The Find: A little over 6,500 days have passed since Tim Berners-Lee created the first web page, and Wired’s Kevin Kelly is prepared to take a shot at predicting what the next 6,500 will bring.- The Source: Kelly’s blog featuring a video of a talk he gave at the Web 2.0 Summit.
The Takeaway: If you could travel back 6,530 or so days to a time before the first Internet page was created, would you have believed that in under 18 years we would have collectively created the billions of pages that constitute the Web today? Of course not, says Kelly, no one did. In fact, back then the Web was supposed to be TV only better. But the failure of past predictions isn’t stopping Kelly from speculating about what the next 6,500 days will bring. He offers numerous insights in the 15-minute talk, but the first and final of these is, “believe the impossible.” It’s already happened.
What else does Kelly foresee for Web 10.0? A mega cloud mated to an all encompassing database creating one, always on machine to which we will grow ever more dependent. He also predicts that “one financial heartbeat” will animate the world. It’s heady stuff and well worth viewing in full.
For those who aren’t entirely sold on Web 2.0, more or less Web 10.0, the ever bountiful Web has something for you as well: data presented at a music conference that suggests digital music sales don’t, in fact, fit Chris Anderson’s popular Long Tail paradigm.
The Question: Is Kelly’s vision of Web 10.0 outrageous science fiction or a real if not assured possibility for the future?
(Image of spooky Kevin Kelly web brain by Michell Zappa, CC 2.0)
