Last month, a post by Marissa Mayer on the Google Blog pointed out the necessity of machine translation for the future of search, saying that the idea of machine-assisted translation is "an incredibly empowering idea" that could "change the way users experience the web and communicate with each other."

That same concept of empowering communications has been incorporated into the new SDL Automated Translations tool, too. The difference with SDL's tool is that instead of just focusing on translations for the web, it also translates documents, emails, chats, company intranet sites, and even internal business applications. Thanks to the tool's open nature, it can be incorporated into anything from customer-facing content on the web to an internal wiki or blog.

The quality of translations can be adjusted to fit your needs, too. For example, you may want your homepage to offer perfect translations of your text, but would rather have on-the-fly, instant translations for use in IM and email. For those quick translations, the tool simply gives users an approximate understanding of sentences and phrases by using something the company calls 'gist' translations.

Why This Is Big

According to Gilbane Group analyst Leonor Ciarlone, technology advancements and pure computing power have made machine translation not only viable, but also potentially game-changing. A global economy, the volume and velocity of content required to run a global business, and customer expectations is steadily shifting enterprise postures from "not an option" to "help me understand where MT fits."

In their group's Multilingual Communications as a Business Imperative report, they discovered that participants in the study, content management practitioners in multinational organizations, identified machine translation as one of the top three most valuable technologies for the future. Also of note is global communications company Language Weaver's prediction of a potential $67.5 billion market for digital translation, fueled by machine translation. That predication takes into account how new technologies now provide translation at dramatically lowered costs than before. This opens up new, untapped markets, asserts Language Weaver CEO Mark Tapling.

Markets and making money are obviously the focus for the companies involved in these ventures, but we're excited to see machine translation going beyond Google Translate and opening up the business world, too.

Is the desktop of the future going to just be a web-hosted version of the same old-fashioned desktop metaphors we have today?

No. There have already been several attempts at copying the old-fashioned "files and folders" desktop interface to the Web, but they have not caught on. Imitations desktops to-date have simply been clunky and slow imitations of the real-thing at best. Others have been overly slick. But one thing they all have in common: None of them have nailed it.  People don't want to manage all their information on the Web in the same interface they use to manage data and apps on their local PC. The Web is an entirely different medium than the desktop and it requires a new kind of interface. The desktop of the future - what some have called "the Webtop" - still has yet to be invented.

The desktop of the future is going to be a hosted web service

Is the desktop even going to exist anymore as the Web becomes increasingly important? Yes, there has to be some kind of place that we consider to be our personal "home" and "workspace" -- but it's not going to live on any one device.

As we move into a world that is increasingly mobile, where users often work across several different devices in the course of their day, we need unified access to our applications and data. This requires that our applications and data do not reside on local devices anymore, but rather that they will live in the cloud and be accessible via Web services.

The painful process of using synchronization utilities to keep data on our different devices in-synch will finally be a thing of the past. Similarly an entire class of applications for remote-PC access will also become extinct. Instead, all devices will synch with the cloud, where your applications, data and desktop workspace state will live as a unified, hosted service. Your desktop will appear on whatever device you login to, just as you left it wherever you last accessed it. This shift harkens back to previous attempts to revive thin-client computing -  such as Sun Microsystems' Java Desktop - but this time it is going to actually become mainstream.

The Browser is Going to Swallow Up the Desktop

It's a classic embrace-and-extend story - the Web browser began as just another app on the desktop and has quickly embraced and extended every other application to become the central tool on everyone's desktop. All that remains is the desktop itself - and the browser is quickly making inroads there as well. In particular Firefox, with it's easy extensibility and huge range of add-ons, is rapidly displacing the remaining features of the desktop.

If these trends continue, will the browser eventually swallow up or simply replace the desktop? Yes. In fact, it will probably happen very soon. There just isn't any reason to have a desktop outside the browser anymore. What we think of as "the desktop" is really just a perspective on our information and applications - it's really just another "page" or context in our digital lives. This could easily exist within a browser. So instead of launching the browser from the desktop, it makes more sense to launch the desktop from the browser. In this way of thinking, the desktop is really just our home page - the place where we do our work and keep up with our world.

The focus of the desktop will shift from information to attention

As our digital lives evolve out of the old-fashioned desktop into the browser-centric Web environment we will see a shift from organizing information spatially (directories, folders, desktops, etc.) to organizing information temporally (feeds, lifestreams, microblogs, timelines, etc.). The Web is constantly changing and the biggest challenge is not finding information, it is keeping up with it.

