Internet is 20 years old… according to Microsoft, in 10 years, what we today call “Internet” will be like this…

most likely, the concept of being “on line” or “off line” will disappear and objects, not only computers, will communicate independantely to each other.

That could be true for highly developped areas, but for these who, still today, have hard time to get access to drinkable water and haven’t seen electricity yet, this future by MS is definitively science-fiction.

How did we get what we call today “The Internet”.

This 8 minutes movie relates a journey started in 1957

More about this great work made by Melih Bilgil.

“Did you know ?” 2008 version.
A 5 minutes movie about pace of innovation, information technologies and globalization.
A broad idea of what is coming next and impressive figures.

Did you know ?

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.

Done with heavy presentations filled up with graphs and stats as well as with endless speeches about Web 2.0, Social Networks etc…

Vinvin tells you all about in an excellent 1’39” video !

It will be, for sure, a summer hit !

Source: Vinvin

Not releated at all with Nomadcom (just in case some might have a doubt) ,

Skype has selected Rebecca, a 26 y/o Australian girl, to take up the "Skype Nomad Challenge" which is to travel non-stop around the Globe and demonstrates that Skype is now mobile.

Over 33 days, Rebecca "The Nomad" will be using as many different forms of transport possible for a girl – from jumbo jets to dog sleds, canoes to camels, sky diving to revolving restaurants.

Her non-stop journey started on May 5th from London (UK) to Singapore, China, Australia (current location) Alaska, USA an back to Europe.

To keep in touch, Rebecca uses SkypePhones as well as a Nokia N810 (the Internet Tablet) loaded with, indeed, Skype software. 

All related links which also gives a good overview of what Web 2.0 is offering:

• Twitter
• Skype: theskypenomad
• Flickr
• You Tube
• Blog
• My space
• Facebook
  

All this perpetual motion is also for a good cause – to create some noise about an awesome charity called Motivation. Basically, they help disabled people in poor countries get mobile.

I may propose to Skype the Challenge #2 as I have an extended list of countries and locations which cannot be so called "Internet/mobile phone" friendly… interested ?

I found very interesting post on Tom Barrett's "ICT in my Classroom" blog about how Twitter is used as an educational tool.

Tom's post also describes where Twitter is positioned among other communications tools. Twitter is not a synchronous or an asynchronous communication system. It is rather both at once depending how channel's followers use it.

He makes a nice metaphoric comparison between Twitter and a flowing torrent where people can just stand by it and observes the flow. Some prefers to jump into while others simply do not pay much attention to the  stream.

Personally I am amazed to see how many different ways Twitter is used today. There are, indeed, lots of individuals (you and me) but also some politicians (Clinton, Obama, UK Prime Minister), Public Services (LA fire department, AmCross), Airlines, News agencies, etc.. which are increasingly using it, but not necessarily to interact with others but to broadcast content or information.

Is any company using Twitter for internal use only ? 

Back online after few days on Chinese Mountains I discovered lots of interesting informations about Internet disruptions which occurred earlier this month and impacted more than 90 millions Internet users. Outages were due to up to cuts on up to 9 submarines cables located, for most of them, around the Arabian Peninsula.

"I Love Bonnie" published on the 12th the excellent "The Submarine Cables – A Complete Guide to the 2008 Internet Outage". The post contains tons of informations and links and provides a detailed review of the events. Media coverage can be found on Renesys site. Steven M. Bellovin professor at Columbia  University analyzed the possible causes of these outages.

Some also speaks, indeed, about conspiracy  

This time iA (Information Architects) have taken almost 300 of the most influential and successful websites and pinned them down to the greater Tokyo-area train map

An A3 printable version is available as well as an online clickable one.

Where your prefered sites are located on this map ? Are you moving by the trend ?