Ballad in Plain E

The opening general session was a combined awards ceremony and keynote speaker event. The awards shone a spotlight on some of the association’s most inspiring members. I was especially glad to see Sabrina Pacifici recognized for her excellent LLRX and Be Spacific sites, with the Innovation and Technology award. After the awards, we were treated to an engaging discussion between Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist, Dr. Vinton Cerf, and the American television journalist Charlie Rose. Dr. Cerf is one of the “founding fathers” of the internet and he gave us a brief overview of its early development. He also shared “the truth about Al Gore” (Gore sponsored legislation that was critical in the advancement of the internet and deserves a lot of credit).

In his interview, Cerf asserted that the internet should be like infrastructure; like a roads system. There when you need it, and in some ways, invisible. But, he thinks, we still have a long way to go. He views the digital divide as a major problem and thinks lowering the costs of internet access and improving accessibility should be some of our major priorities.

He described how mobile technology is really the next big thing, and believes it will be the catalyst for the growth that brings the internet to parts of the world where it would otherwise be unavailable. He predicts that within ten years, everyone on the planet will have access to the internet in one way or another.

Cerf believes that the power of the ‘net is its openness and freedom, and that access to it must be preserved and improved. The internet provides a forum for every person’s knowledge inasmuch as they are willing to share. One powerful axiom is “You could learn something from everyone.”

Digital objects, such as Excel spreadsheets, are complex and intricate and are interacted with and manipulated in ways completely different from analog (print) resources. As such, we must be conscious now that as an increasing amount of our world’s information is produced digitally and accordingly, a decreasing amount physically printed, it is essential that we preserve the software that allows us to read and interpret this digital information. Cerf sees the internet as a place to make available outdated or superseded software versions that we will likely require in the future to access today’s information.

Cerf thinks that within the next 15 years we will begin to see an improvement in search with the growth of the semantic web; that is, searching not just for text but for meaning. This, he predicts, will be hard. Natural language translation is improving rapidly but he thinks that true artificial intelligence may not ever be realised.

When asked what he feels optimistic about, Cerf replied that if the internet stays open and unrestricted, its abilities know no boundaries. When asked what he is fearful of, he said it was that the internet won’t be open; that it will be constrained by business or political forces.

Rose and Cerf took the saying “Knowledge is power” and tweaked it: “Knowledge SHARING is power”.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 at 4:47 pm and is filed under Conference Notes, sla2008. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.