The desktop of the future is going to be more concerned with helping users manage information overload - particularly the overload caused by change. In this respect, it is going to feel more like an RSS feed reader or a social news site than a directory. The focus will be on helping the user to manage and keep up with all the stuff flowing in and out of the their environment. The interface will be tuned to help the user understand what the trends are, rather than just on how things are organized.

Users are going to shift from acting as librarians to acting as daytraders.

As we move into an era where content creation and distribution become almost infinitely cheap, the scarcest resources will no longer be storage or bandwidth, it will be attention. The pace of information creation and distribution continues to accelerate and there is no end in sight, yet the cognitive capabilities of the individual human brain are finite and we are already at our limits.

In order to cope with the overwhelming complexity of our digital lives, we are going to increasingly rely on tools that help us manage our attention more productively -- rather than tools that simply help us manage our information.

It is a shift from the mindset of being librarians to that of being daytraders. In the PC era we were all focused on trying to manage the information on our computers -- we were acting as librarians. Filing things was a big hassle, and finding them was just as difficult. But today filing information is really not the problem: Google has made search so powerful and ubiquitous that many Web users don't bother to file anything anymore - instead they just search again when they need it. The librarian problem has been overcome by the brute force of Web-scale search. At least for now.

Instead we are now struggling to cope with a different problem - the problem of filtering for what is really important or relevant now and in the near-future. With limited time and attention, we have to be careful what we look for and what we pay attention to. This is the mindset of the daytrader. Bet wrong and you could end up wasting your precious resources, bet right and you could find the motherlode before the rest of the world and gain valuable advantages by being first. Daytraders are focused on discovering and keeping track of trends. It's a very different focus and activity from being a librarian, and it's what we are all moving towards.

The Webtop will be more social and will leverage and integrate collective intelligence

The Webtop is going to be more socially oriented than desktops of today -- it will have built-in messaging and social networking, as well as social-media sharing, collaborative filtering, discussions, and other community features.

The social dimension of our lives is becoming perhaps our most important source of information. We get information via email from friends, family and colleagues. We get information via social networks and social media sharing services. We co-create information with others in communities. And we team up with our communities to filter, rate and redistribute content.

The social dimension is also starting to play a more important role in our information management and discovery activities. Instead of those activities remaining as solitary, they are becoming more communal. For example many social bookmarking and social news sites use community sentiment and collaborative filtering to help to highlight what is most interesting, useful or important. 

Sites such as Digg, Reddit, Mixx, Slashdot, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Twine, and many others, show that collective intelligence may be the most powerful way to help individuals and groups filter content and manage their attention more productively. The power of many trumps the power of one.

The desktop of the future is going to have powerful semantic search and social search capabilities built-in

Our evolving Webtop is going to have more powerful search built-in. It will of course provide best-of-breed keyword search capabilities, but this is just the beginning.

It will also combine social search and semantic search. On the social search dimension, users will be able to search their information and rank it via attributes of their social graph (for example, "find documents about x and rank them by how many of my friends liked them.")

Semantic search on the other hand will enable more granular search and navigation of information along a potentially open-ended networks of properties and relationships. For example you will be able to search in a highly structured way -- for example, search for products you once bookmarked that have a price of $10.95 and are on-sale this week. Or search for documents you read which were authored by Sue and related to project X, in the last month. The semantics of the future desktop will be open-ended. That is to say that users as well as other application and information providers will be able to extend it with custom schemas, new data types, and custom fields to any piece of information.

Interactive shared spaces will replace folders

Forget about shared folders -- that is an outmoded paradigm. Instead, the new metaphor will be interactive shared spaces. These shared spaces will be more like wikis than folders. They will be permission-based environments where one or many contributors can meet, interact synchronously or asynchronously, to work on information and other tasks together.

There are many kinds of shared spaces already in existence, including discussion forums, blogs, social network profiles, community sites, file sharing tools, conferencing tools, version control systems, and groupware. But as we move into Web 3.0 these will begin to converge. We will store information in them, we will work on information there, we will publish and distribute information through them, we will search across them, and we will interact with others around them.

Our next-generation shared spaces will be nestable and linkable like folders, but they will be far more powerful and dynamic, and they will be accessible via HTTP and other APIs such as SPARQL enabling data to be moved in and out of them easily by other applications around the Web.

