ReadWriteWeb

Mr. E.C. Mendenhall has built a robo-Tumblr called Meme Pool to experiment with the evolution of ideas. Just as a gene pool is the collection of all biological expressions (genes) in a population, a meme pool is the pool of memes, or transmittable ideas. Mendenhall's Meme Pool draws on Tumblr's vast reservoir of image memes, picks the two fittest every day, mates them and posts their offspring.

There's no relation to memepool, the once-great mini-blog of handpicked Internet goodies. That one hasn't evolved since 2008. But armed with a little bit of Python and the surging population of Tumblr, Mendenhall will try to give the primordial ooze of the Web a new life of its own.

Over the past week I read Kevin Kelly's latest book, What Technology Wants. It's a highly ambitious and expansive book, which looks at technology from an evolutionary perspective. Over 350 pages, Kelly outlines and explores technology as a living system, akin to humanity's biological evolution. The title alludes to this - 'What Technology Wants,' as if technology is a living, breathing thing.

Kelly's book is a must read for technologists and anybody interested in the future of the Web. In this post I'll explore a few of the main themes of the book, in particular as they relate to the evolving Web. (there won't be any spoilers, for those of you in the middle of reading it or if you haven't yet read it!) Two of the main themes are how technology will evolve and how we - humanity - can guide it and make the best use of it.

A friend asked me yesterday if we should be more worried than we are now about the prudence of entrusting so much of our personal data, our business assets, and to some degree our livelihoods to "the cloud." My immediate answer (I always keep immediate answers on hand) is that cloud architecture is nothing to be feared. In fact, the more we understand cloud architecture, the more we may be able to apply it to solving some serious, fundamental architectural issues that face us this moment -- as demonstrated by this week's colossal failure of non-cloud architecture, the BlackBerry e-mail outage.

It occurred to me only later, as we were driving through an intersection that is my hometown's version of Russian Roulette, that if we had as much concern about "the Web" 22 years ago as we do about "the cloud" today, "the Web" wouldn't be the overblown excuse for an electronic flea circus that it has become.

Tim Berners-Lee, to his credit, did not invent the Internet. He did have one good idea. He was not the first person or even the twelfth with the same idea, but he did make it work. Yet most of the underlying work - the bringing together of dozens of communications systems with slightly or wildly varying protocols - was done before him. He just plugged it in, and for that, he gets most of the credit.

What made the Internet, and thus the Web, possible - the thing that, without which, Tim Berners-Lee would still be watching reruns of "Eastenders" - was a decision. The major carriers of electronic mail, whose business it had become to route messages to each other's members, collectively reached a truce. They decided that the long, endless fight over who has the biggest volume, the longest distance, the fastest network, so that one could charge the others more postage than it was being charged, was too expensive and was stifling progress. They decided to call off the war. I know. I was on the phone with them the moment it happened.

Over the past week I read Kevin Kelly's latest book, What Technology Wants. It's a highly ambitious and expansive book, which looks at technology from an evolutionary perspective. Over 350 pages, Kelly outlines and explores technology as a living system, akin to humanity's biological evolution. The title alludes to this - 'What Technology Wants,' as if technology is a living, breathing thing.

Kelly's book is a must read for technologists and anybody interested in the future of the Web. In this post I'll explore a few of the main themes of the book, in particular as they relate to the evolving Web. (there won't be any spoilers, for those of you in the middle of reading it or if you haven't yet read it!) Two of the main themes are how technology will evolve and how we - humanity - can guide it and make the best use of it.

Part One of a Two-Part Series

We're moving beyond the days of a simple search box in which you type a query and get a list of results. Today, companies are trying to build a smarter web - one that understands what things are, how they relate, and perhaps most importantly, what things you're going to like. But has Web 3.0 arrived in its full semantic glory? No, not yet. But it's clear we are getting closer than ever before.