i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Remember the WIRED article in Aug this year named “The Web is Dead. Long Live the Internet?"

Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semi-closed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display.

And in conclusion, it predicts that the web is dead. 

In the December issue of "Scientific American", Tim Berners Lee on the other hand, defends the web. (See his article “Long Live the Web”. He believed that universality, openness and linked data are the foundations of the web. It is these features that made the Internet so powerful, and indeed revolutionized our world. An interesting quote from this article:

Other companies are also creating closed worlds. The tendency for magazines, for example, to produce smartphone “apps” rather than Web apps is disturbing, because that material is off the Web. You can’t bookmark it or e-mail a link to a page within it. You can’t tweet it. It is better to build a Web app that will also run on smartphone browsers, and the techniques for doing so are getting better all the time.

I would agree with TBL that web is far from dead. HTML-Like stardards, and the notion of URLs, which are abandoned by applications (like iPhone apps) gives everyone the ability to provide content and share information to the mass with no restrictions from a particular organization. Information on the web is far easier to link and could potentially avoid informatin silos. Of course, as pointed out by TBL, current web is far from perfect, and requires a lot of work from technical, legal, social perspectives.