Read Write Web ran an article (Google's Eric Schmidt on What the Web Will Look Like in 5 Years) which include the following summary of prognostications. My comments are indented from main topics.

Which may be true, but it will only matter to people who speak Chinese. Discovering relevant relationships in content that surface actionable insights will be key. If I were CEO of Google I would be worried a bit about this because making sense of the world’s information will require cross-links between languages, and very very good translation. The stuff the really matters really needs to be right, so having an accurate view of text across languages, as well as an understanding of cultural context and nuance, will be critical if this matters beyond the speakers of Chinese. Choose your dialect.

That is one view. It is not the only view. A major cyber-terror attack could actually reduce the amount of cloud influence and drive people back to a more myopic and insular view of information. Other information distrust events may cause the same behavior.

Moore’s law is about raw power not application. If we don’t start thinking about distributed and parallel computing models all of that raw CPU-power will go to waste. The key word in Schmidt’s sentence is “capable” which doesn’t mean “realized.”

Yes, but there will be new business models on the web as media attempts to figure out what it means. When all the pipes are big and all the media high resolution, we will need to invent new ways to differentiate.

Perhaps. But will it be corporate and personal, or will it be generative and interactive. Will the video be more game-like, more dream-like, less watch and more play.

Great, but if information is a commodity, making sense won’t be. The winner will be the company that goes from finding things to helping individuals make sense of what they find, and what it related to it that they didn’t know to ask for.

Duh. In ten years, I doubt that Twitter or Facebook will matter. They will either really matter, as in, they will be a platform around which our worlds revolve, or they will be a Wikipedia entry we all edit fondly with our recollections of posts past.

See real-time comment above. It isn’t about ranking,its about sense-making, which is a completely different business model. What, me worry?

There is another version where trust erodes and we return to vetted information. There may be so much user-generated content that we become overwhelmed with the uselessness of it all and even the entertainment value wanes. People desire to re-establish trust, and new models of trust will emerge, and with them, new sources of trusted content.

Forecasts should always be couched in the context in which they exist, with clear caveats. Not having seen the entire presentation, I can’t say if Schmidt did this or not – but all good forecasters should. If your going to talk about the future, prove that you thought about it robustly and understand the variables and the uncertainties in play. As I say at the top of this blog, you can’t be wrong today, but over the course of time, you run the risk of being wrong much more often than right, so thinking deeply, understanding context and the interplay of uncertainty is crucial to creating strategic plans that are meaningfully informed.

The cloud is intriguing. I’ve already lived through the private cloud. 30 years ago when timesharing companies let me run manufacturing and sales remotely. It wasn’t as elegant as it is now, but it worked. And then came lower cost minicomputers and eventually PCs. As we all know, PCs changed everything, and they may well change everything again, but not if we let the cloud-only rhetoric go on without challenge.

The current edition of the Economist (Oct 17th-23rd 2009) ran an article on the coming cloud-computing wars (read it here). This article doesn’t take the longer view of technology. The cloud is not binary. The PC’s time has not passed. Why? Distributed computing. If you look at the power of PCs they have gone up dramatically and turning them into dumb clients for smart clouds is a waste of resources. Any client software that uses cloud services (think searching clip art of servers with Microsoft Word as a very basic example). Along with timesharing, I also worked on early distributed computing applications, including a Hughes Aircraft project on distributed manufacturing where intelligent controllers on factory floors negotiated with each other to replan factory when a machine broke down or a part didn’t show up.

PCs provided individual control over data, but even better, they provided local processing power. That local processing power has now been distributed into phones, media players and cameras – but not in an intelligent way. Those devices are mostly very dumb clients to the PC or the clouds. They are getting smarter, but all of this computing should not just end with devices as end points to cloud agendas. The power of the PC was to let people set their agenda. With distributed computing, individual PCs could act as nodes on an integrated network where problems could be solved faster and more creatively than if they were tackled by the cloud alone. But because development efforts are being split between legacy clients and the cloud, this huge area of distributed computing isn’t really being explored effectively.

Complex modeling of economics, science or physical objects is often accomplished using proprietary distributed computing (think rendering farms for animated movies and video games, weather forecasts). But that collective problem solving hasn’t been democratized to making sense of the information on my computer or your computer. It’s great that we have wonderful animated features coming out of Hollywood.  But I would like to see my computer be part of a network that makes it smarter every time I turn it on. It can’t do that by itself as effectively as it can using all of the processing power available, and the cloud can’t do it without the intimacy of data on my phone and my PC. To take knowledge work to the next level we need to turn our admiration for social computing on to our machines and let them get social. If we can crowd source the next great marketing idea, perhaps our PCs can figure out what they need to know before the next meeting – before we ask for it. I’m not convinced the cloud will get me there alone. I like having something that is mine act as my agent, and I want it to bring its friends along for the insight.

