Liveblogging Webwise Day 2

Keynote presentation, The Cloud, the Crowd and the 3-D Internet, Michael Nelson, Visiting Professor in Internet Studies, Georgetown University .

Michael Nelson is former technologist for the FCC, Director of Internet Technology for IBM, and Senator/Vice-President Al Gore's science advisor.

Key points- we're now entering the third phase of the internet, as profound a change as the creation of the web. Business practices are going to shape this new world 'in the cloud'. Society is only 15% transformed by the current state of the internet- most of the changes have not happened yet and are being created now.

"Cloud Computing"- one of the most common words in articles about computing and the internet, the term was almost unknown three years ago. More and more services "live in the cloud" rather than being run from local servers. This is a fundamentally different way of doing computing, where the network BECOMES the computer.

Economist October 23rd 2008 article "let it rise" is one of the best articles available on the impact of the cloud.

Phase I was the PC, Phase II was the Web, Phase III is the Cloud. Each new phase has created an explosion of businesses and services, and each has transformed society and commerce.

Common formats and compatibility are what makes the cloud unique- different datasets can be combined to create new outputs, based on the inputs from simple and inexpensive devices- from mobile phones to RFID tags.

"The Big Switch" by Nicholas Carr gives a background to the business practices of the new age of the cloud. The comparison is to big businesses transition from locally generated electricity to the elctrical supply grid in the early 1900s.

Gartner Group says that the cloud will be as big as e-business and will have as profound implications. Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud and Akimai (which stores 15-20% of internet sites in a distributed grid) serve millions and millions of website hits per second.

PC-based grids have been around for a while also- Seti@home, FightAIDS@home, and many other ways in which you can connect your home computer and 'donate' its spare capacity to process hugely complex and large analyses.

By 2009, as much as 98% of web traffic will be in video files. This will be part of a projected 25-fold increase in the amount of data being handled by the web, which is know becoming measured in 'exabytes'. Video walls and Telepresence will be part of this traffic, as well as online gaming and virtual worlds- the GDP of which is equivalent to that of Belgium by 2006 (in 2005 it was equal to that of Namibia- so the rate of growth is tremendous.)

The internet is becoming a place rather than a medium for young people.