Visionaries Outline The Future

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Visionaries outline the future of the web.

Web titans met at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco earlier this month. One idea presented at the conference was universal access to all human knowledge, which could be done for as little as $260 million. The idea of access for all was put forward by vvisionary Brewster Kahle, who suggested starting by digitally scanning all 26 million books in the US Library of Congress. He estimated that the scanned images would take up about a terabyte of space and cost about $60,000 (£33,000) to store. Instead of needing a huge building to hold them, the entire library could fit on a single shelf.

Experts at the event said the next generation of the web will come out of the creative and programming communities starting to tinker with the vast pool of data the net has become. Web 2.0 will also build on the groups that are springing up around well-known net companies such as Google, Amazon, eBay and many others. This will revolve around tools and programs that re-work the information collected by firms like Amazon that will help create new services and businesses.

Another glimpse of how the web is changing was given with the unveiling of new search engine Snap by net veteran Bill Gross. Snap lets people find web pages related to a keyword query but also produces lots of extra information.

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