A sleep-deprived office worker accidentally discovers a black hole – and then greed gets the better of him..

Phil and Olly / UK / 2008

During the Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco, Kevin Kelly, co-founders of Wired magazine explained simply the History of the Web and sketched what could be the next 6500 days.

3 chronological phases brought the Web to what we have today:

1. Computers are connected together. The Net is used to share “packets”. (No intimacy, nothing personal).
2. Documents are linked together. We start to share links. (a bit more intimate and personal as they are documents).
3. Today, we share data. We establish links among information which are inside the pages. We share our data and information.It’s where we are today.

So, what next ? How the Web will continue to evolve ?

Kelly says that the Web will be quite different than what we know today. It may look like a big machine with clouds which will contain all data. The Web will be tomorrow’s Operating System which will catch everything. We will access to it though lots of different kind terminals (computer, phone, fridge, TV, car’s GPS, etc..).

Kelly characterizes three elements which are already on the way :

1. A broad trend inclines to move everything to clouds.
2. At the same time, a broad displacement of all documents to databases which become the foundations on which the whole system relies on.
3. Then to make it works, to create a dataflow and to give signification to all these data: sharing is the key element which makes the machine to work.

According Kelly, in 6500 days our life will always been connected. We will be totally dependent of the network connectivity. New values will have to be invented to collectively managed the rules related to the sharing of these data which will be the essence of our tomorrow’s lives and collectives values.

Scary ? Unavoidable ? Already on its way ? or just a vision from a Silicon Valley geek  ?

Watch Kevin Kelly’s speech during Web Summit 2.0 last week in San Francisco.

Sources: Transnets

PingER project made this “Internet Weather” map of Africa and shows the network performance measured from Trieste Italy to African Universities, from April 2007 to March 2008.

Darker red dots indicate higher speeds such as enabled by ADSL or better . Clearer, lighter red dots indicate lower speeds, in some cases as poor as 56kbps modems. If a site is unreach able its dot disappears, so flickering dots indicate fragility. If all dots disappear the measurement host expe rienced an outage. Africa’s network performance is over 10 years behind that of Europe and the US and falling further behind. These measurements are made by the international PingER project and provide hard evidence of the extent of the Digital Divide for planners and policy makers.

In Africa, only 4, 99% of the population have access to the Internet. An average small compared to 41.18% of Europeans and Americans who are familiar with the Internet says another report published yesterday.

About PingER
PingER (Ping End-to-end Reporting) is the name given to the Internet End-to-end Performance Measurement (IEPM) project to monitor end-to-end performance of Internet links, developed by the IEPM group at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. The network performance of more than 300 hosts are monitored worldwide.