A superb Flash animation recaps some of the landmarks of the web and seamlessly transforms into a Gibsonesque / Matrixian extrapolation of the interweb from now to the year 2014. Funny, informative in a weird way and quite a bit of it is actually a pretty good guess at a possible future.
3 Comments
I liked it, but I think they could have said a bit more on the DRM features that Microsoft is selling hard these days. Since Digital rights are going to be the next digital battle.
Also, the most interesting point is “But at it’s worst, and for too many, EPIC is merely a collection of trivia. Much of it untrue, all of it narrow shallow and sensational”
Hey, you know that if it’s on the web it must be true :-)
Good call on the DRM.
As for the quote, that’s also a part I noticed and he’s probably right. Currently people seem to use RSS and other “more advanced” web news features to get better informed. As it’s used more widely (and gets more powerful, as in this video) it will be the same as other media; mostly used for cheap sources and irrelevent info like Entertainement Tonight, reality shows and pr0n.
hm, i suppose in this timeline all the antitrust regulators have been shot?
Interesting possibilities though. I wonder if it isn’t already being built from the ground up though, with things like wikis, community wifi, blogs, technorati, flickr, and storage space totally dirt cheap nowadays.
I actually predict that at some time in the future your ISP will offer you a discount if you allow your machine to be a sort of Akamai node / bittorrent host, to alleviate the coming bandwidth crisis. Call it the digital version of the “sustainable local economy.”