargon. The internet is no longer about corporations telling you what to do, think or buy; it's about things people create. The stuff they create falls into two very broad types. (The types aren't distinct; they blur and overlap and mash-up, as is the new way of it.)

The first type is the collective or collaborative gathering of information. One of the most important examples of this came in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, when survivors were dispersed all over the place, information was chaotic and contradictory, and the government, temporarily, seemed to collapse. A group of net-heads, led by a hacker called David Geilhufe, realised that scattered information was being posted to blogs and news sites, and put together a team of thousands of volunteers to "screenscrape" this information off the net and amalgamate it in one place: Katrinalist.net, which within a single day had collated information about 50,000 survivors of the disaster. No other medium could have done that, and no government agency came close to having the nous.

The collaborative aspects of the net have tremendous power to gather and collate information. Wikipedia is one example of this: the biggest and fastest-growing encyclopedia on the net, and the subject of many horror stories on the part of what bloggers like to call the MSM (that's mainstream media, like this). Wikipedia-bashing is all the rage in the press, and there's no denying the encyclopedia's flaws; but it's also a reference resource of extraordinary range and ease of access and, when the subject involved is sufficiently uncontroversial, remarkable usefulness. The rule of thumb with Wikipedia is that the more nerds argue about an entry, the less useful it is. (Incidentally, in the American university system, any use of Wikipedia immediately guarantees the student an F.)

Another collective site - one I look at every day - is Digg, in which users click on a thumbs-up to vote for interesting stories. Digg, Wikipedia and comparable sites have just been the subject of a blistering essay by Jaron Lanier, a scientist-thinker-mountebank who invented the term "virtual reality" and whose essay in Edge, an online magazine, complains about "Digital Maoism" and the tendency of these sites to form a "hive mind", a collective, consensus reality. And there's something in that: in any arena of human activity, you don't get a spiky, idiosyncratic take on things from sites where people vote for the most popular anything. But you do get a sense of what people find interesting, what they're reading about and talking about; a lot of what is on there is interesting and funny, and anything boring and/or stupid can be quickly scanned and rejected. The ease and speed of not-reading is one of the good things about reading on the net.

If collective sites are one of the big categories of New Thing, the other is to do with personal sites - what have been called "Me Media". But the distinctions are not clear-cut, and some interesting things happen in the overlap. Del.icio.us is a bookmark site where people list favourite places on the web - sites, blogs or whatever - which makes it a personal thing, but the entries can be tagged (ie, they can have subject labels attached) by anyone who looks at them. This gives Del.icio.us a flavour that is both personal and collective: it's about individual likes, as viewed in a group perspective, or something. I find I use it most when something else on the net sends me there, and I become curious about what someone who's interested in the same things as me finds interesting. Flickr is another site in this personal/collective overlap. It's a place where people post and tag photographs, often with multiple categories: so, say, a photo of a woman in a bikini on a beach in Brazil might be tagged as "beach", "bikini", "Brazil", and "whoa baby". I don't fully understand why people are so keen to post private photographs to Flickr, or why people are so keen to look at other people's photographs, but that's just me. Millions do.

YouTube is a hugely popular site that is more firmly in the personal category. It is basically a huge clearing house where people can post videos of, well, of anything. Want to film yourself standing on one leg, and let strangers see the result? YouTube! Then everyone who views it can vote on its popularity - that's the collective touch. Quite a lot of YouTube is pilfered off the TV: the point at which the site became a household name in the US was when it rebroadcast a sketch called Lazy Sunday from Saturday Night Live. NBC forced them to take the footage down, but the resulting publicity turned YouTube from a geek favourite to a general favourite. Because anybody can put anything (except porn) on to YouTube, I'd say roughly 98% of it is so boring that it rivals prescription sleeping aids, but the other 2% still adds up to a lot of stuff. At the time of writing, the most popular thing on YouTube is Peter, a 79-year-old man from Norfolk, complaining about modern life. His unique selling point is that he is the oldest person on YouTube. Peter is like a nicer, duller, less funny, less incisive version of Victor Meldrew. People love him.

We are now firmly in the category of the personal site. One way of putting it is to say that collective sites are useful (except when they're not) and personal sites are interesting (except when they're not). The big daddy of these, the 900lb gorilla, the Godzilla, the current Biggest of Big Things, is MySpace. Readers of the business pages first heard of MySpace when Murdoch bought it in 2005, and the site forced itself into the consciousness of the wider public over the past year, mainly through the MySpace-powered breakthroughs of three musical acts: Gnarls Barkley, the Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen.

That was no accident. Music made MySpace what it is today. At the time the company launched, in 2003, the then biggest social networking site, Friendster, didn't allow bands to promote themselves. The men behind MySpace saw that as a crucial mistake, not least because of music's centrality to young people's self-definition. Bands gave them a reason for visiting MySpace, and something to talk about when they went there. "Music is a major cornerstone of our success," Tom Anderson says today. "We've got over two million bands on the site already and the number just keeps growing. As other artists - comedians, film-makers, designers, etc - have come on the site, the success we've seen with music has repeated itself. If you're connected to culture and offer compelling content, you can reach broad segments of our community pretty fast. That's true if you're Snoop Dogg or an unsigned garage band in Liverpool."

Cool - everything to do with cool - is a big, big business. MySpace is in that business. It has more than 110m registered users; if it were a country it would be the 10th biggest in the world, just behind Mexico. Its audience, heavily skewed towards the affluent youth of the west, is a marketer's and advertiser's fantasy. In time, this might be a problem for MySpace, as companies become more astute about how to manipulate the apparent chaos and spontaneity of the site to plant manufactured hype. (There has just been a kerfuffle of this sort on YouTube, about a fake video blog called Lonelygirl15.) Chris DeWolfe, the CEO of MySpace, was bullish about this when I asked him. "'I'm not sure how anyone could falsely construct hype on MySpace," he said, "since the community rejects pretty much anything that isn't authentic." Well, quite - and they might decide that MySpace itself is not wholly authentic. But although there are murmurings about hype, for now, the site is riding high. "If you're not on MySpace," an American teenager told a researcher, "you don't exist."

