The New Web

This is probably one of the best blogs/columns I read this year. After reading it, I sat thinking about how true it all is. The New Web is just the beginning. Just like the Web before, this will change almost everything we do from getting news to buying stuff to entertaining. For once, it is the participants who decide what the game is. Here are my favorite fragments from this Time’s Person of The Year.

The new Web is a very different thing. It’s a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter.

Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I’m not going to watch Lost tonight. I’m going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana?

It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person.

The New Web is taking shape. It will go by different names and evolove into something none of us foresee. You can call it Web 2.0 or Web 3.0 or Semantic Web. But it is not the technology (though that may help). It is the people. Augmented by technology. As Doug Engelbart would say, it is the co-evolution of people and technology. They aument each other.

Wishing you all a very Happy and Prosperous 2007.