Any group of two or more individuals will be able to participate in a shared space that will appear on their individual desktops, for a particular purpose. These new shared spaces will not only provide richer semantics in the underlying data, social network, and search, but they will also enable groups to seamlessly and collectively add, organize, track, manage, discuss, distribute, and search for information of mutual interest.

The Portable Desktop

The underlying data in the future desktop, and in all associated services it connects, will be represented using open-standard data formats. Not only will the data be open, but the semantics of the data - the schema that defines it - will also be defined in an open way. The value of open linked-data and open semantics is that data will not be held prisoner anywhere: it will be portable and will be easy to integrate with other data. The emerging Semantic Web and Data Portability initiatives provide a good set of open standards for enabling this to happen.

Due to open-standards and data-portability, your desktop and data will be free from "platform lock-in." This means that your Webtop might even be portable to a different competing Webtop provider someday. If and when that becomes possible, how will Webtop providers compete to add value?

The Smart Desktop

One of the most important aspects of the coming desktop is that it's going to be smart. It's going to have to be. Users simply cannot handle the complexity of their information landscapes anymore - they need help. There are a range of tasks that the desktop should automate for users including: organizing information, reminding users when necessary, resolving data conflicts, managing versioning, maintaining data quality, backing up data, prioritizing information, and gathering relevant information and suggesting it when appropriate.

Most other features of the future desktop will be commodities - but intelligence will still be difficult to provide, and so it will be the last remaining frontier in which competing Webtop providers will be able to differentiate their offerings.

The Webtop is going to learn and help you to be more productive. As you use it, it's going to adjust to your interests, relationships, current activities, information and preferences. It will adaptively self-organize to help you focus your attention on what is most important to whatever context you are in.

When reading something while you are taking a trip to Milan it may organize itself to be more contextually relevant to that time, place and context. When you later return home to San Francisco it will automatically adapt and shift to your home context. When you do a lot of searches about a certain product it will realize your context and intent has to do with that product and will adapt to help you with that activity for a while, until your behavior changes.

Your desktop will actually be a semantic knowledge base on the back-end. It will encode a rich semantic graph of your information, relationships, interests, behavior and preferences. You will be able to permit other applications to access part or all of your graph to datamine it and provide you with value-added views and even automated intelligent assistance.

For example, you might allow an agent that cross-links things to see all your data: it would go and add cross links to relevant things onto all the things you have created or collected. Another agent that makes personalized buying recommendations might only get to see your shopping history across all shopping sites you use.

Your desktop may also function as a simple personal assistant at times. You will be able to converse with your desktop eventually -- through a conversational agent interface. While on the road you will be able to email or SMS in questions to it and get back immediate intelligent answers. You will even be able to do this via a voice interface.

For example, you might ask, "where is my next meeting?" or "what Japanese restaurants do I like in LA?" or "What is Sue's Smith's phone number?" and you would get back answers. You could also command it to do things for you -- like reminding you to do something, or helping you keep track of an interest, or monitoring for something and alerting you when it happens.

Because your future desktop will connect all the relationships in your digital life -- relationships connecting people, information, behavior, preferences and applications -- it will be the ultimate place to learn about your interests and preferences.

Federated, open policies and permissions

This rich graph of meta-data that comprises your future desktop will enable the next-generation of smart services to learn about you and help you in an incredibly personalized manner. It will also of course be rife with potential for abuse and privacy will be a major function and concern.

One of the biggest enabling technologies that will be necessary is a federated model for sharing meta-data about policies and permissions on data. Information that is considered to be personal and private in Web site X should be recognized and treated as such by other applications and websites you choose to share that information with. This will require a way for sharing meta-data about your policies and permissions between different accounts and applications you use.

The semantic web provides a good infrastructure for building and deploying a decentralized framework for policy and privacy integration, but it has yet to be developed, let alone adopted. For the full vision of the future desktop to emerge a universally accepted standard for exchanging policy and permission data will be a necessary enabling technology.

The personal cloud

One way to think of the emerging Webtop is as your personal cloud. It will not just be a cloud of data, it will be a compute cloud as well. When you need to store or retrieve information it will provide that service. When you need to do computations, it will provide that to you as well. The cost of harnessing the capabilities of your cloud may be based on a monthly subscription or it may be metered, or it may be ad-supported.

Your personal cloud will have a center - provided by your main Webtop provider, where your address will live -- but most of its services will be distributed in other places, and even federated among other providers. Yet from an end-user perspective it will function as a seamlessly integrated service. You will be able to see and navigate all your information and applications, as if they were in one connected space, regardless of where they are actually hosted. You will be able to search your personal cloud from any point within it. It will look and feel like a single cohesive service.