The hardest thing to get your head around is the sheer size of this audience. When you first browse MySpace pages, the site asks what country you're interested in, which gender, what age range, and whether you want only to see people who've posted photographs of themselves. If you leave all of those settings on the default options, you are taken to see the MySpace pages of women in Afghanistan between 18 and 35 who have posted pictures of themselves. Guess how many there are? Three thousand. I thought that was a mistake - what, 3,000 women peering out from beneath their burkhas in Kabul to post complaints about their mothers-in-law? - but when I started clicking, I landed first on the page of a 18-year-old woman who is a private in the US army and based at Bagram. That's when I realised that most of these pages belong to young women soldiers, and also what MySpace is: a place where you can go to communicate with, if not quite anyone in the world, then with an 18-year-old US army private who likes Sixpence None The Richer, Eagle Eye Cherry and the Ramones, has a weakness for deli pickles, a fear of snakes and whose ambition for this year is to achieve abs of steel. And there are 100m more pages where that one came from.

There is something freaking-out about this. It's hard to know what to think of a phenomenon where quite so many people are so on display, so contactable, so ready to be got in touch with, so connected. Speaking for myself, I feel a strong sense of intrusiveness when I look at people's MySpace pages - a reaction that makes no sense at all, since the whole point of these pages is that they've been designed to be looked at. While I've been working on this piece, I've been showing MySpace to people who don't know it and asking what they think of it, what it reminds them of. One of the best answers was given by my wife, who said it reminded her of scrapbooks, the kind that teenagers used to keep - postcards, photos, lists of likes and dislikes, doodles, best friends, boyfriends, crushed flowers, crushes. But while all that is true, the truest thing is to say that you can't really come up with a metaphor for MySpace. It really is a new thing.

This has, of course, caused a moral panic. Like most moral panics these days, it is about paedophilia. In the US, there are court cases from people who've been bullied online, and there's a bill targeting MySpace before Congress, under the lumpen name of the "Deleting Online Predators Act". And I suppose there's something in this; certainly there's no way of knowing if people are who they say they are. But it should also be borne in mind that teenagers, in particular, need a place where they can try out identities and experiment with different versions of themselves. MySpace has more then 4m registered users in the UK, and logged more than 1.6bn page visits in June. A great deal of that traffic, perhaps most of it, comes from teenagers - a fact that surely reflects the diminishing opportunities for teenagers to meet and interact in real life. A lot of what goes on on MySpace is that, to non-teenagers, extraordinarily hard-to-understand activity of hanging out. What's going on? Nothing's going on. That's the point.

The usefulness of this for young people is not small. A friend firmly interrupted me when I was talking about the MySpace moral panic. Her children are devotees of Bebo, a site similar to MySpace but based around schools and colleges. "Leila had some friends over from her school. She's 13 and Tom is 11, and that's a difficult gap when the girls are older than the boys, so I was worried. But when they came over they hit it off immediately, because they already knew all about Tom from Bebo, what bands he liked and so on, and he already knew who they were, and they immediately began talking and they never stopped, and there was no awkwardness at all. It was fantastic. Especially compared with what it used to be like to be a teenager. I feel as if I spent the second half of the 70s trying to make conversation with boys who felt even more awkward than I did - thanks to the net, you just don't have to do that any more."

Perhaps the more genuinely worrying thing is the opposite of the one the moral panic is about. I said MySpace is all about connectedness; but equally, and perhaps more truthfully, it could be said that it's all about separation. In 2000 a man called Mitch Maddox changed his name by deed poll to Dotcomguy and lived for a year without going out of his house: all his shopping, all his everything, was done exclusively over the internet. That was a stunt, obviously - a rather depressing stunt - but it made the point that this is what the world is now like. (In case you're worried, he changed his name back to Mitch Maddox at the end of the year.) You can make your living, do your shopping, pay your taxes, enjoy your entertainments, have friends and relationships, all without going out of your house, or indeed without moving away from your computer screen except to go to the fridge and toilet. Now that, it seems to me, is a profoundly grim thought.

Tom Anderson doesn't agree. "For most of our users," he told me, "the vast majority of their MySpace friends are also offline friends. They're just connecting through a different medium when they're on MySpace. The connection between someone in Leeds and a comedian in Los Angeles would probably never happen if it weren't for MySpace, so it enables friendship and connection far more than it limits it." Pressing the point, I asked if the MySpace idea of a friend represented a devaluation of the idea of friendship. Again, he didn't agree. "It's pretty cool when you can connect directly with your neighbour and the Black Eyed Peas at the same time. MySpace gives our members the ability to reach such an incredible range of people and have direct contact with them. I'm not sure how that devalues friendship so much as it expands the range of potential friends you can have."

Well, maybe. About five years ago I was checking my email in a cybercafe in Sydney. Being nosey, I began sneaking discreet peeks at my neighbours' computer screens. On my left, an American backpacker was writing to a man she'd met in India, debating whether they should arrange to meet again and take their relationship further or whether they should leave it as it was, as a Bogart-and-Bergman we'll-always-have-Dharamsala memory. On my right, a man in a turban was writing to a woman not his wife about how his wife did not understand him. It struck me that everybody on the net is sitting alone at a computer screen, and many of them are wishing they weren't alone, while also, often, in some deep way, preferring that they are alone and being nervous of the alternative. Sit someone at a computer screen and let it sink in that they are fully, definitively alone; then watch what happens. They will reach out for other people; but only part of the way. They will have "friends", which are not the same thing as friends, and a lively online life, which is not the same thing as a social life; they will feel more connected, but they will be just as alone. Everybody sitting at a computer screen is alone. Everybody sitting at a computer screen is at the centre of the world. Everybody sitting at a computer screen, increasingly, wants everything to be all about them. This is our first glimpse of what people who grow up with the net will want from the net. One of the cleverest things about MySpace is the name.

November 5, 2006 at 07:20 PM in Internet evolution | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Internet use growth 2000 - 2005 - Middle East

September 11, 2006 at 08:44 PM in Internet evolution | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Internet use - Canada

Related tables: Internet.  

Internet use by individuals, by location of access, by province
(Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia)

2005

Canada
Sask.
Alta.
B.C.

% of all individuals aged 18 years and over¹

Location of Internet access

Any location²
67.9
66.2
70.6
69.3

Home
60.9
58.3
63.9
63.3

Work
26.3
24.0
30.1
25.0

School
11.7
11.6
11.5
11.3

Public library
10.2
8.2
10.9
13.8

Other location
20.3
19.7
20.0
22.0

Note: The Canadian Internet use survey (CIUS) tables beginning with 2005 replace the Household Internet survey (HIUS) tables from 1997 to 2003. The unit surveyed is now the individual rather than the household. Only adults aged 18 years and over were surveyed.
1. Percentage of all individuals, aged 18 years and over, who responded that they had used the Internet in the previous twelve months for personal non-business use from any location.
2. Internet access from any location includes use from home, school, work, public library or other location, and counts an individual only once, regardless of use from multiple locations.
Source: Statistics Canada, CANSIM, table (for fee) 358-0122.

