Tim Berners Lee recently raised concern that thanks to the spread of apps for newspaper delivery, more of the web is becoming inaccessible to search engines.

I believe he is right to be concerned and that this is part of a larger problem – that much of the web is already locked in walled gardens and in danger of being lost to future generations.

And that makes me think that even this is only part of a bigger problem still. Thanks to Tim et al, we started off with a fantastic opportunity in the world wide web, but we have really messed it up.

A few days ago, I wanted to find the opening times for a Chinese restaurant, a pretty everyday task. You might think with a mature web that I would be able to go straight to the website of the restaurant just by Googling it. In fact, the first few pages Google returned were all intermediaries, all getting in my way instead of helping.

Far from creating a nice streamlined web where you can do business direct with suppliers and cut out the middleman, we have done pretty much the opposite, creating layer upon layer of intermediary where none is needed.

If you don’t know the URL of the company, it can be near impossible to find it now, buried under hundreds or thousands of other companies hoping to use their company to squeeze commission or advertising revenue from your transaction. We badly need a ‘Google Direct’ or the like that allows you to search for the company and exclude all the other sites.

Walled gardens are a problem too. If material isn’t searchable to outsiders, its impact is limited and it is also in danger of being lost when the company owning the garden disappears or changes the system.

Proprietary software and standards make data more vulnerable to change. But the bigger problem is that they restrict people to a small area of the web.

A lot of people spend most of their web time inside Facebook for example, and see the online world via a corporately owned and controlled filter. iPad users also live in an attractive but mostly restricted world.

Some people want to make this way of being the norm, especially Facebook and Apple, of course, but it is hard to see how a cage is better than freedom, however gilded.

Social search will make it even worse and even Google is heading down this route, filtering what we see according to what they know about us to maximise their revenue. The web offered us freedom but it seems that we have chosen captivity.

A whole generation is growing up thinking that Facebook is the universe. It is like those Americans who never feel any desire to step outside of the US, imagining that everything worth doing or seeing is there.

I am not sure whether it is worse that we aren’t getting the web we should have, or that people seem happy with it, blissfully unaware of how they have been short-changed. They booked the Royal Suite but got put in the broom cupboard but because they don’t know what the Royal Suite looks like, they don’t know anything is wrong.

Even if we tried to make a new web to fix it, it could just happen again the same way. We need to make search mechanisms that let people see everything, even if they can’t fully access it without a subscription, and to be able to easily filter out intermediaries.

Google won’t be allowed to do the first of these and won’t even want to do the second, nor will Microsoft or Facebook. Regulation won’t work – it rarely does, so a technology platform that is appealing to all parties may be the answer.

All these competitors use the same IP so why not also the same overall platform for search? And if we can do that, then we can also look at data formats and make sure that we use systems that are OS independent and app independent so that we don’t lose everything when a company goes under.

If there is sufficient volume of data in a format, then making sure that the compression or conversion algorithms are absorbed into future standards would be basic common sense to most people so it isn’t too much to ask that the IT industry catches up and adopts such a common sense approach for everyone’s benefit. How this is done is anyone’s guess.

It will take a while, but it needs doing and quickly. At the moment we are relying too much on luck and goodwill and neither of those can ever be assumed to have a long life.

http://www.futurizon.com/

@timeguide

Soon, with the new visors appearing at the end of the year, the screen could be an augmented reality display. And since the computing is being done by your PC, the ‘computer’ that you interact with could actually be anything at all visually. Like a banana for example.

It is already quite a week on the web, with the enormous backlash against the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act). Very many sites and blogs (mine included) joined the protests, with the view that if the act was passed, it would give the music and film industries enormous power over what everyone else can or can’t do.

Some people in the media world are terrified their businesses will be wiped out by new technology such as pads, clouds and augmented reality, but they won’t, not if they take the opportunities it brings.

The sad passing of Steve Jobs has led many to speculate about what will come next. I blogged about the future for Apple a while ago, looking at their alarming new tendency to use the courts to win instead of relying on better design.

Many engineers are Star Trek fans. A lot of technology ideas in Star Trek have influenced real life, but of course the influence goes both ways.

It was predictable that social networking would be used in coordination of the recent riots, and thankfully also the clean-up. Of course it was. People will use whatever tools are available to communicate with each other - notched sticks, smoke signals, clay tablets, or any other medium. You may be able to switch off a network but you can't stop people communicating with each other.

As technology rapidly advances in all fields, convergence is happening between biotech, nanotech, infotech and cognitive technology. In the very long term, many decades away, this will give us almost complete convergence of man and machine.

One of the interesting trends during the recession is that pay for top executives has stormed ahead while that for most people has been held back or reduced.

The recession has provided a good excuse to keep pressure on the remuneration levels for lower staff, and also to restrain their spending, and in many cases this has helped keep profit levels up, for which executives are then rewarded. If the economic difficulties continue, pay differences will increase, but shareholders will gradually start asking questions on the wisdom and necessity of paying such levels to senior staff just as they now are with junior staff.

It is hard not to feel some sympathy with retailers at the moment, but the further future shows some potential for fighting back against the current webification as the recovery takes hold. Certainly there are more tools in the box than just cost reduction and price increases.

The UK recession continues but it is frustrating that we see such narrow journalistic coverage of it. We see figures on overall sales, and overall this or that. A lot of interesting figures are left out.

Back in the days when networks and networking services were designed, built and operated by telcos (telecoms companies to those of you who don't live in IT) there was a great vision of the future, where an information superhighway would connect everyone at high speed to networks and we'd be able to build fantastic new services.

With Google’s project Tungsten recently in the news, I thought I’d dig out a blog I wrote on a similar topic 11 years ago.

The BBC has managed to recover much of the data from their Domesday project in 1986 and put it on the web. Back then, a mere 25 years ago, people were asked to document some aspects of their area and lives, and it was all stored on laserdiscs - we didn't have the web then so it seemed a good idea at the time.

The BBC has usually been pretty good on technology awareness, so it wasn't that they lacked understanding, it is just that technology comes and goes and it isn't always obvious which will survive. At the time, laserdiscs were thought to be a modern storage technique, a large format CD basically, aimed mainly at video storage.

It is an interesting time for the IT industry. After two decades of convergence, we are finally at the point where pretty much all IT companies are realising that they are pretty much in the same markets. With almost full convergence of TV and PCs, and now tablets making the missing link, expanding into books and magazines as well as games, we now have direct and very open competition between players who were in very different markets just a year or two ago.