The Internet in 2035

I watched this video the other day which features Vint Cerf, commonly referred to as the father of the internet. He makes some outstanding predictions, while being a very engaging and likeable speaker. At the end of the speech, he warns us of the dangers of digitizing everything without a backup print document. What would happen if the materials we digitize today cannot be read by the software of the future? Everyone should be aware of the dangers of relying solely on technology, and he makes a good point at explaining this. By keeping our perspective broad and our minds open, we can move towards a digital environment while being conservative in our techniques.

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This Just In!

I wanted to share some sites I recently ran across that are super cool and exciting!

Juice is a great browser application that allows you to drag and drop chunks of text or pictures into the sidebar and "juice" other mentions (video, articles, etc.) on the topic. I just started using it with Firefox and so far, it's a fun way to discover more about the things you are interested in on the web.

Hakia is a search engine that provides credible results that are recommended by librarians. It uses relevancy instead of sites that pay to be at the top! Yay to librarian input and results!

Searchme is a visual search engine that has an "iTunes" type feel to it. You can choose from a "stacks" of material related to your search terms. For example, if you type in "black cats", the stacks "cats", "Halloween", "music", "history", "blogs", etc. all come up to search through. The pages also highlight your search terms much like the Google cache feature. Very cool visual search tool that is currently in beta (Searchme widget is at the bottom of this page).

One site I recently came across that is using the age-old "school textbooks are too expensive and not interactive" adage is Flat World Knowledge. It's a great example of how the internet is forcing the printed book to change! It's not yet in production, but this is a site to keep and eye out for - especially for students!

Yahoo! Pipes looks like a free alternative to InfoDesk. I haven't tested it out yet, but from what I read, it's pretty powerful in terms of aggregating all the sites and RSS feeds you subscribe to.

Clip Syndicate is a cool tool that allows you to search for TV news sites and turn them into RSS feeds.

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The Semantic Web

Web 3.0,or the semantic web, is a fascinating concept - and one I think librarians need to capitalize on immediately! Web 3.0 can be thought of as performing searches that involve many complex facets all pertaining to the same subject on a multitude of different databases (sites) - making the web one large database. While web 3.0 has been envisioned as something completely automated, it is also time consuming and presently beyond our technological capabilities. From the article Tim, Lucy, and the Semantic Web, "You get the ability to do all these very complex queries, but it takes a tremendous amount of time and metadata to make that happen."

I think this sounds like the perfect opportunity for librarians to grab a piece of the pie!

Managing and retrieving information/knowledge has always been a major task at hand for library professionals and knowledge management. To have software that would take any search or word or picture that we look at and then link to all the most pertinent data related to that piece of information with accuracy, would be a huge breakthrough.

But can computers and software manage this task alone?

Maybe. But the addition of human know-how, nuances in language or idioms that might take artificial intelligence time to catch onto, the ability to read a question deeper than the words on the page, that's where I believe librarians can, and should, be a part of.

In a recent article PC.mag article Why Google Must Die, the author mentions how SEO would affect an automated semantic web. There is a disconnect between what humans can make a system believe, and how humans can control what the systems does. This again, is what information professionals should be on the cutting edge of - if not right in the middle!

Food for thought, and I'm sure not the last time I will discuss this topic!

Some "web 3.0" sites to try out:

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Riya

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