The WebOS

No discussion of the future of the desktop would be complete without delving into the topic of the WebOS. The shift from desktop to Webtop - the move from a local desktop to a hosted desktop - is a necessary step towards the entire operating system moving to the Web as well. Many of the services that comprise an operating system are already available as Web services, but they are not yet integrated into a single cohesive WebOS. However it seems clear that the major players are aware of this opportunity and are positioning their services to capture it. Just as the desktop OS wars were won by capturing the "high ground" of the desktop, I would not be surprised if the same principle holds in the battle to own the WebOS. Whomever wins the Webtop will win the whole stack.

Who is most likely to own the future desktop?

When I think about what the future desktop is going to look like it seems to be a convergence of several different kinds of services that we currently view as separate.

It will be hosted on the cloud and accessible across all devices. It will place more emphasis on social interaction, social filtering, and collective intelligence. It will provide a very powerful and extensible data model with support for both unstructured and arbitrarily structured information. It will enable almost peer-to-peer like search federation, yet still have a unified home page and user-experience. It will be smart and personalized. It will be highly decentralized yet will manage identity, policies and permissions in an integrated cohesive and transparent manner across services.

By cobbling together a number of different services that exist today you could build something like this in a decentralized fashion. As various services integrate with each other it may simply emerge on its own. But is that how the desktop of the future will come about? Or will it be provided as a new application from one player - perhaps one with a lot of centralized market power and the ability to launch something like this on a massive scale? Or - just as with the previous desktop hits of the past, will it come from a little-known upstart with a disruptive technology? It's hard to predict, but one thing is certain: it is going to happen relatively soon and will be an interesting process to watch.

Image via Arnaldo Licea

Build A Custom Search Engine Using Your Social Bookmarks

Last week, Yahoo finally unveiled the long-awaited new version of the social bookmarking site Delicious. Along with the new URL, simply delicious.com, the site got a revamped UI and added new features like selectable detail levels and alphabetical sorting of bookmarks. However, amid the delighted oohs and ahhs from the tech community over the new-and-improved site, some people were raising the valid question: "Who bookmarks anymore?" Besides bookmarking for the sake of making sure a site gets seen in your FriendFeed stream, the truth is that many people bookmark, but then turn to Google search when they actually want to find something.

Mainstream Web Watch: The Olympics & Online Video

The Beijing Olympics started this week and what better test of the mainstream web is there than the world's biggest sports event. One of the most obvious ways the Web will be utilized with the Beijing Olympics is with online video coverage. In the US, NBC has teamed up with Microsoft Silverlight for 2,200 hours of live coverage. Meanwhile in China, Adobe has teamed up with a Chinese network.

Mainstreaming RSS: Regator is Now in Public Beta

We first wrote about the mainstream RSS reader and blog directory Regator in early July. At that time, Regator was still in private testing, but this week, it has opened up its doors for a public beta release. Since we first covered Regator, the developers have made some important changes to their service, including the ability to upload OPML files. Even with this feature, though, Regator still remains a highly curated service, where every new entry in its blog directory has to be approved by the editors.

Microsoft Relaunches Windowslive.com as a Community Site

Until now, Microsoft had used WindowsLive.com as the main hub for getting information about its Live branded services like Messenger, Hotmail, Spaces, SkyDrive, and Photo Gallery. This week, Microsoft re-launched the site as a community site, where users can exchange information and ideas about how to best use these tools. As Marty Collins, the Windows Live senior marketing manager explained to us in an interview last week, the idea behind this redesign is to better explain to users how they can use these services together, as well as fostering an active user community.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Web Trends

What's Your Vision of the Future of the Web? Mozilla Wants to Know

Everything's changing on the internet these days, so it's as good a time as any to make some drastic changes to the way we interact with it too. Mozilla Labs has put out a call for anyone in the world to share their vision of how they would like to see the browser, or the web in general, look and act in the future. Called The Concept Series, the project will track down and share future web concepts submitted through a very simple process. What would you like the web to look like in the future? We offer one of our favorite visions below.

The Future of Blogging Revealed

There has been a lot of talk lately about the changing face of the blogging landscape. Darren Rowse of ProBlogger asked if blogging has lost its relational focus; Scoble explained why tech blogging has failed you; and even though not everyone agreed with his every statement, there was a renewed commitment in the blogosphere to return to blogging about what excites instead of just writing about "Apple's newest gizmo or the peccadillos of tech personalities." However, we're wondering if people even need to blog anymore...at least in the traditional sense.