August 16, 2006 at 10:35 AM in Internet evolution | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

For those who missed it the first time...

TheStar.com - For those who missed it the first time...

Aug. 6, 2006. 01:00 AM

While the terms Internet and Web tend to be used interchangeably, the Web — like email, videoconferencing, streaming audio and video — travels across the Internet. The Net is a global infrastructure of computer servers, fibre-optic trunk lines, "routers" that direct electronic traffic, and the slender phone and cable lines running into your home. A rough analogy would be the Web as a train and the Internet as the tracks.

"On the Net," Tim Berners-Lee has explained, "you find computers. On the Web you find information — documents, sounds, videos. The Web could not be without the Net. The Web made the Net useful because people are really interested in information (not to mention knowledge and wisdom!) and don't really want to have to know about computers and cables."

Berners-Lee is the son of two mathematicians who worked on the Manchester Mark I, one of the earliest computers. At age 25, the erstwhile tiddlywinks league player at Oxford University devised a primitive version of the Web he called ENQUIRE, after a Victorian book, Enquire Within Upon Everything.

ENQUIRE's advanced version, debuting on this date 11 years later, was built on HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol), HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and URL (Universal Resource Location) — the last being of the most critical importance.

The HTTP determines how and where Web pages are sent. The HTML is the language by which a Web page is formatted for the Internet. And the URL is the unique address assigned to each Web page, enabling a Web user to retrieve it from its precisely identified location, be it deep in the bowels of an enormous mainframe computer at the Johns Hopkins medical school, a United Nations agency or the University of Tokyo, or on the website of a gun dealer in Birmingham, Ala.

August 6, 2006 at 05:07 PM in Internet evolution | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

A slow death by progress

TheStar.com - A slow death by progress

If our global civilization dies, what's left to replace it?
Aug. 6, 2006. 10:08 AM
RONALD WRIGHT
SPECIAL TO THE STAR

The following was to be the keynote address by Ronald Wright to the Couchiching Conference this Thursday. Wright, the author of the bestselling book A Short History of Progress, had to withdraw from the conference at the last minute for personal reasons. The theme of this year's conference is "Wedded to Progress: For Better, For Worse." For more information, visit http://www.couch.ca.

For at least 60,000 years — ever since religious belief first shows itself in the burial rites of Neanderthal Man and the great cave paintings of the Old Stone Age — human societies have probed the mystery of existence with mythology and art. Then, a few centuries ago, the Enlightenment accompanied the rise of modern science and the world quickly became a lonely place, for Man deposed the gods and put himself in charge. And as industry began to remake both nature and society, Western civilization became conscious, for the first time ever, of runaway change, and therefore self-conscious about its destiny.

Literature on this theme is usually called "utopian" or "dystopian," depending on whether it pictures the best, or the worst, of all possible worlds: a future we think we might want, or one we know we don't want. For our purposes here, I'm defining "civilization" in an anthropological way — to mean complex societies with large populations based on the domestication of plants, animals, and human beings. When moral weight is attached to it, "civilization" can become a dangerous word. The notion that civilized people not only smell better but behave better than "savages" doesn't stand up well to scrutiny: The biggest and most notorious incidents of human sacrifice — the public killings of ancient Rome, the bonfires of the Spanish Inquisition, the Aztec heart-extractions, the Nazi death camps — were all the work of highly civilized folk. So-called savages have done no worse.

Almost everyone on Earth today is civilized in the technical sense: enjoying the fruits, and bearing the consequences, of an experiment that began when farming first arose in several key areas of the world — the Near East, the Americas, and Asia — soon after the end of the last Ice Age. This discovery is what archaeologists call the Neolithic or Farming Revolution. With it began a population boom that has yet to level off.

By about 5,000 years ago, farming had led to the first big towns and cities; to specialists and priesthoods; to kingdoms, empires, and theocracies; to the rule of the many by the few. For those at the top it brought wonderful things: most of art, literature, music, and science. For the masses it brought monotony and toil.

A span of five millennia may seem long enough to declare the experiment of civilization an unqualified success. But its entire run is barely one-fifth of one per cent of the human career on Earth. Even our modern subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens — people with the same physical and mental abilities as us — has existed between 10 and 20 times longer than its oldest civilization. The settled, urban life we regard today as normal is not the life that made us; not the life by which we evolved.

For me, the greatest mystery of what we call the "ancient world" is how recent it really is. No city or monument is much more than 5,000 years old. Only 70 lifetimes of 70 years have been lived end-to-end since civilization began. Yet civilization has displaced almost all other ways of living, often forcibly. There is now no viable alternative, no blank on the map, no going back without catastrophe. As we climbed the ladder of progress, we kicked out the rungs below.

We look at the Pyramids, Stonehenge, the Mesopotamian ziggurats, or the colossal stone heads of Olmec Mexico, and such ruins seem of vast antiquity, proud markers of the human permanence on Earth.

Or we can draw a different lesson from them. In Europe, Asia, Africa, America, and Oceania, the abandoned monuments stand as proof that, like individuals, civilizations are mortal: They are born, they flourish, and they die.

Except ours. Ours, we like to believe, is different, the beneficiary of all the rest. The sunny afternoon in which we thrive will stretch ahead forever, its permanence underwritten by scientific progress. Indeed, with the Industrial Revolution arose the very idea of progress, as defined by the historian Sidney Pollard in 1968: "the assumption that a pattern of change exists in the history of mankind... that it consists of irreversible changes in one direction only, and that this direction is towards improvement."

Anyone who looks over the events of the past 100 years with a clear eye will, I think, have to concede that progress, like most things in life, comes in two kinds: good and bad. The invention of Viagra was good, it seems to me, not for any personal reason but because it softened the market in rhino horn, seal penises, and other supposedly aphrodisiac bits of wildlife.

