ReadWriteWeb

Future of the Web Debate: Needs Your Votes!

Written by Richard MacManus / June 1, 2008 9:00 PM / 5 Comments

As we blogged recently, ReadWriteWeb is the exclusive Media Partner for an interactive debate on the future of the Web being held by the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Tetherless World Research Constellation. In this post we check in to see what the top questions are so far - and we encourage RWW readers to vote on these questions here.

The event is June 11 and features Tim Berners-Lee and other Web thinkers. The debate's content will be defined by users, via a digg-style question submission and voting process (see our coverage of similar user generated ideas sites).

The debate's theme is 'the future of the Web'. To submit a question or vote on them, you first need to create an account. It only requires a username and an email address, so nothing too onerous. We encourage RWW readers to vote on questions, it takes just a few minutes and will really help create an interesting debate (which RWW will be covering).

Top Questions

A representative from Rensselaer told us that "right now we have about 25 questions running the gamut from internet privacy to how the web can solve the global hunger crisis." He mentioned that "there are some really good questions that go beyond the obvious - for example, a question about crossing language barriers as Internet access expands in the developing world."

The most popular topic "by far" is the semantic web, but the equal most popular question overall is about net neutrality.

Here are the top questions over the last 30 days, at time of writing:

  • Semantic Web a dream?
  • Is net neutrality essential for democracy?
  • Can you imagine the future of the world (wide Web) without the Semantic Web? What would such a world (wide Web) look like?
  • Muttilingual Internet--Fracturing or Blossoming?
  • What controls should be in place on the Web, if any?
  • How do we make sense of the proliferation of data from the ever growing number of User's social activity feeds?
  • Can the web help us solve the world hunger problem?
  • How can we make ourselves less vulnerable to "web failure"?

To submit a question and/or vote on them, create an account here.

Comments

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  1. Man, if only the voting site added OpenID (it's Drupal for crissakes) I totally would have voted. Oh well.

    Posted by: factoryjoe.com Author Profile Page | June 2, 2008 1:48 PM



  2. Thanks Chris, I've made that suggestion to Rensselaer.

    Posted by: Richard MacManus Author Profile Page | June 2, 2008 8:35 PM



  3. I Second factoryjoe.com

    I would have posted questions if I didn't have to create yet another account. Am very wary of sites that want me to register when options like OpenID are available and taking Name/Email/URL has become standard

    Posted by: Sachendra | June 3, 2008 4:17 AM



  4. As one of the organizers of the event, I have already brought up this issue to the technical folks supporting it (who are not in my lab) and it is being worked on. FWIW, let me assure you that none of this info is being archived nor is their any intent to use any of it as "information" rather than verification.

    Posted by: jim Hendler | June 3, 2008 9:31 AM



  5. Hi,

    I must apologize for submitting more trackback requests for this post. It looks like Ecto wasn't able to ping it and so I've tried using curl and I have submitted by mistake multiple POSTs.

    cheers,

    ./alex

    Posted by: Alex Popescu | June 5, 2008 3:01 AM




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