Five Essays on the Open Web – Post 4 – Chris Sherman

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In Canada, it is just barely legal to work on the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday. Hence, with turkey envy in my veins, I post the next installment in our five-part series of mini-essays on the future of the Web. Chris, you always have been and always will be webiquitous to us.

Chris Sherman:

This Is the Best of All Possible Webs

As much as I respect and admire Tim Berners-Lee, I can’t agree that the web is facing any kind of danger of “withering” or being susceptible to impending demise, collapse or other threats of ultimate doom. The web is now like the atmosphere – ubiquitous. Certainly there are existential challenges that will raise alarms and calls for action (global smarming, searchquakes, facetwitidiocy). But like the atmosphere, the web may change but it ain’t going away, and we will continue to live (and hopefully thrive) in it day to day.

I’m not Canadian, but through my FutureSoBright® lenses I see that we’re still just starting on the upslope of a hockey stick graph of growth, and there’s no looking downhill, no matter what the oppressive/regressive/luddite contingents are clamoring about. “Webiquitous” isn’t a popphrase now, but will be in the future – even if it doesn’t rank well in Google. With a tip of the hat to the Arabic word for “essence,” the web is actually morphing into the true manifestation of the tower of Babel, but in a digitally sound version 2.0 release.

Call me Candide… but that’s OK. This is the best of all possible webs.

Chris Sherman is Executive Editor of Search Engine Land, President of Searchwise LLC, and author (with Gary Price) of The Invisible Web: Uncovering Information Sources Search Engines Can’t See.

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