The Olympics & Social Media Marketing

This week we looked at how Web technology is being used in the Beijing Olympics. In this post we check out how some of the world's leading brands are using social media tools in their Olympics campaigns. Our first post discussed how online video will be a big part of this Olympics, which is great for consumers. The Web can also be a boon for brands too, when it comes to major sporting events.

Will The Semantic Web Have a Gender?

One academic warns that it might and says we need to pay attention to it.

As machines learn to understand what the web means, what perspective will they understand it from? Who is teaching them? "Objective" descriptions of the world and the relationships in it can cause real problems, particularly for people with little power in those relationships. How will the emerging Semantic Web understand relationships and what will that mean for us as human users?

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Is the Semantic Web a Dream?

The first question is about the Semantic Web -- is it still just a dream? Nova Spivack of Twine says simply: yes! He says that the problem gets harder as more information comes on the web. You need to "disambiguate data". The AI approach puts burden on the software. The Semantic Web approach puts the burden on the data itself, so it's not about making smarter software - but smarter data.

He says there are technical and social challenges. Nova asks, rhetorically: is there an alternative to the Semantic Web, as the Web grows and scales? He says the HAL-9000 AI approach is an alternative, but it is not progressing much. Another solution is to "use the crowd", and he says while this approach shows promise, it doesn't scale to solve the problem. So both machine and human approaches won't scale -- hence the Semantic Web is the solution. He says "it's a huge cultural project" and is a long term goal.

Deborah McGuinness from Rensselaer introduces the debate, including a mention of ReadWriteWeb as part of the debate's "social media twist".

AI's Role in the Web's Future

Nigel Shadbolt is a Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Deputy Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK. He kind of defends AI, although he says we can expect "a very different form of AI" to what has gotten most of the press thus far. He says that we can expect "augmented collective intelligence". He says "fragments of micro-intelligence" will evolve into an ecosystem, so AI will contribute to the future of the Web in that way.

Multi-lingual Web

The next question is about a multi-lingual Web. Wendy Hall is a Professor of Computer Science in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK. She talks about the Chinese Web, which has 5 billion pages that Google doesn't index. She says that soon the dominant language on the Web will be Chinese, and much of that data will be via mobile phones. She says that a lot of "key sites" in the english language Web are not accessible in China, so the role of government will in a big way determine what will happen. She says that educating government all over the world will be important. The Web is already fragmented, but the solution isn't to teach everyone english. So the Web Science Lab has been established in China and progress is being made there.

Nigel Shadbolt points out that different cultures frame information quite differently. So he says there must be multiple ways to represent content on the Web. Nova says that each culture has to map their content to a conceptual representation, and then globally we need to map different culture representations together.

Tim Berners-Lee says that sometimes that will work and sometimes it won't. He says "the diversity of culture is really important" and he lists a kind of gradation of content that we can understand -- e.g. 10% of Web content everybody can understand, x% we can't understand, etc.

Democracy and the Web

A question from the audience about democracy. Wendy replies that the Web does have the potential to change the way we select politicians to represent us. So she says it's been interesting to watch the US presidential election - Obama has been using new technology and could bring young people into the process. So the Web brings a wider representation of people to be involved in democracy. She says it has the potential to "dramatically change" the way we select governments, mentioning the self-organizing of Wikipedia. "You can well imagine something which can shift what we do" in democracy.

Nigel chimes in that the Web can both mobilize democracy, but also there is danger of "cyber vigilantism". He mentions the dangers of a "rampant blogosphere".

Nova also mentions the "threat to democracy" of the Web - he says "freedom is actually at risk". He notes data logging and privacy issues. So he says it's too early to tell how the Web will affect democracy - he says the Web was built on trust, but that nowadays the Web is being mis-used in some ways. So we need to be worried about that - encryption, privacy, etc are things to look out for.

Web Science?

There is a question about ontologies, but (ironically) the answer got rather complicated and so I lost the thread :-)

Next an audience member asks: what's the difference between Web Science and Computer Science? Wendy replies that Web Science is inter-disciplinary and it's designed to get more people than just computer geeks into studying this domain.

Multi-modal Data; Can Semantic Web Capture Nuances?