I remember years ago having a security discussion with my colleague Steve Hunt about why the reactive response wasn’t sufficient to combat hackers on the Net. I said that the hackers understood the biological metaphors better than the security companies. Hackers created software that evolved independently of its creators, while the security companies wrote specific code to combat specific threats. The Internet didn’t have an independent immunity system to fight the viruses being thrown at it, thus in many cases, new viruses entered unprotected spaces and ran rampant.

The industry has done a better job over the last decade cutting out the routes to infection, but they haven’t stoppered (or even discovered) all of them. This week’s New Scientist take up the cause of Internet immunity with an article titled Defeat worms, send them to quarantine, which explores issues cooperative computing. Being one to always look for patterns, I found just a page away an article that discusses clustering spy satellites (Why it’s time to hand over the spying to cluster satellites) which says ‘The key to making such a “fractionated” system resilient will be the distributed computer systems and the wireless network.’

Both of these articles point to the same issue. Our monolithic computing systems continue to be architected with old assumptions, such as standalone computing. Most software doesn’t know how to take advantage of multiple CPUs in multi-core CPUs from Intel or AMD, let alone, how to cooperate with each other to solve problems (though efforts like SETI@home have existed for years).  The computing industry has been complacent in adopting distributing computing because it often faces the issue that commercial software doesn’t maximize the capacity of existing hardware. People complain that software already has too many features, so why should they invest in something as seemingly uncommerical as distributed computing? The answer is, there are problems that need to be solved that can’t be solved with a single computer, and that is the next leap in computing (the industry needs to look beyond individual requirements and look at computing as an ecosystem). It isn’t just about connecting people, but connecting content, collaboratively solving problems over extended periods of time, finding patterns in data. SETI understood that not everything needs to happen in an instant. Their problem was not one of instantaneous compute results like to expected with an Excel spreadsheet. SETI has time. The Internet’s immunity, too, has time. Many big problems, from understanding the human genome to making sense of global environmental development, all require extended periods of time to discover meaningful results. Distributed computing is the key. The massive amounts of content on the Internet too, are time independent. Systems that constantly look for relationships and enhance value over time will be much more valuable than search engines, and much more specific (and they will even be able to help you define your query better).

Our planet is a distributed, interconnected, relationship driven vehicle for life. The future of computing lies in systems that understand the same attributes and uses them to create applications that span individual needs and span time, to create answers to questions that no individual can ask, and that no one computer can answer.

Sherri Gulczynski Burns, pictured below, editor of American Way (the American Airlines in-seat magazine) wrote in the October 1st issue (2006), about the need to become decoupled from a personal device. It is OK to turn off a phone or e-mail device. The ability to be always connected isn't the same as the need to be always connected. It is about choice. The choice to work when you want, when you need to, and nobody needs to work all the time. If we do, we loose our perspective. We become tactical rather than strategic. We become repetitive rather than creative. Take time out to learn, to enjoy. E-mail will always be there. That is the deal now. Use it when you need to. If you don't use it, you won't loose it. In fact, you may just gain something. Enjoy the break.

Reposted on August 8, 2009 to repair photo link

Serdar Yagulalp, writing in InformationWeek (read it here) is worried about open source code being used in services without the service providing giving back to the community. I find this fascinating in that the model for open source is built around altruism and trust - which is not universal. When things are in the public domain, regardless of their licensing model, they will get used. The edges of agreements will be tested and models will change. The open source community is coming up against  a moment of change, that will either drive innovation or it will drive a retrenchment. If information wants to be free, as many in the open source community believe, then people will use that software. And the kind of altruistic competition seen in this article is naive. The suggestion that the open source community quickly compete, duplicate and drive those who don't give back out of competitive advantage. If services are good, and they get picked up, they will thrive, and most users won't worry about how the code was developed. They will only worry that the service is accurate, safe and reliable.

Rather than get defensive, it is time for the open source community to look at themselves and innovate. They protectionism that thwarts innovation in manufacturing, also thwarts innovation in software. The open source community can't afford to be derisive on this issue. They will need to evolve their model in a way that services the needs of their community - those who contribute and those who don't.

Television is almost ad free now. Think about it. For those who have on-demand, the shows they watch are largely free of advertising - and if you run across an ad, you just fast forward through it.

How will this manifest itself on the web: people will pay for what they want. Yes, I said it, kind of a return to the days of Compuspend and AOL. The advertising revenue looks appealing, until you start hearing that you are driving off your audience. A recent BusinessWeek article, Generation MySpace Is Getting Fed Up (read it here) reports that growth rates on social networking sites has slowed, and that some big ones are loosing active members - just as advertising investments increase.

