The Web
Posted: 2007-09-27
Since it's conception, the internet has grown and evolved to become a network that unites peope all over the world using all kinds of devices: personal computers, gaming consoles, mobile phones, and all sorts of cool new gadgets. The Internet's enormous potential to continue to revolutionize the world we live in has not dimmed one bit. There is still lots of room for growth, expansion, improvement, and innovative new uses. There are infinite possibilities for the internet. Imagine not having to only hear about political candidates with the most money to canpaign but hear more from the candidates who's ideas gained the most support on a level playing field. This kind of idea becomes a real possibility with the internet.
Wikinomics is a book i'm yet to read but, from what i can see, contains some valuable ideas. It's supposedly based on the ideas of Openness, Peering, Sharing, and Acting Globally. The book dives into this idea of "Mass Collaboration" just like Wikipedia uses.
So the internet is a great place to learn, share information, ideas, and spawn great creativity. I like this video:
http://video.google.com
Anybody can make a video and post it online:
http://video.google.com
And nobody is restricted to one website to do this. Ah, i can't even begin to explain all of the wonders of the internet. I'm sure anyone reading this blog can grasp some of it's greatness.
Dell made a surprising move when creating IdeaStorm, a place where people are invited to come and post ideas and vote on them. It was really a joy to hear that they had done this. It resulted in some big changes. When Dell announced that they would sell computers with Ubuntu pre-installed, they made pretty big news.
Wouldn't it be great if this could be taken to the government? Well, Massachusetts Governor, Deval Patrick, has a MyIssue site where you can post issues and add your support to existing issues like the use of Free software exclusively for Massachusetts. This could use some development but we're heading in the right direction! What if this could make it up all the way to the federal government? What if there was an online directory of all public governemnt files? What if all laws, proposed and in practice, were published to the Internet along with an analysis of what they mean and what they do? We could sniff out bad laws, and clean up our government, even reform our tax system effectively!
Then there's the Open Library project which provides free online access to public domain books. I imagine an open library, beyond this, of all books. A place where you can read the books, search through them, and even help translate the books. Think of a huge web of books. You're reading page 56 of a book written in old english and right alongside that page is a line-by-line or paragraph-by-paragraph reiteration of the reading in easy-to-understand, current-day language. Not only that, but chapter summaries and analyses are available. Even more, as you're reading, you can see where the text refers to previous parts of the book, turn off spoiler protection and see where it relates to a future piece of the book, and even how it links to other books and outside documents. Who would ever settle for SparkNotes with a resource like that?
And still, more and more becomes available constantly and we have no idea where the web will take us in the next 5 or even 2 years! That's why it's also so important to protect our digital freedoms.
Still, the internet began as an experiment, and continued to develop by modifying what already existed. Now this next idea of redesigning the internet is kind of hard to explain this but i like how the Economist put it: if we were to design a new planet-wide network on Mars like the internet on Earth, how would we do it? Knowing what we know now about the problems the internet has, how would we build a new one? There are people working on designing a new internet, but reconstrusting a global network of computers isn't going to be easy...or cheap. But the need for this new internet will continue to grow just as the internet continues to grow. Even the founders of the internet have come out to say that the internet is outdated. I ask though, instead of rebuilding the internet, why not just create a new network (making sure that anyone who wishes to connect to it must abide by laws to protect privacy, digital rights, and internet freedoms) and make it something people would want to connect to, and slowly phase out the old internet?