The next, rather rambling, question from the audience is addressed to Nova and is about data. The question (when it eventually comes) is: what is the Semantic Web when it comes to different kinds of data (multi-modal, subtleties, nuances). Nova's first response to this involved question: whoa! He then says that we have to start with the simple cases. He talks about time and calendars, semantic representation of events, etc. But he says the Semantic Web won't capture the nuances of human interaction any time soon. He says "we're not trying to replace human intelligence", but "free up" human intelligence.

Nigel, coming from AI angle, says that behavior is a key part of the puzzle. He says understanding behavior, on a Web scale, is happening. He talks about sensors - where sensors report on data in our environment. 'Ambiently intelligent environments' is his term for this.

Tim's response: "an ontology does not represent the same thing as a haiku does." The audience laughs appreciatively. He interprets that as mening there are different languages for different things.

Will there be an Innovation in Logic?

The next question talks about "an innovation in logic". For example "visual logics" will need innovation if the Web is to understand multi-modal information. Tim's response is that logic has given us formalized reasoning, but it doesn't describe how people think. So he doesn't believe we need to formalize some kind of data as logic (e.g. the way people dance).

Nova says that we don't have an equivalent of a functional MRI for the Web, in other words there aren't enough ways to measure things on the Web. He says you need sensors and math to do measurements, rather than logic.

Conclusion

The final question is about data: how do you validate it, and if it's to be shared, how to you manage privacy etc. Nigel points to Wikipedia as a way to validate information, self-correcting by people. Nova says reasoning is where the Semantic Web can help validate data, as well as the human self-correcting (e.g. wikipedia).

And that ends the debate. Feel free to contribute comments below!

Update: Live Blogging Future of the Web Debate

On June 11, 2008, leading authorities on the World Wide Web will gather at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute for an old-fashioned debate with a social media twist. The questions for discussion will be shaped and selected by the collective wisdom of Web users from around the world.

After delivering a keynote address, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web, will join a panel of experts from academia and industry for a public discussion about the Web's future.

The content of the debate will be collaboratively created by Web users, who can submit questions and promote them through a user-based ranking system, similar to the community-based news site Digg. The most popular questions will drive the discussion at the June 11 debate.

The public debate, which will be streamed live via an interactive Webcast, is part of a daylong event to celebrate the launch of the Tetherless World Constellation at Rensselaer -- a new academic center devoted to the emerging field of Web Science.

This event is a chance to discuss and argue about where the Web is headed. Berners-Lee's keynote is at 2:45 p.m. EST and the debate starts at 3:45 p.m. EST. Click here to check it out!

Update: Live Blogging Future of the Web Debate

Other interesting topics include: the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the emerging Web, the harmfulness (or otherwise) of proprietary technologies to the Web, and how we can make ourselves less vulnerable to "web failure".

Submit your questions now, on RWW if you have to...

Now is your chance to submit some controversial questions :-) And if you can't be bothered signing up for an account at the debate website (there were grumblings in the last post that it doesn't have OpenID), simply leave your questions here in the comments on ReadWriteWeb -- and I will submit the best of them myself.

I am really looking forward to this event, it's a chance to discuss and argue about where the Web is headed. Mark your calendars, the debate and webcast happens on Wednesday 11 June. Berners-Lee's keynote is at 2:45 p.m. EST and the debate starts at 3:45 p.m. EST (World Clock times below).

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.

Let us know your feedback / suggestions in the comments - I will continue to add to and tweak this presentation as these Web trends evolve. Alert readers will notice one new slide, page 9 about The Social Networking Arms Race.

Note: click here and then click 'full' (bottom right) to view full screen and enable the links inside the presentation.

This event is happening on June 11 at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. If (like me) you've never heard of Troy NY, don't worry because the debate will be webcast and the questions for discussion will be derived from the Web community. In other words, you can submit your questions on the Rensselaer website and then participate in a digg-style user-based ranking system. The most popular questions will drive the discussion at the June 11 debate. During the webcast, viewers will also be able to interact with the panelists by submitting questions and comments in real time.

Where ReadWriteWeb comes in is that we want to get our community behind this, because talking about the future of the Web is something that I'm sure a lot of you enjoy doing :-) RWW is proud to support this event and we hope you get involved. We will also try to live-blog it.

Before the debate, Tim Berners-Lee will deliver a keynote address. The event also doubles as the launch of The Tetherless World Constellation, which aims to "design new techniques to explore social, scientific, and legal impacts of the evolving technologies deployed on the Web."

For details about the event and how to submit and rank questions, go to: http://tw.rpi.edu/launch/.