The invention of nuclear weapons (a brilliant feat technically) was the worst kind of progress, because it may yet kill us all. Most inventions fall somewhere in between, and whether their effects are ultimately good or bad is often a matter of scale. And of time: What strikes me most strongly, when I look at the wake of the human voyage, is the runaway progression of change — or, to put it another way, the collapsing of time. From the first chipped stone to the first smelted iron took nearly 3 million years. From the first iron to the hydrogen bomb took only 3,000 years.

In my book A Short History of Progress, I coined the term "progress trap" for a seductive trail of successes that leads to a catastrophic end. The first of these, I argue, was the overkill of big game late in the Old Stone Age.

Ancient hunters who learnt how to kill two mammoths instead of one had made real progress. Those who learnt how to kill 200 — by driving a whole herd over a cliff — had made too much. By about 10,000 years ago, most people on Earth had ruined hunting as their main way of life. Some escaped from that trap by the discovery of farming, only to repeat the pattern of overconsumption on a grander scale, as many of the world's most creative civilizations wore out their welcome from nature and collapsed.

The Sumerians of early Iraq, arguably the world's first full-blown civilization, had developed large-scale irrigation by 3000 BC. For several centuries all went well — the Sumerian people and their dozen cities grew as the agricultural base expanded, as canals and ditches led more and more water to the thirsty land.

But what the Sumerians didn't know is that groundwater nearly always holds some mineral salts, and these become concentrated over time by irrigation: the water evaporates; the salt stays behind in the land. By 2000 BC, Sumerian scribes were writing that the fields had "turned white"; the very thing that had built their society turned their farms into saltpan, leaving the mud-brick ruins of their cities standing in a wasteland of their making.

The same problem afflicted many other parts of the world, and is still degrading arid regions of North America, Asia, Argentina, and Australia to this day. Farming also tends to wear out land by deforestation, erosion, and nutrient loss — troubles that beset the Greeks, Romans, Maya, and many more.

Urbanization is another common trap. A small village on good bottomland beside a river begins as a rational and seemingly harmless settlement pattern. But as the village grows into a town and then a city, the best land disappears beneath buildings, and farmers are driven onto marginal soils.

Some ancient peoples, among them the Maya, made this elementary mistake; others, such as the Incas and Egyptians, were more farsighted. Modern societies, especially in North America, and now Asia, are behaving like the Maya, allowing Los Angeles, Vancouver, and Shanghai to turn cropland into industrial parks, suburbs and shopping malls.

Societies often make things worse than they need to be by falling victim to what anthropologists call "ideological pathologies" — self-destructive delusions, usually religious in nature. The mini-civilization of Easter Island, for instance, eventually wrecked its whole ecology for the sake of its statue cult. The last tree came down to put up the last colossus. The bare earth then washed or blew away, leaving hunger, war, and death.

Our present faith in an ill-defined material progress and our capitulation to the market forces that claim to drive it (the very forces that turn fields into parking lots and forests into paper towels) may not seem religious, but is hardly less dangerous or delusional. When, how, and above all why did we start believing that the stock market must run the world?

In the past, the cycles of rise and fall were regional. As Babylon died, Rome grew; as Rome fell, the Maya rose; and so on. Setbacks were local; the experiment of civilization carried on elsewhere. But when one region, Europe, came to dominate the rest of the world, and — strengthened by the wealth and food staples of the civilizations it conquered — to industrialize, the graph of human impact shot skywards.

In 1492, when Columbus sailed, there were about 400 million people on this planet. It had taken us all of our existence to reach that number. But since 1492 — a matter of only seven lifespans of 70 years — that total has multiplied by 16 times.

The bets our ancestors unwittingly placed when they invented civilization now rest on a single high-stakes throw. We have in effect one big civilization, feeding on the whole world at such a rate that we can observe the exhaustion of natural capital within our own lifetimes, whether it be the loss of wildlife, clean water, coral reefs, rainforests, or topsoil. We are cutting old-growth trees everywhere, we are irrigating everywhere, we are mining and fishing everywhere. And no corner of the biosphere escapes our haemorrhage of waste. As each year goes by, the world loses an area of farmland greater than Scotland to erosion and urban sprawl, while 70 million extra human mouths must be fed.

Some years ago, I called civilizations "pyramid schemes," partly because they build pyramids (costly but unproductive projects that may take the form of colossal statues, extravagant tombs, sumptuous temples, office towers, or missile shields) but mainly because civilizations often behave like "pyramid" sales schemes: thriving only while they expand, paying the present by stealing from the future, collapsing suddenly in political and environmental bankruptcy.

The creation of imaginary worlds to comment upon the real one has long taproots in mythology. The tales of Icarus, Prometheus and Pandora illustrate the risks of being too clever by half, a theme also known to Genesis. Perhaps the most insightful ancient story of this kind — particularly as it comes from a civilization that had suffered collapse — is the "Rebellion of the Tools" in the Maya creation epic, the Popol Vuh, where human beings are overthrown by their farm and household implements:

"And all [those things] began to speak... `You... shall feel our strength. We shall grind and tear your flesh to pieces,' said their grinding stones... At the same time, their griddles and pots spoke: `Pain and suffering you have caused us... you burned us as if we felt no pain. Now you shall feel it, we shall burn you.'"

As the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier pointed out, this was perhaps our first explicit warning of the threat in the machine.

Such warnings became common in the 19th century when, for the first time ever, wrenching technical and social change could be felt within a single lifetime. In 1800 the cities had been small, the air and water relatively clean — which is to say the water was more likely to give you cholera than cancer. The sound of machinery was almost unknown. Nothing moved faster than by wind or limb. A person from Shakespeare's day, from 1600, transported to 1800 could have made his way around quite easily.

The facts really don't seem to matter anymore. How else can we explain the re-elections of Tony Blair and George Bush?
But by 1900, there were motorcars on the streets, and electric trains beneath them; movies were flickering on screens; and Albert Einstein was writing his Special Theory of Relativity.

Early in the 19th century, Mary Shelley pondered the new science with her Frankenstein. And Charles Dickens gave the social costs of industry a scalding and prescient critique in his novel Hard Times, asking whether "the Good Samaritan was a Bad Economist" and foreseeing the new religion of the bottom line: "Every inch of the existence of mankind, from birth to death," Dickens wrote in 1854, "was to be a bargain across a counter."

In his 1872 novel Erewhon (an anagram of nowhere), Samuel Butler created a remote civilization beyond the mountains of New Zealand that had industrialized long before Europe, but where the side effects of progress sparked a Luddite revolution.

