Via Business Club Innover Entreprendre, je découvre ce superbe article de Kevin Kelly dans le numéro d’août de Wired sur l’histoire et l’avenir du web: We Are the Web. Une vision d’un web collaboratif où il y a plus de producteurs que de consommateurs, capables de devenir de plus en plus intelligents en apprenant des comportements des uns et des autres. Jusqu’à créer et à devenir le réseau ultime! Enfin, je ne vais pas tout dévoiler, je vous laisser découvrir par vous-même.
We all missed the big story. The revolution launched by Netscape’s IPO was only marginally about hypertext and human knowledge. At its heart was a new kind of participation that has since developed into an emerging culture based on sharing. And the ways of participating unleashed by hyperlinks are creating a new type of thinking – part human and part machine – found nowhere else on the planet or in history.Not only did we fail to imagine what the Web would become, we still don’t see it today! We are blind to the miracle it has blossomed into. And as a result of ignoring what the Web really is, we are likely to miss what it will grow into over the next 10 years. Any hope of discerning the state of the Web in 2015 requires that we own up to how wrong we were 10 years ago.
Et à propos des blogs…
No Web phenomenon is more confounding than blogging. Everything media experts knew about audiences – and they knew a lot – confirmed the focus group belief that audiences would never get off their butts and start making their own entertainment. Everyone knew writing and reading were dead; music was too much trouble to make when you could sit back and listen; video production was simply out of reach of amateurs. Blogs and other participant media would never happen, or if they happened they would not draw an audience, or if they drew an audience they would not matter. What a shock, then, to witness the near-instantaneous rise of 50 million blogs, with a new one appearing every two seconds. There – another new blog! One more person doing what AOL and ABC – and almost everyone else – expected only AOL and ABC to be doing. These user-created channels make no sense economically. Where are the time, energy, and resources coming from?The audience.
Et sa vision de l’avenir…
… in the near future, everyone alive will (on average) write a song, author a book, make a video, craft a weblog, and code a program. This idea is less outrageous than the notion 150 years ago that someday everyone would write a letter or take a photograph.Who will be a consumer? No one. And that’s just fine… As with blogging and BitTorrent, prosumers produce and consume at once. The producers are the audience, the act of making is the act of watching, and every link is both a point of departure and a destination.
Attention les vélos, là ça devient vraiment cosmique. Mais j’adore!
The real transformation under way is more akin to what Sun’s John Gage had in mind in 1988 when he famously said, « The network is the computer. » He was talking about the company’s vision of the thin-client desktop, but his phrase neatly sums up the destiny of the Web: As the OS for a megacomputer that encompasses the Internet, all its services, all peripheral chips and affiliated devices from scanners to satellites, and the billions of human minds entangled in this global network. This gargantuan Machine already exists in a primitive form. In the coming decade, it will evolve into an integral extension not only of our senses and bodies but our minds.Today, the Machine acts like a very large computer with top-level functions that operate at approximately the clock speed of an early PC. It processes 1 million emails each second, which essentially means network email runs at 1 megahertz. Same with Web searches. Instant messaging runs at 100 kilohertz, SMS at 1 kilohertz. The Machine’s total external RAM is about 200 terabytes. In any one second, 10 terabits can be coursing through its backbone, and each year it generates nearly 20 exabytes of data. Its distributed « chip » spans 1 billion active PCs, which is approximately the number of transistors in one PC.
This planet-sized computer is comparable in complexity to a human brain. Both the brain and the Web have hundreds of billions of neurons (or Web pages). Each biological neuron sprouts synaptic links to thousands of other neurons, while each Web page branches into dozens of hyperlinks. That adds up to a trillion « synapses » between the static pages on the Web. The human brain has about 100 times that number – but brains are not doubling in size every few years. The Machine is.
Ca ne vous rappelle pas un certain film?