Afterthought

After top IT corporations consolidated their hold on web searching, as well as impacting the lives of every person in this world with each new software technology that comes out, in the areas of shopping, advertising, and professional research, the age-old questions arise. What is information? What is influence? What is the optimum way to manage the flow of information in a theoretically information-symmetric world? Besides its well-known search capabilities, Google, for example, already has a considerable share invested in user-created videos as well as land and marine navigation, and has earned a trusted position in our society. What holds next is the future of the Internet, and the future of human thought itself.

Microsoft, in turn, failed to establish an influential domain on the on-line segment, because it ran an enterprise on software, which was limited by court rulings. Unable to install versions of Internet Explorer on more recent versions of Windows, which would otherwise re-direct all traffic to the main MSN site before the user was able to set a custom home page, Microsoft-designed scripts (e.g. ActiveX), used for querying, storing, and redirecting information would no longer be the primary design medium the new Web 2.0.

The Internet, however, was largely unregulated and not subject to any national or international law, except in China, where officials take the burden of managing a immense and extremely difficult task. Taking private ownership of individual sites is impossible, because not only there are already too many web-hosting services, but physically ownership cannot happen without purchasing the servers and mainframes which host the data. This holds equally true for the government, or any other corporate entity. Furthermore, establishing a new universal code is not currently possible, because HTML and its sub-variants are public domain, and developed in part by the World Wide Web Consortium. But to control a significant majority of web traffic, as well as possible destinations through technologies such as PageRank and AdSense, is truly remarkable in practice as well as the pace of accomplishment, which amounted to only about a decade.

Like the branches of a tree and flow of sap through its limbs, we have come to realize the complexity, as well of difficulty of orchestrating individual users moving through nodes of a multi-dimensional network, of an exponential numbers of subnodes and links. As we see the growth and evolution of the Internet as we know it, new business models will form around the new-found structures. New ways of tapping into previously unaccessible knowledge will be possible. New players and a whole new level of playing field is ready to begin. The future, is at hand.

This entry was posted on 9. February 2009 at 12:57 and is filed under Computing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.