FutureEverything

Apparently, Digital Britain covers P2P just twice, once in a glossary, and once again in an annexe - although it was said to be peer to peer as it was prepared for Lord Mandelson by Lord Carter. That's funny, but not as funny as a Britain that looks at the digital future but clings to centralized models. Tom Ilube and Roland Harwood gave talks on the dramatic changes yet to come as we move from a web of documents to a web of data with apps delivering services - from Uniform Resource Locators to Resource Description Frameworks, from static items to the dynamics of relationships that confer meaning. Hello semantic web.

Tom had bad news for the one-stop and walled-garden models of web services - step aside Google, and Amazon, and Facebook as RDFs allow search, shopping and social networking to go local.

Roland discussed work by Karen Stephenson (2008 The Quantum Theory of Trust) and Ron Burt (1995 Structural Holes: Social Structure of Competition) that showed the impacts for individuals as the web moves 'from what to whom'. He spoke of a newly emergent web topology - heterarchic rather than hierarchic - where information matters less than relationships, where what he characterized as ambient relationship building empowers individuals and groups to flourish.

Hearing their lucid presentations, it was hard not to wonder where Digital Britain took their advice, and how they could miss so much. And, then again it was possible to wonder if Digital Britain matters. The kids are already there. And the semantic web's killer services will likely spring up from nowhere and go pandemic before...