Web 2.0/Web 3.0 Mashup
Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT (EmTech08)
Boston, MA
September 24, 2008
I was invited to speak on a panel at EmTech, the annual conference on emerging technologies put on by MIT’s TechnologyReview Magazine, on the future of the web. The conference spans many disciplines (alternative energy, cloud computing, biotech, mobile, etc.) and we were the representatives of the consumer internet, which was quite a humbling task! Robert Scoble moderated the panel, which featured me, David Recordon, Dave Morin, and Nova Spivak.
It was a loose and lively back-and-forth discussion of the major trends we see on the web today: it’s going social, it’s going open, it’s going real-time, and it’s going ubiquitous. These trends are all working together: it’s now common (at least in silicon valley) to use your iPhone on the go to see what articles/restaurants/etc your friends have recommended from a variety of distributed tools, aggregated via FriendFeed, Plaxo Pulse, or Facebook. A lot of the vision behind the Semantic Web (structured data enabling machine-to-machine communication on a user’s behalf) is now happening, but it’s doing so bottoms-up, with open standards that let users easily create content online and share it with people they know. As the audience could clearly tell from our passionate and rapid-fire remarks, this is an exciting and important time for the web.
We got lots of positive feedback on our panel from attendees (and also via twitter, of course), as well as from the TR staff. We even received the distinct honor of attracting snarky posts from both Valleywag and Fake Steve Jobs (if you don’t know the valley, trust me: that’s a good thing). You can watch a video of the entire panel on TechnologyReview’s website.
I must say I’m quite impressed with TechnologyReview and EmTech. They do a good job of pulling together interesting people and research from a variety of technical frontiers and making it generally accessible but not dumbed-down. The piece they wrote recently on opening up the social web (which featured a full page photo of yours-truly diving into a large bean bag) was perhaps the most insightful mainstream coverage to date of our space. They gave me a free one-year subscription to TR for speaking at EmTech, and I’ll definitely enjoy reading it. Here’s looking forward to EmTech09!
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