BARACK OBAMA ASSUMED his duties on Tuesday and his electoral campaign is already far away. However, his masterful use of information and communication technologies has aroused some enthusiasm and many hacktivists (activists versed in the use of ICT) expect transformations in the way of governing.
Among others, we can choose three positive signals given to date: the creation of the Change.gov site, in which the transition team has practiced a certain degree of transparency about its activities and searches; the placing of the content of said site under Creative Commons license, and the effort to achieve a certain degree of citizen participation in the development of health policy, with a conference among 1.000 people organized by the future Secretary of Health, Tom Daschle, and the request for comments.
The signs are encouraging, but the geeks They are going to have to show a lot of political ability if they want to change the way Washington operates, and if they want it to last.
Twitter's growth in 2008 (343% from September to September) is impressive, but still quite small. The champion of social networking sites is, hands down, Facebook. It ends the year with 140 million users and its growth rate went from 300.000 new users at the beginning of the quarter to more than 600.000 now.
The success of this type of sites, however, cannot cover up the fact that the economic model of Web 2.0 based on traffic, user-generated content and advertising, is in crisis. Some analysts do not hesitate to announce the death of an era lived under that seal, but the participatory Web is in good health.
Under these conditions, 2009 could be a very strange year in which Web 2.0 will no longer be so fashionable while Web 3.0 will not arrive. The problem is that it might never arrive or, rather, that the next stage could be so different that it would deserve another type of name.
To follow this evolution we can look at two key elements of future development. The first is the emergence of the contextual Web, a prelude, in a way, to the semantic Web, whose progress continues to be relatively slow. According to Alex Iskold of Read/Write Web, the contextual Web can replace search, the source of Google's power and an essential activity on the Internet today. It will be born when the browser understands both the data displayed on a page and the behavior of the Internet user. When the time comes when, instead of all the time we have to googling To inform us, the browser suggests what we need thanks to its understanding of the data we check and our motivation. This understanding draws its power from the Semantic Web, where the browser understands what type of data it is displaying. Mobility will continue to grow; but, unlike what we have seen in past years (with the iPhone and the new Nokia and Blackberry models), the most significant thing will not occur in terms of Hardware, but in the field of applications and services offered.
The crisis can be good for innovation. Many people in Silicon Valley are convinced, for example, that laid-off engineers take advantage of the moment of forced quiet to return to work on projects or ideas they had not had time to develop, contributing to the emergence of new companies one or two years after the most difficult moments.
Julia Levitt explains in the blog WorldChanging.org: "When things are going well it is difficult for most to change their own lives. When times are difficult, however, we might be more willing to experience that idea of start-up which we have always dreamed of." It is even more true in the case of social innovations, the need for which "is never more acute than when things are not going well in the global economy."