The Future of the Web

Recently, I have been involved with the Nexus 2007 Conference organized by The Digital Movement. The event was held in NTUC center last Saturday. It was a very successful conference, organized by a group of dedicated students and it gave us the feeling that we are in Silicon Valley for a few hours. The title of my panel is "The Future of the Web" and I have written a narration about the panel in the SG Entrepreneurs. Speaking on the panel are: Andeas Weigend (Former Chief Scientist of Amazon.com), Bobby Napiltonia (Senior Vice President, Global Business Development and Alliances,Salesforce.com), Reza Behnam (MD of Yahoo! Southeast Asia) and Nathan Torkington (O’Reilly Radar, Perl Foundation Board - who is one of the authors of the Perl Cookbook which I happen to have it on my working table everyday).

Although the discussion is built on the current development of internet technologies, there are interesting implications that will change the way we think and work in the future. It will be interesting to examine them from the perspective of bloggers who write about social and political issues in Singapore.

It is interesting to think about the social innovation that web 2.0 has brought about in our daily lives. Not too long ago, Time Magazine has named "You" as the person of the year. Now, everyone can produce their own content with the tools made available to them in the form of blogs, podcasts and vodcasts. When you put up your personal content, you are basically advocating a certain agenda. Now the internet has provided a distribution platform that is slowly tearing down the traditional distribution channels controlled by the very few in the business world. To put it simply, the internet has provided a correcting mechanism to readjust pricing, automate and destroy inefficient traditional business models.

Actually, instead of market forces driving web 2.0 development in Singapore, it is the social and political blogosphere who have utilized the full advantage of this new media. The new internet revolution has brought about subtle changes that even the businesses in Singapore are slow to adopt. If you ask a typical business owner in how they utilize this new technology, they are still using the old portal concept or what I can the "1.0 reasoning".

During a recent interview with Chris Anderson which I conduct over a phone call, he made this comment that demonstrates how Singapore is trying to deal with a paradigm shift and I quote him here,

"The question or perhaps, the challenge for Singapore: is the Singapore government prepared to accept the chaotic and unrestricted ideas that emerges once the content creators and distributors are given the tools of production? I will be interested to see how the Singapore government can mitigate the inherent tension between a long tail economy and their quest for control, civil discourse and harmony."

Here are a few key principles which I believe that Singaporeans need a cultural shift (and very few of us do think that way):

• Open Source: Despite being one of the countries which is most open to innovation, our adoption to creative common licenses and open source software (such as Linux) is still slow. That's why we have very few innovators. In fact, most of the big innovations that create the technologies which we have are open source. However, what about information and data that the government use to work their economic policies? Is it possible to go open source? Unless it has something to do with national security, it remains a challenge for the social political bloggers to request that economic and social data be made open source. After all, the experts (or the academics) can do an independent analysis of the data to provide deeper insights. That comes to my next point.
• The Wisdom of Crowds and Credibility: The interesting power that arise from web 2.0 is the wisdom of crowds. Immediately, you think of big collaborative projects such as Linux (free operating system) and Wikipedia. Despite the threats of cyber-vandalism, the community in wikipedia can respond to correct the information quickly demonstrates a good case that we do not need regulation. Similarly with the blogosphere, you can rely on the credible communities to help each other out and moderate without imposing any form of legislation. Imagine if the government's data goes open source, we can use the wisdom of crowds to have an independent assessment of where our country is going. With credibility, people can easily work out what information are reliable. For example, you can write a bad review about a dining place and if you have been recommending good places, it is not difficult to see that people believe you. We are also seeing the same trends happening to the social political bloggers in Singapore.
• Privacy: Imagine the first moment you do a google search, you are already being profiled by the people who are maintaining the aggregators. The privacy issue will be a big challenge for those who are using the internet. One thing I learned from the panel is that people tend to be very irrational when they give their data to register on different websites. It is not hard to imagine your spending habits and interests being profiled by the very things you search. Although there is a lack of privacy in Singapore, it is interesting to know how many people are profiled with what they are writing. With recent death threat to a blogger named Kathy Sierra in US, there seem to be a movement towards getting people to adopt open-IDs. Does that mean that we cannot be completely anonymous?

Where are we heading? Technology is a very interesting creature, because it can be put to good use or be abused for vindictive purposes.  In some sense, the future of the web is not just using technologies to transform the way we work, but inherently changing the cultural mindset when we apply the technology as well.

Note: Recently, Ivan Chew, aka Rambling Librarian has started a project called Singapore Social Media Directory. If you are a blogger, do help in the efforts. Another interesting project, started by Kevin Lim, is to bring political blogging into the classroom.

 

For those who are interested in listening to what transpired in the panel, here is the podcast for your viewing (click on the picture):

Comments

[Ivan Chew]

Thanks for the plug. Awareness of the project has tapered off. Will see how it goes :)