The great danger, wrote an Erewhonian radical, was not so much the existing machines as the speed at which they were evolving: If not stopped in time, they might develop language, reproduce themselves, and subjugate mankind.

Butler was sending up Darwinism here, but the anxieties stirred by the panting monsters of the Steam Age were real enough. Years before he became Queen Victoria's favourite prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli had anticipated Erewhon's fears in his novel Coningsby: "The mystery of mysteries," he wrote in 1844, "is to view machines making machines, a spectacle that fills the mind with curious and even awful speculation."

The faster the hands began to move on the clock of progress, the more writers and thinkers began to ask themselves Paul Gauguin's question: Where are we going? If so much was happening so quickly before their eyes, what might happen in the future? Butler, H.G. Wells, William Morris, Richard Jefferies, and many others developed a new literary form that could present their imaginings to a broad reading public: a blend of fantasy, satire, and allegory that became known as the "scientific romance."

In The Time Machine of 1895, Wells sent a traveller to a distant future where the human race has split into two species. The Eloi, a sybaritic upper class, live brainlessly on the industrial toil of the underground subhuman Morlocks, never guessing that the latter — seemingly their slaves — are in fact raising them for meat.

In his novel, News from Nowhere, William Morris dreamt up a post-industrial New Age — a utopia of honest workmanship, good design, and free love — from which he attacked the first great wave of globalization, the World Market ruled by the steamship, the telegraph, and the British:

"[A]rtificial necessaries... became, under the iron rule of the aforesaid World-Market, of equal importance... with the real necessaries which supported life...

"To this `cheapening of production,' as it was called, everything was sacrificed: the happiness of the workman at his work, his most elementary comfort and bare health... His life, in short, did not weigh a grain of sand in the balance against this dire necessity of `cheap production' of things, a great part of which were not worth producing at all... The whole community was cast into the jaws of this ravening monster, the World-Market."

The 1890s. Or the 1990s? While we may learn from the past, we don't seem to learn much. That last generation before World War I — the time of the young Einstein and of Joseph Conrad's terrorism novel, The Secret Agent — was in many ways a time like ours: an old century grown tired; a new century in which moralities and certainties were withering, mad bombers were lurking in the shadows, while industrialists declaimed from their mansions that unfettered industry would bring a glittering future to all.

The dystopian writers sensed that change was running out of control and began to fear that, with the might of industry, mankind had found the means to suicide. They saw jingoistic nation-states equipped with high explosives and steel warships; they saw social exploitation and vast urban slums; chemically contaminated air and water, and civilization conferred on so-called savages through the barrels of machine-guns.

What if those guns were turned not on Zulus or Sioux Indians but on other white men? What if the pollution and degradation of the slums caused degeneration of the human race? What, exactly, was the point of all this economic output and activity if, for so many people, it meant deracination, misery, and filth?

By the end of The Time Machine, Wells's Traveller sees "in the growing pile of civilization, only a foolish heaping that must inevitably... destroy its makers in the end."

Many say that we stand here, a century later, to prove those gloomy Victorians wrong. But do we? The dystopian writers may have been wrong on the details they imagined for the 20th century, but they were right to foresee trouble. Just ahead lay the Great War and 12 million dead, the Russian Revolution, the Great Slump — leading to Hitler, the death camps, the Second War with 50 million dead, the atom bomb. And these in turn to the Cold War, the greatest squandering of human and natural wealth in history. To say nothing of the Korean War, the near-fatal Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, Cambodia, Rwanda. Even the most pessimistic Victorian might have been surprised to learn that the 20th century would slaughter more than 100 million people in its wars — about half the entire population of the world in Roman times.

The Victorian scientific romances had two modern descendants: mainstream science fiction and profound social satire set in nightmare futures. The latter includes several of the past century's most important books: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, and a number of post-nuclear wastelands, of which Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker has to be the masterpiece.

With the nuclear threat fading (maybe), modern apocalyptic novels have concentrated more on the whimpers than the bang at the world's end. There has been a revisiting of concerns first raised before Hiroshima, especially the unforeseen risks of new technologies, and how our species might conduct itself so that we do not breed, poison, and murder ourselves to extinction on the one hand, or abandon our humanity for antlike order on the other.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Brave New World was the good case Huxley made for the devil of order — a case harder to answer today than in 1932. Consider this homily delivered to the outsider called the "Savage" by the world ruler, extolling genetic selection, Pavlovian conditioning, and mind-numbing hedonism:

"A happy, hardworking, goods-consuming citizen [is] perfect... Otherwise the wheels stop turning... You're so conditioned that you can't help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant... that there really aren't any temptations to resist. And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there's always [the drug] soma... to make you patient and longsuffering... to give you a holiday from the facts."

In 1932, real soma hadn't been invented; now we have it in Prozac, Zoloft, and the like. The facts really don't seem to matter anymore. How else can we explain the re-elections of Tony Blair and George Bush? About half the adult population is now on antidepressants, and many of those who aren't still soak them up in drinking water from the Great Lakes and the Thames.

Meanwhile, the clanking monsters of Erewhon have taken subtler forms that threaten the entire biosphere: climate disruption, toxic waste, new pathogens, nanotechnology, genetic engineering.

One of the dangers of making up a nightmare future is how depressing it is when you get things right. About a dozen years ago I began work on my novel A Scientific Romance, a title I chose to acknowledge the Victorians, and because my theme was our culture's heady romance with science.

For satirical purposes I made what I thought were wild extrapolations from things in the news. I had a character die of mad cow disease, thinking that in the final draft I would probably have to kill her off with something less farfetched. By the time the book was published in 1997, dozens of people really had died of mad cow.

Other elements of the satire — climate change that turns wintry London into a tropical swamp, a race of genetically modified survivors, and a GM grass that doesn't need mowing because it has the self-limiting properties of pubic hair — no longer seem quite the funhouse mirrors they were when I began.

Just lately something more specific came to haunt me. In the jungly ruins of London, my protagonist finds a street blocked off and buildings fortified with concrete slabs. Here, he deduces, an embattled British government must have spent its final days in the 2030s. Only last year I read in the newspaper that the Blair government actually has plans to surround the Houses of Parliament with a 15-foot concrete wall and razor wire.

I don't want to be a prophet, and I certainly don't claim to be. It doesn't take Nostradamus to foresee that walls will go up in times of crisis — though the thickest walls are in the mind. A telling feature of the real mad cow disaster was how long the British government did nothing except hope for the best.

