A few pieces on the internet and where it is heading, from August and the distant past of 2008.
1. The Web is Dead. Sorta.
Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff from Wired says “The Web is Dead, Long Live the Internet“, only the argument is more nuanced than the cheeky title, and about how corporate strategies and consumer preferences may change the web, or at least reduce it to a smaller part of a larger internet-enabled online environment with more emphasis on walled gardens, applications, and members-only material.
2. No, it is not, it just got company.
Rob Beschizza from Boing Boing calls Anderson and Wolff on some dodgy visual rhetoric in their data illustration of how the web is “dying” when in fact it is more accurate to say its share of a vastly expanded internet is shrinking in relative terms. Alexis Madrigal from The Atlantic protests that technologies rarely replace each other quite like that (though in fairness that thought is more pronounced in Anderson and Wolff’s title than in the actual argument).
3. Back to Berkman.
Lurking behind it all is Jonathan Zittrain’s insightful book about The Future of the Internet – And How to Stop It, well worth reading even for people with little interest in technology per se.
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