Michael Meiser has incredibly lucid insights into the new "Tech Bloom". The rise of tagging and open source editing such as Wikis, Flickr point to the democratization of media. I've summarized some of his ideas below.
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Social is the word.
Welcome to the latest tech bloom, the next evolution, Web 2.0.x. We're soon to see what happens when democratization goes beyond Email and Blogs and Wikis to the rest of the media. The hallmark of this next evolution will be democratized media and Web 2.x starts with audio and video.
It's time to break mass communications out of the box and see what next happens when all the world has equal access. What happens when all the world has access to a project manager? How about an enterprise development manager? The best encyclopedias? The coolest, latest greatest tools? What happens when "amateurs" have access? ...they build even cooler shit.
The future of web based tools is in ubiquitous social collaboration and communication. The value is in their ubiquity. There is no purpose in having a word processor online or for that matter a to do list... unless.... unless it can go anywhere and do anything and collaborate with anyone. That is to say, unless it can go social.
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This is big.
Wednesday, June 22, 2005
Monday, June 20, 2005
Computers Will Become Vastly Simpler To Use
Marshall Brain is an ongoing source of great, well articulated ideas.
I really like his "as simple as possible but no simpler" writing style. His way of removing the complexity and jargon while retaining the essence is why I always look forward to articles like this in which he points to a near future scenario in which our increasingly powerful computers become vastly simpler to use.
It's also great to see some fresh light on this subject.
I recall Eric Schmidt talked about the hollowing out of the computer in a similar manner quite a while back. Bob Metcalfe expanded on the concept in his article "The Coming Software Shift".
As our applications inevitably migrate from our computers to the network, the network literally becomes the computer.
This new supercomputer gets faster as bandwidth increases. A completely optical network means bandwidth would approach the speed of light. My computer could use your hardware as seamlessly as mine.
Meanwhile Ray Kurzweils predictions of $1000 of hardware with the processing power of a human brain arising within our lifetimes is also quite conceivable.
These factors, combined with Metcalfe's Law (The power of the network increases exponentially by the number of computers connected to it) all point to an emergent, distributed, networked, increasingly "intelligent" global nervous system.
And we've got front row seats :)
Stay well,
Ted
I really like his "as simple as possible but no simpler" writing style. His way of removing the complexity and jargon while retaining the essence is why I always look forward to articles like this in which he points to a near future scenario in which our increasingly powerful computers become vastly simpler to use.
It's also great to see some fresh light on this subject.
I recall Eric Schmidt talked about the hollowing out of the computer in a similar manner quite a while back. Bob Metcalfe expanded on the concept in his article "The Coming Software Shift".
As our applications inevitably migrate from our computers to the network, the network literally becomes the computer.
This new supercomputer gets faster as bandwidth increases. A completely optical network means bandwidth would approach the speed of light. My computer could use your hardware as seamlessly as mine.
Meanwhile Ray Kurzweils predictions of $1000 of hardware with the processing power of a human brain arising within our lifetimes is also quite conceivable.
These factors, combined with Metcalfe's Law (The power of the network increases exponentially by the number of computers connected to it) all point to an emergent, distributed, networked, increasingly "intelligent" global nervous system.
And we've got front row seats :)
Stay well,
Ted
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