The past, present and future of Internet

Time flies. It's almost two weeks into 2009. And it has been a while since I posted here.

I will not start of by summing up the past year of this blog, as I did last year. Instead let's have a look at the past, present and future of the Internet (OK, perhaps not that much of the present, but anyway...).

When I scanned my overloaded feedbox in Google Reader I found a post on the CommonCraft blog, highlighting a video about the history of connected computers up to the birth of Internet (or the Web as we know it today).

This reminded me about a video from TED, where Kevin Kelly reminds us that the Internet as we now take for granted is only 5000 days old (I haven't done the calculation, but you should add a few hundred days to that number by now). In the video Kevin Kelly goes on and looks into the next 5000 days. Some of the predictions feels very much "yes, that's what's happening now".

So, here are the two videos. A nice way to spend the next half hour of 2009:

First video: History of the Internet:


Second video: Predicting the next 5000 days of the web:


(And it's funny how you come across things multiple times when you look around. While thinking about this post I went into Jaiku for another reason, stumbled over a Jaiky-thread on .SE domains which lead me to Binero. Once there I looked at the Binero blog, and found two posts containing the same two videos...)