Hope may be a virtue, but it has its risks. Hope drives us to invent new fixes for old messes, which in turn create ever more dangerous messes; hope elects the politician with the fattest empty promise; and as any stockbroker or lottery seller knows, most of us will take a wild punt over prudent and predictable thrift. Hope, like greed, fuels the engine of capitalism. And so we all conspire in the upward concentration of wealth that ensures there can never be enough to go around. In the past it was only the poor who lost this game; now it is the planet.

But the world has grown too small to forgive us any more big mistakes. The species that has lately brought the Earth atomic war and nuclear waste, DDT, thalidomide, mad cow disease, Chernobyl, and the Bhopal chemical spill must recognize itself for what it is: clever but seldom wise. Put baldly, we are not as smart as we think we are. If Homo sapiens is to survive the accumulating consequences of its half-evolved intelligence, it must become aware of its habitual shortcomings, like drivers who keep their speed within their skill.

Our greatest experiment — civilization itself — will succeed only if it can live on nature's terms, not Man's. To do this we must adopt principles in which the short term is trumped by the long; in which caution prevails over ingenuity; in which the absurd myth of endless growth is replaced by respect for natural limits; in which progress is steered by precautionary wisdom. This ideological shift is the most urgent task for science and society, for professors, politicians, priests, and writers.

What we humans — with our Easter Island-like faith in the bigger, the better, and the more complex — have naively called "progress" is now moving so quickly, and with such unforeseeable consequences, that its promises can no longer be taken at face value.

Instead of hoping for the best, we have to imagine the worst — and by doing so strive to forestall it.

August 6, 2006 at 05:06 PM in Internet evolution | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

The worldwide whatever

TheStar.com - The worldwide whatever

Aug. 6, 2006. 07:36 AM
DAVID OLIVE

"Legend has it that every new technology is first used for something related to sex or pornography. That seems to be the way of humankind."

— Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web

Last week, Playboy Enterprises, Inc. teamed with a Toronto-based specialist in gambling software to announce the launch later this year of the first Playboy-branded online poker website.

CryptoLogic Inc.'s president, Lewis Rose, lauded Playboy as "one of the world's premier entertainment brands." And Christie Hefner, CEO of Playboy, blew an air kiss Rose's way, heaping praise on his firm's "technical and industry strength."

In the United States, where online gambling is illegal but thriving, federal legislators now attempting a crackdown on the illicit industry might see the deal differently — as the partnership of a porn purveyor with a firm exploiting another of man's primordial weaknesses.

Fifteen years ago today, Tim Berners-Lee launched the World Wide Web with a noble vision for it as "a force for individual, regional and global understanding."

It's a safe guess that the great majority of the more than 1.1 billion people who now use the Web are more in tune with Playboy's vision of it than Berners-Lee's. For them it's about searching for a job or a new-home listing. Making a last-minute mortgage payment online. Comparison shopping for Advil at Walmart.com and Walgreens.com. Making arrangements for a trip to Disney World, including a stop at Lavalife.com to check out potential travelling companions. Downloading a screensaver of the cutest Coldplay band member. Filling out a collection of limited edition Hummels. Or ogling porn sites and visiting chat rooms — the "killer application" that drove Web-surfers to the first "cybercafés" in the early 1990s.

The Web has shrunk Marshall McLuhan's global village into a town square. Its most intimate manifestation, perhaps, is MySpace, a hangout for 100 million people, many of them teens who share photos with friends and exchange history-class horror stories.

The Web phenomenon of "social networking" has yielded scores of websites where people with common interests daily congregate, including Connect. ee for the Estonia diaspora; Reunion.com, where 25 million users re-connect with friends and family; and VampireFreaks.com, a seven-year-old Web community of 550,000 mostly teen-aged "cybergoths." Long-time members are granted access to The Dungeon, where they can view each other's buttocks. Possibly this is what George W. Bush had in mind when he warned of "children living, you know, in the dark dungeons of the Internet."

The mostly prosaic uses of the Web can only be a disappointment for Berners-Lee, a self-effacing man nonetheless infected with his share of that geek high-priesthood conviction that he's on a mission to refine our civilization, in ways we technophobes can't quite understand.

Just the same, Sir Tim (he was knighted in 2004) and his collaborators on the nascent Web project back in 1991 succeeded in creating a means by which their aspirations for a world less plagued by conflict, disease, and ignorance might yet be achieved.

In Boston, the dogged Sir Tim, now 51, is now at work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on another potential triumph. Dubbed the Semantic Web, it aims to develop a "thinking" computer network that gathers, with a minimum of instruction, copious amounts of vaguely related data worldwide.

Cleverly interpreted, such a data accumulation could demystify the most stubbornly misunderstood diseases, or "connect the dots" of terrorist-group activities — a task beyond the abilities of intelligence agencies who so abysmally failed before the terrorist attacks on New York, Washington, Bali, Madrid and London.

Computers read but can't manipulate the billions of bytes of information out there. But with "global semantic data," says Berners-Lee, "you'll be able to combine the data you know about with other data that you didn't know about.

"The big challenges such as cancer, AIDS, and the drug discovery for new viruses require the interplay of vast amounts of data from many fields that overlap — genomics, proteomics, epidemiology, and so on. Some of this data is public, some very proprietary to drug companies, and some very private to a patient."

The challenge for Berners-Lee and his MIT colleagues is to develop computer programs that protect propriety and personal information while gathering and manipulating it all the same, to make trailblazing connections across hundreds of fields, encompassing everything from regional weather patterns to racial origin to household finances and job vocations, in order to determine predictors of disease incidence or avoidance.

"Our lives will be enriched by this data," Berners-Lee explained in a 2004 interview, "which we didn't have access to before, and we'll be able to write programs that will actually help because [the computer will] be able to understand the data out there rather than just presenting it to us on the screen."

Many of us would settle for changing the world just once a lifetime, as Berners-Lee did on Aug. 6, 1991. The Web came into being that day when, at age 36, the soft-spoken English computer programmer at a scientific think tank in Geneva put his first "Web" site onto the Internet, thus creating the World Wide Web, a term he coined.

That first website explained the set of Web protocols, of which Berners-Lee was the principal author, and by which millions of pages of data stored in far-flung computers worldwide could be retrieved with relative ease for the first time.