If you do some research, and I have, because I am associated with an organization that just funded this kind of research - nobody knows the real business value of social networking. Not as a home for advertising or building marketing communities, and not the role it plays inside organizations where connected netizens seek out advice or solace from friends and colleagues on the net. What has been true is people come for the people, regardless of an articulated value, and when that stops being the reason for the site, the traffic slows.

At some point people will be willing to spend to avoid advertising, and those who won't or can't spend more on subscription sites will find alternatives. Adblockplus.org and other ad blockers promises to help make ads go away. I haven't tried any of them - I just ignore ads mostly, on the web or on television - unless they are really creative in an artistic way - or really funny. I try not to buy things because I see or read advertisements, but every once in awhile, they do educate, and after a bit more homework, one or two may convince me to act. But if ads in my life disappear, I won't miss them at all. I have enough stuff and enough stimulation that a calm Internet experience that just delivers the value I need at the moment will be fine by me.

Yes and no. Yes because people like little things they can master. And they like to share them. Widgets will be kind of like the Pez Dispensers of the Internet.

Will they rock your world view? No. People will grow tired of them soon enough when they keep doing the same thing, day in and day out right there in your peripheral view. Could some become important? Probably not as widgets. If a widget becomes important it will become an application or part of a framework or OS.

Too bad computer programming has been taken away from common folk. If widgets were programmed like HyperTalk, then they might be even more interesting. But as the industry bemoans the loss of talent, it hasn't done the engineering to make application development easier for non-developers.

If somebody does a widget tool kit that makes widgets easy to code, and not just little trinkets to collect and discard, they may at least have some lasting affection like HyperCard does for those of us who did cool things with it, at a level of abstraction that came close to the way we think.

When a widget finds what I am looking forward before I ask for it, I will be impressed. Until then, I'll see if anyone has coded another cool clock or the ultimate RSS feed display. Sound boring just talking about it.

My hats off to Nathan Heleine for this wicked widget wonderland that proves my point.

The Economist examines a trend toward topic-specific search engines this week in "Know Your Subject." I believe that search focused on topics is a good start, but it ultimately means two things: somebody is making a choice about what to index, and somebody is making a choice about how to describe a topic.

If you trust your sources, then for the near term, this may be a good thing - but read on to the bullets for another take.

When all is said and done, I think we will end up with a meta-search strategy, at least for people who really care about their search results (my sense is many people care at a superficial level but they don't really care at a life-or-death level about most of their searches - love and health perhaps exclusive of this observation).

A meta-search strategy would combine:

• General search - this way if something new pops on that the taxonomists haven't captured yet, you may still find it. Over time, general search may be complemented by contextual search.
• Contextual search - this is search based on personal profiles. I think about this as the world's largest Venn diagram. Index everything that is known about you: calendar, workspaces, blogs, wikis, e-mail, crawls of favorites, local documents, etc. - locally and securely, and use that to inform searches. Let information start finding you based on patterns recognized within the rich digital representation of your interests, in the context of what you are actually doing or working on.
• Topic specific searches - If you trust the source, include it. Realize that it will include a bias. It may well reflect your own bias, or give you insight into the biases of others. Imagine the field day in politics when parties start using their own "topic specific" legislative search engines against each other. The taxonomists would be incapable of weeding out ideology because of the strong influence of their constituency to return "meaningful results" about their subjects - here meaningful means data that reinforces the ideology and casts alternatives in a dark light.

I have said for years that a single mega-meta search engine is not what is needed, and the fickle nature of webizens will eventually drive any single source under because the bigger it becomes, the less trustworthy (just read recent rhetoric about Google's emergence as the dark lord of the Net).

In many cases, the problem is we don't know what we are looking for. For researchers or consumers or marketers or scientists, the questions may be clearer but how to pose them and what sources are being drawn upon still leaves questions. For others, the initial trawl is OK. Scrolling through a few pages of relatively relevant links or images will get close enough to satisfy whatever itch caused you to probe below the epidermis of the Net. "If you don't know where you are going, all roads will take you there." (BTW, it took ten minutes to search and source this quote - now the question is, do I trust the reference?). As we learn from quantum mechanics though, multiple paths may be needed to get us someplace. With a wealth of views in the world, why trust your search to one approach. If you really want something, to surround it, to corral it, you won't rely on just a  digital dog or just a digital fence or just a digital ranch hand - you will want them working together to bring the most relevant bits to the center of you information universe.

And now for the metaphor search engine, which I clearly need...

One of the best way to understand the future is to work intensely with those who will be the first to step into it. This week Microsoft is sponsoring its second Information Worker Board of the Future with 12 students, age 17-25, from 10 countries. This is a way to help Microsoft understand the perceptions of the next generation of information workers by having them share their perceptions, biases and expectations for what they expect in the workplace, and how the expect they will influence the workplace through their careers.

Information on the IW Board of the Future can be found at:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/iwboard/default.mspx