The World Wide Web has not stopped evolving while we’ve been busy with our Open House and fighting phishing scams in recent months. So in this, our first anniversary issue, we’ll take a look at a few intriguing news items you might have missed in the meantime.

First up, life online before search engines like Google is hard to remember. But have you ever imagined what it might be like after Google?

Web Inventor Looks Beyond Search Engines & Social Networking

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while a fellow at the European nuclear research facility, CERN, has said that Google may eventually be displaced as the top brand on the Net by whatever company harnesses the power of next-generation Web technology. And not just Google. The same technology, he said, would eventually supercede even currently-popular sites like Facebook and MySpace.

This technology is called the “Semantic Web”. It will allow any piece of information to connect with any other. Today, the World Wide Web is a collection of pages with built-in links. These links not only help surfers navigate; Google and other search engines also use them to build search lists and rankings. This allows a person to efficiently find the pages with the most information and links to other pages.

This next phase will build Web-based connectivity into any piece of data so that it can link to any other piece. It’s already happening with “mash-ups”, where applications are combined together, like finding real estate prices or locations noted upon Google Maps.

Berners-Lee claims that this would enable much more powerful applications to be built. “Imagine if two completely separate things – your bank statements and your calendar – spoke the same language and could share information,” he gave as an example.

“You could drag one on top of the other and a whole bunch of dots would appears showing you when you spent your money.” He said you could then drag your photo album over this to be reminded where and under what circumstances you spent it on. “It’s about creating a seamless web of all the data in your life.”

Berners-Lee said that the “Google of the future” would likely be a type of “mega-mash-up” where every bit of data is like a location on a map and anyone can join them together for different purposes.

Google Wants TV for Wi-Fi

Meanwhile, Google is creating the basis of many mash-ups itself, but it’s also pursuing many other options as well. Recently, it began pitching an idea to the FCC to use “white space” on broadcast televi- sion to provide wireless Internet service.

The “white space” is the unused sections of the electromagnetic spectrum between TV channels 2 and 51. Broadcasters oppose this, fearing interference with their programming and the federally ordered transition to digital TV that will be completed by next year.

The FCC will likely make no decision on the plan until the switch to digital television is complete.

Photoshop Express Online

Adobe Systems, creators of the universally-used Photoshop image manipulation software, have just launched a new website that it claims blends its popular tools with the ease of social networking.

Photoshop Express, still in a test version, is now available for use online. This is a free Web-based image editor with tools for one-click cropping, color adjustment, some special effects, and sharing, and comes with 2 Gb of free storage for your pictures.

Of course, the online version has far fewer options than the $649 Photoshop CS3 suite used professionally. This is intended for amateur photobugs who would want to post their pictures online at places like Flickr, Facebook, or Picasa. It includes features for building albums and slideshows as well.

Find it at www.adobe.com/products/photoshopexpress.

Email Inventor Did Not Foresee Spam

Another great Internet inventor, Ray Tomlinson, who sent the first email on an autumn evening in 1971, doesn’t remember what it said. He thinks it was probably “QWERTY” or another nonsense phrase, and it traveled a mere yard between two computers in his Cambridge, Massachusetts, lab.

Since then, email has become one of the most important means of communication ever devised. Hundreds of billions of messages now span the globe each day. Even astronauts aboard the International Space Station use it. But like many technologies, it too has been abused in ways its inventors could not have possibly foreseen.

Spam, says Tomlinson, could not even exist until email “came to be so widely used that the possibility of sending a message anonymously emerged.” He says that he did not have any idea of the havoc it could cause because in the earliest days, the number of people using email was so small, “you’d know who was sending it. You’d be able to say to them: that’s not a good thing to do.”

The ubiquitous @ sign, by the way, was adopted to separate the recipient’s name from their computer. Since most special characters were already being used, of those remaining, “@ was the best. Plus it conveyed a sense of place, which seemed to suit,” he said.

Though he suspects that email and other messaging methods will evolve in the future, Tomlinson says there will always be a need to “send messages that won’t be read or replied to instantly, and that’s what email allows you to do.”

The Future of Online TV Arrives

That recent Hollywood writers’ strike was largely about the future of commercial television and the Internet. Tinseltown really first began to get worried back when people started to post the best sketches from their favorite shows on YouTube. Lawsuits from Viacom and other major media companies soon put a chill to that. Copyrighted content began to be limited to corporate producers’ websites, like The Daily Show at Comedy Central. This resulted in a confusion of formats, players, and sites that often required registration to use.

What Hollywood really wanted was their very own professional version of YouTube, as it were, that they totally controlled, from which their products could be streamed in high-quality video. And, of course, from which those advertising dollars could be gathered.

The answer seems to have arrived with Hulu. Launched by Fox, NBC, and their partners, it has no registration or special players. Clips or full episodes of popular shows like The Simpsons and a number of full-length feature films can be viewed for free, full-screen, and with just a few commerical interruptions. Check it out at www.hulu.com.

Internet Addiction?

With all these dizzying possibilities, a person could easily wind up spending too much time online. Dr. Jerald Block, in an editorial for the American Journal of Psychiatry, warns that Internet addiction is so widespread that it should be formally defined as an illness.

He says Internet addiction has four main parts:

• Excessive use, often associated with a loss of the sense of time or a neglect of basic human drives,
• Withdawal, including feelings of anger and depression when the computer is inaccessible,
• Need for better computers, more software, more time,
• Negative effects, such as lying about use, arguments, poor achievement, loneliness, and fatigue.

A case study supporting this comes from South Korea, which has the greatest use of broadband on the planet. There, over 10 people have died from blood clots from sitting too long in front of the screen and another was murdered over an online game.

Ironically, many people around the world are attempting to deal with these compulsions through online forums. Though resistant to treatment, one psychiatrist suggests face-to-face “real” self-help groups rather than online ones.

An occasional walk might also help. 

by Jay Nelson, Editor 

from SWCP Portal, April 2008