Among the most important acronyms of all time, the protocols HTTP, HTML, and URL (see sidebar this page) transformed the three-decade-old Internet from a repository of arcane technical data into the most powerful tool of today's Information Age.

Like running water, the Web is now a ubiquitous utility as familiar as the phone and cable companies that provide access to its congeries of 98 million websites (up from 50 in 1992). Websites are maintained by the Prime Minister's Office and comedy-club booking agents, by blue-chip corporations and local scrap yards, advocacy groups like Amnesty International and the Sierra Club, and possibly your neighbourhood church and pub, eager to post their calendar of choir practices and darts tournaments.

Not to overlook the estimated 30 million sites operated by "bloggers" — online diarists, or "Web loggers," who carry on about the perfidy of the Bush administration or its detractors, fly-fishing techniques, or updates of the Henderson family's progress, complete with holiday snaps, as it retraces the 18th-century trade route of the coureurs de bois.

Last year, Canadians purchased close to $40 billion dollars worth of merchandise online. Canadian households viewed 1,373 Web pages and spent 28 hours online each month. And that doesn't include Web surfing in the workplace.

The global count of Web searches worldwide is now 5.7 billion per day. For many of us, the Web is the first place to look for weather, travel and financial information and, thanks to Google Maps, the exact location of the dinner party you're to attend tonight.

`The information superhighway will... open up a huge opportunity to waste your time'

Harold Geneen

1970s management guru

The world's embrace of the Web is invariably described as unusually rapid. The widespread acceptance of the telephone took some 70 years; of cars, 60 years; of passenger aviation, 70 years; of radio and television, 30 years each; of microwave ovens, 28 years; and of VCRs, 35 years.

But the first "Internet cafés" appeared in London, Toronto and Helsinki just three years after Berners-Lee posted his 1991 manifesto proclaiming the newborn Web to be "an easy but powerful global information system."

And in the comparatively brief decade or so since the Web became a commercial medium, with the emergence of Amazon.com, eBay Inc. and other Web vendors in the mid-1990s, two-thirds of North Americans, or 227 million of us, became regular Web users.

Similarly startling were the early predictions made about the Web's certain impact.

Medical and other scientific discoveries would occur at a breakneck pace. Abroad, tyrannical regimes would succumb to new leaders empowered by information disseminated from freedom-loving societies, while at home political and corporate governance would be sanitized by thorough scrutiny from the proliferation of both revelations of wrongdoing and of the independent watchdogs (as political bloggers style themselves) who dug them up.

Traditional stores would be killed off by e-commerce, as computer-mouse "clicks" triumphed over "bricks." The mainstream media would be supplanted by Web broadcasts and electronic publishing of books, newspapers, and magazines.

"Commerce in the next decade will change more than it's changed in the last hundred years," Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric Co. and one of the globe's most respected management gurus, declared in the late 1990s.

Even earlier, Hugh McColl, CEO of Nationsbank (now Bank of America), said the Web "is like a tidal wave. If you fail in the game, you're going to be dead."

Bill Gates, chagrined that he had initially underestimated the Web's impact, said, "The Internet is only surpassed by mental telepathy."

The Web's usefulness is, of course, undeniable. But seldom has the significance of a major innovation been so exaggerated.

The industrialized world was primed for the Web well before it was launched. The Internet, of which the Web is something of a mere application, was 20 years old already and largely built, and personal computers were widespread in homes and offices by the late 1980s.

But, if anything, the uptake of the Web was halting in the beginning, given the conflicting strategies of the new Internet service providers (ISPs) and the lame content, crude graphic design, and poor navigation of mid-1990s websites.

A hesitant business world wavered between thinking the Web was a fad and fearing that its success would only cannibalize existing sales. E-commerce has since manifested itself as just another distribution channel of companies from Loblaws to the Royal Bank, which still operate plenty of bricks-and-mortar supermarkets and bank branches.

Amazon.com, still only marginally profitable 12 years after its founding in Seattle by Jeff Bezos, and eBay, not a retailer, actually, but an auction house, are among the few major survivors of the dotcom bust of 2000.

The traditional book trade has thrived since 1991. Stephen King's late-1990s experiment with writing a book exclusively for Web viewers has not been repeated, by King or anyone else. A decline in newspaper readership that began long before the Web's appearance was reversed by the papers' online editions, which have given major papers the biggest audiences they've ever commanded. Not one paper or magazine has perished directly because of the Web.

And, sadly, not one scientific breakthrough can be attributed to Web-accelerated exchanges of research data. Nor has peace and greater mutual understanding broken out in the Middle East, Darfur, or among the combatants in the fledging war between Ethiopian and Somalia.

Bloggers, mostly one-person operations with no reporting staff, scalp much of their content from the mainstream publications and network broadcasts they mock for their slow-footedness. Bloggers have not set the agenda in politics, science or any other realm.

"The blogosphere is not a hothouse where brilliant new ideas are generated by the self-described iconoclasts who populate it," says Rick Salutin, media critic at The Globe and Mail. "The main qualification for blogging is that you failed to get a mainstream media job. Writers on the Web tend to be in touch only with other bloggers, not people in the street. It still takes a grassroots movement to force a fundamental change in social conditions."

Then there's the downside. There is a Center for Online Addiction in Pennsylvania. Porn continues to be the Web's top attraction. Sexual predators are an increasing worry for parents of kids who frequent social-networking websites. And scam artists and identity thieves have found a new playground.

The Web 1.0 version has pretty much turned out as Harold Geneen, the most celebrated management guru of the 1970s, said it would in his 1997 book, The Synergy Myth.

"Let's not get carried away," Geneen said. "The information superhighway is a tool, perhaps as revolutionary an innovation as the printing press or the telephone, but a tool nonetheless. A lot of it will be a guy in New Jersey sitting in his room talking to a guy in Iceland about the weather. It will also open up a huge opportunity to waste your time. You ought to go back to the beginning of the television era and read some of the claims people made for that new technological wonder."

Still, there is reason to expect better from Web 2.0. In 1961, decades before the arrival of Newsworld, the Discovery Channel and Masterpiece Theatre, the head of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission could rightly describe TV as a "vast wasteland."

Berners-Lee, who was put off by the greed-seeking of the dotcom era (he forfeited his own chance at riches by donating his protocols in order to standardize the Web), insists the Web will evolve substantially from what he regards as its current infancy.

