The Evolution of the Web: Past, Present, Future by Nova Spivack

And continuing further with that series of blog posts with highlights from 2009, here is another one that I thought I would share with you folks today. It’s not going to be the only one touching on this specific topic, but I guess I had to start somewhere. Yes, that’s right! I’m talking about some of the most amazing presentations that I have been able to attend live, or rather, get exposed to them from services like Slideshare that some of the folks I have been following for a while have been sharing across in there.

One of those presentations that I have certainly found really inspiring, as well as very much thought-provoking, is the one put together by Nova Spivack under the title "The Evolution of the Web: Past, Present, Future" and which he gets to describe briefly over at his blog. If you are looking for one of those presentations that would make you think for a while where we are in terms of our own usage and exposure to the Web, and its true potential, and, much more interestingly, where we are heading, this is one presentation to go through!

When I was first exposed to it a couple of days back, I just couldn’t help pondering about what my own Web user experience has been throughout the last 13 years. You would think that it’s been one of those that some would consider mature, specially when I realised it’s been almost 10 years since my first exposure to social software. However, if you check Nova’s deck you will realise how it’s actually something more to do with baby steps. Right at the infancy of what the Web will offer not just today, but in the next upcoming decades.

Plenty of people seem to think that Enterprise 2.0, or Social Computing, whatever term you would want to refer to, is the final destination that will help change the way we work within the enterprise,  fundamentally transforming not only the business itself, but us all as knowledge workers who are constantly depending more and more on the flow of information and knowledge at our fingertips. Well, for all of those folks I can certainly recommend you check out Nova’s deck, because it surely isn’t the case…

Somehow, after going through his deck, that growing sense that Enterprise 2.0 is just the beginning, having just gotten started with its initial infancy stages, would become stronger than ever. Yes, we are at the beginning, or going through the initial stages rather, of a new (r)evolutionary way of conducting business, of having more information than ever before at out immediate reach and having to make plenty of informed / learned decisions that may well not only change, but also influence tremendously, the corporate world as well as knowledge workers. I know that some of you may be thinking out loud we are witnessing a rebirth of Knowledge Management, perhaps. In fact, some of the main principles, defined over 15 years ago, are still the same.

However, in my opinion, there is a big fundamental change taking place and Nova nails it quite nicely on that presentation shared above by using a specific term I have grown to become rather fond of over the last few months… Yes, I’m talking about the Intelligent Web. The last frontier for the World Wide Web, where, finally, we are starting to see how it will connect everything, bringing into reality the concept of Semantics, for which Nova describes five different approaches that combine some of the main key elements that long time ago KM tried to put together, but never succeeded, at least, completely: Tagging, Statistics, Linguistics, Semantic Web, Artificial Intelligence.

That’s where Social Computing kicks in; it’s just the beginning, the first initial baby steps for us all to realise there is something larger out there on the Web that we will eventually end up with. It may take us another decade or two, but eventually the move towards it is inevitable. So I guess the mission for us all is to keep growing along with it; don’t think that Social Computing is the end of it all, but rather… just the beginning. And if you would need further inspiration of what may lay ahead I’m just going to leave things over here as is and embed Nova’s Slideshare deck below for you to watch and ponder about it some more … It will be worth it, I can assure you of that. If not, judge for yourselves …