The Adnostic

I love predictions and forecasting. Usually because that when they get it wrong, they usually get it so very wrong (anyone remember how SecondLife was going to change everything and I am still waiting for that jetpack I was promised). It's mostly because people with very little qualification to comment on a subject do so with abandon, but that is the nature of blogging and the advice to not believe everything you read has never been more true.

There are a few people that I would consider actually qualified to comment on the future of the internet, and Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO is one of them. Here is an excerpt from his tak at the 2009 Gartner Symposium/IT Expo in Orlando:

Main take aways (from ReadWriteWeb) with my added commentary:
* Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.

• Makes sense, especially now that non-latin based characters have just been approved to use in web addresses and that China has the largest share of the global population.

* Today's teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years - they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.

• If you work on a computer with any proficiency, then you're already doing this and you get frustrated when different communication applications don't work together to create a seamless messaging/broadcast structure. Google Wave and Mozilla Raindrop - you better be everything you've promised.

* Five years is a factor of ten in Moore's Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today."

• If the past five years is any indicator, then I believe it.

* Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance - and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away."

• What is this "TV" and "radio" that you speak of? Do you mean the NPR and CBC apps on my iPhone? The shows I get on AppleTV and Hulu?

* "We're starting to make significant money off of Youtube", content will move towards more video."

• Finally! They're making money off of video content. It's about time.

* "Real time information is just as valuable as all the other information, we want it included in our search results."
* "There are many companies beyond Twitter and Facebook doing real time."
* "We can index real-time info now - but how do we rank it?"

• Real time search is definitely helpful during large events or times of crisis, but sometimes when I view the results for the trending topics on Twitter they make me sad for humanity.

* It's because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that "is the great challenge of the age." Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.

• I'm not entirely sure that this will be 100% the case. I think that there will always be a great social need for solid investigative journalism. It is the funding and the distribution of that journalism that is in a huge state of flux at the moment. The non-profit funded investigation of the Hurricane Katrina mercy killings is a great example of where journalism could go, but to be fair, that article was pointed out to me by a friend's blog.

Final assessment, mostly agree. Interactive technology and real time reporting that comes with ambient intimacy is going to continue to expand and how we navigate these oceans of information is going to grow and change drastically over the next few years. Kids are going to be at an advantage for using these new pathways of learning and communication and we grownups are going to have to figure out how it all works.

These are predictions that I think could actually happen.