Looking Ahead

Well, we have certainly learned a lot this quarter. It’s still amazing to me that we have covered less than 20 years of history. Everything has changed so fast. E-commerce hardly existed when I was a young child, and now you can easily purchase just about anything online. YouTube is less than 5 years old and already has millions of viewers from around the world. Many of us can hardly imagine a life without forums, blogs, wikis, podcasts, online news, social networking sites…the list goes on. Yet this online world is new to our generation.

As we study the Web, we certainly can’t stop here. The more I learn about the Web’s history, the more I find myself anticipating its future. What will the next 10 years bring? 20 years? 50 years? Have we seen most of what the Web has to offer, or have we yet to realize its potential?

A Google search will tell you that there is no lack of people anticipating how the Web is going to change and evolve. Articles like The Future Of The Web: Where Will We Be In Five Years? offer a variety of different predictions. It’s interesting to envision the effects that some of these changes may have.

As we learned in our lecture, many people are looking forward to Web 3.0 and the Semantic Web. Tim Berners-Lee and others envision a system where machines and programs have the ability to understand, categorize, and interconnect information. Although the Web provides easy access to a wealth of content, it still requires manual sorting that can be tedious and time consuming. Think how much more powerful the Web would be if the content could be accurately identified and organized for the user, if Web browsers could “understand” your search terms and quickly provide you with the most pertinent information.

Whatever the future may be, I am looking forward to seeing how the Web changes in the years to come, and I hope to be an active part of that dynamic process.

It has been fun learning with you all this quarter, and I have benefited greatly from everyone’s contributions.  I hope you all survive finals week and have a wonderful winter break!