Evolution of the internet

The protocol TCP was first accepted as a global standard on the first of January 1983, meaning that the Internet is 26 years and 291 days old. Still in the prime of it's life and really only just showing us what it can do, the internet still has some way to go. With internet usage changing as regularly as the technology providing access to the internet, it's hard to imagine where the hot-spots on the internet will be next. Not so long ago many people couldn't live without myspace and the relentless bulletin posting and page view counting, and then everyone's parents and aunts found a use for the internet...Friends reunited! Today it's all about Facebook poking, twitting and Googling for answers. So what's next for the internet, where is it heading?


Comparisons have been made between the developing net and a baby's brain- some say that they develop in almost identical ways. So is the net the next stage of evolution then? The sum collective of our knowledge as a species? Of course not, it is simply a large collection of text and hyperlinks with a few pictures and videos thrown in for good measure-there's no actual thought process going on here-at least not yet. The next stage of the world-wide-web is web 3.0, and involved in this stage is semantic web. The concept of semantic web has been developed by the inventor of the internet Tim Berners-Lee. In brief, semantic web is an internet which can be understood by computers as well as humans. Presently the internet is a group of pages designed to be read by humans, meaning that search processes can be drawn out, and often you end up looking at pages completely irrelevant to what you were looking for. The following is a quote from Tim Berners-Lee in 1999, describing the concept.

"I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The intelligent agents people have touted for ages will finally materialize."

Recently though there have been hints that we are getting very close to semantic web. Google's highly anticipated take on social networking 'Google Wave' is in beta testing now, and should go live early on in 2010. Wave features a content-based spell checker-one which knows in which circumstances to use there/their/they're, and that also knows the sentence 'I'm going to go on the rollercoaster at the fair' needs amending.

The velocity of technological advances is increasing, and it seems a little worrying that computers are now being taught grammatical rules and how to understand the content of the internet.