"It will be many decades before we will be able to say we have really implemented the Web idea in full, if ever we can," says Berners-Lee. But "once you start with the basic Web idea, so much stuff becomes possible."

Berners-Lee, who now makes his home near MIT, returned to religion after a long absence and is active in the Unitarian church. As he described on his own website, he sees a parallel between the Unitarians and the Web.

They are, he believes, both decentralized entities with a higher purpose.

August 6, 2006 at 05:04 PM in Internet evolution | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Smart sites to power semantic web

BBC NEWS | Technology | Smart sites to power semantic web

By Jonathan Fildes
BBC News science and technology reporter in Edinburgh

Holiday makers in sea, AP
The semantic web may make it easier to find the perfect holiday
Much of the talk at the 2006 World Wide Web conference has been about the technologies behind the so-called "semantic web".

Phrases like "increased intelligence", "next generation" and "bringing meaning to the web" are being bandied around by researchers, exhibitors and delegates alike.

But like many big ideas behind the hype and evangelising finding a concise definition of what the semantic web is and what it will do is more difficult.

According to Professor Wendy Hall, head of a research team at the University of Southampton looking into the semantic web, part of the problem is that the term means so many things to different people.

However, she believes it can be summed up as "creating a web that can be interpreted by machines".

Clever codes

The idea was articulated in an article in Scientific American five years ago by web creator Tim Berners-Lee, Professor Jim Hendler of the University of Maryland, and Professor Ora Lassila of phone giant Nokia.

It was their idea to try to start to make sense of the tangle of data on the World Wide Web.

Until now, almost all of the information on webpages is produced by humans for humans.

Although a computer is good for viewing the information on webpages and crunching some of the numbers contained in databases, it is no good for extracting the meaning of words and numbers on websites.

Man sneezing, PA
Flu outbreaks could be tracked if web data were smarter
So, at the moment, if you want to book a hotel in Majorca on the web you have to use a search engine to search for "hotels" and "Majorca".

You then have to trawl through various websites to look at prices, facilities, distance from the beach and the best time to visit.

It is up to you to find the hotel that best fits with your budget and holiday plans.

The semantic web hopes to do away with all of this fuss and wasted time.

On the semantic web all of the data about the hotels, for example, will be made available, but in addition it will be classified and then "tagged" with common descriptions to tell computers what they are looking at.

"That allows you to ask much more complex questions," says to Professor Hall.

For example, you could ask your search engine to find a hotel that costs less than £50 a night, that has a large swimming pool, and is less than five minutes walk from the beach.

The semantic search engine would then cross-reference all of the information about hotels in Majorca, including checking whether the rooms are available, and then bring back the results which match your query.

Although this improves on what we have now, the next step is even more intelligent.

"Once you have all of that data on the web in a form that a machine can understand, then you can start having services like a personal agent that picks a holiday for you or even negotiates the price on your behalf," explains Professor Hall.

Cold comfort

But the semantic web goes way beyond booking your next holiday.

Screengrab of Swoogle homepage, University of Maryland
The first tools to use the semantic web are emerging
Big business, whose motto has always been "time is money", is looking forward to the day when multiples sources of financial information can be cross-referenced to show market patterns almost instantly.

Financial markets, pharmaceutical companies and other data-heavy industries are all looking to the future and starting to get their data in order.

The academic world is also interested. The semantic web could allow epidemiologists to pick up on disease patterns by comparing geographical data with prescription records.

So retail data that shows a run on flu remedies can be married with geographical location to show that a particular town, neighbourhood or even street has an outbreak of flu.

Efforts to build this next wave have been going on since the Scientific American article was published.

But before the general public will start to notice the benefits, researchers must make sure that software is developed and, importantly, that the data is available and classified correctly.

According to semantic visionary Jim Hendler some of those pieces are starting to fall into place quite quickly.

There is now even a test version of a semantic search engine called "Swoogle" at the University of Maryland.

But just as getting a coherent definition of the semantic web is tricky, finding out when it will arrive is harder still.

However, one thing that all the researchers at the conference agree upon is that when it does appear, anything that has gone before on the web will seem mundane in comparison.

"You ain't see nothing yet," promised Professor Hendler.

May 27, 2006 at 04:08 AM in Internet evolution | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

OECD Broadband Statistics, December 2005

OECD Broadband Statistics, December 2005

The number of broadband subscriptions throughout the OECD continued to increase during 2005 from 136 million in June 2005 to 158 million by December 2005. Broadband penetration growth in the OECD held steady at 15% in the second half of the year reaching 13.6 subscribers per 100 inhabitants in December.

Main highlights from the second half of 2005 are:

• 
  
  In December 2005, four countries (Iceland, Korea, the Netherlands and Denmark) led the OECD in broadband penetration, each with more than 25 subscribers per 100 inhabitants.
  
  
  
  
• 
  
  Iceland now leads the OECD with a broadband penetration rate of 26.7 subscribers per 100 inhabitants.
  
  
  
  
• Korea’s broadband market is advancing to the next stage of development where existing subscribers switch platforms
  for increased bandwidth. In Korea, fibre-based broadband connections
  grew 52.4% during 2005. This switchover effect is evident by the net
  loss of DSL (-3.3%) and cable (-1.7%) subscribers during the year.
  
  
• The strongest per-capita subscriber growth came
  from Iceland, Finland, Norway, the Netherlands and Australia. Each
  country added more than 6 subscribers per 100 inhabitants during 2005.
  
  
• 
  
  Japan leads the OECD in fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) with 4.6 million fibre subscribers at the end of 2005. Fibre subscribers alone in Japan outnumber total broadband subscribers in 21 of the 30 OECD countries.
  
  
  
  
• 
  
  DSL is still the leading platform in 28 OECD countries. Cable subscribers outnumber DSL in Canada and the United States.
  
  
  
  
• 
  
  The United States has the largest total number of broadband subscribers in the OECD at 49 million. US broadband subscribers represent 31% of all broadband connections in the OECD.
  
  
  
  
• 
  
  Canada leads the G7 group of industrialized countries in broadband penetration
  
  
  
  
• 
  
  The breakdown of broadband technologies in December 2005 is as follows:
  
       o DSL: 62%
  
       o Cable modem: 31%
  
       o Other technologies (e.g. satellite, fibre and fixed wireless) : 7%
  
  
  
  Last updated on 11 April 2006
  
  

Data 2005

Broadband subscribers per 100 inhabitants, by technology, December 2005