I Don't Know About Web 2.0

But I know Web 3.0 will be all about cleaning the crap on the Internet. The creation and aggregation of content is all well and good, but there is just too much crap out there. In a few years it will simply become impossible to find anything on line because of all the junk that's piled up. I'm talking about spam blogs, old newsgroup threads, pictures of you taking hits from a 9' bong, etc etc. The next revolution will be about identity and information control. If someone googles my name, I can only control what shows up if I created the content and I host it. If, however, my name was casually mentioned on an online publication, editorial in a school newspaper, etc. then I have no control over that information whatsoever. People will increasingly find this unacceptable.

If someone tags you in a photo on Facebook, you can remove the tag, but you can't remove the picture. The next Google will be a company that comes along and enables people to manage their online exposure without infringing on others' rights in the process. This might be a crazy idea, but it's what we need in order to "restart" the Internet. Just like Gmail has a "report spam" button, so, too, must our web browsers have the same.

The next level in electronic democracy is to enable vast pools of users to eradicate malicious content by the power of their votes. Although the current season of American Idol is making a strong case against the wisdom of the masses, it is still a problem that can be mediated by exceptional software. That's where the opportunity lies for the Google killer. Where Google takes pride in being neutral and unbiased in their search results, someone else will come along and promise the opposite. This will not happen in the next year, but I believe it's coming.

Google To Buy YouTube?

According to this report Google is in talks to acquire the popular video sharing site YouTube for an estimated $1.6 billion. This comes a week after some very blunt comments by Mark Cuban that anyone who thinking of buying YouTube is an idiot because they have no revenue model and come loaded with legal issues related to copyright infringement on the site.

If this goes through, then Google would be paying almost two billion dollars for a dominant market share. Google already has a competitive video service, so there's nothing to be gained in terms of new technology. Owning the market might be a good deal for Google because this is the future of content distribution for all video from people making faces on their webcams to television shows and feature films. People are going to start paying for this stuff; iTunes is teaching them.

Toronto To Get City-Wide WiFi

According to a newly announced initiative, Toronto Hydro is going to build a city-wide wifi network in order to directly compete with Rogers, Telus, and the like. This is huge not just because we will have ubiquitous wifi access anywhere, but also because municipal devices such as parking meters will be networked and monitored in a more central way. Cops will also have access to more data from their cruisers. How does this relate to porn? Well, now you can download hi-speed smut from anywhere. And it'll probably be fairly cheap so as to undercut the other players. Competition is good!

What's next? WiFi iPods of course. I believe that an 802.11a/b/g adapter is cheaper to stick into a portable device than a hard drive. What if the 'pod had little or no storage of its own but directly streamed your content from your home server or iTunes? No more storage limits!

Quantum Computer Works Best When Off

From New Scientist comes a short story about a theory that quantum computers will still be looking for answers when they're off. This is pretty mind blowing. Even more amazing is the fact that this post wrote itself on a quantum computer in the future, which also happened to be off.


"With the right set-up, the theory suggested, the computer would sometimes get an answer out of the computer even though the program did not run. And now researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have improved on the original design and built a non-running quantum computer that really works."

Population Growth

According to Wired, the world's population will hit 6.5 billion this Saturday at around 7:16pm EST. Not if I have anything to say about it! Mwa ha ha! Oh wait, I'm not the only one who wants to trim the fat from humanity's ample midsection.

From the article:

"For his part, Cohen estimates that if we want to support individuals indefinitely -- allotting each person 3,500 calories per day from wheat and 247,000 gallons per year of fresh water -- the planet has room for only about 5 billion people."