'Father of Internet' says that the 'web balance' might tilt !

I listened to an interesting talk today by Vint Cerf, the Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, better known to the world as 'father of the Internet' & co-designer (with Robert Kahn) of the TCP/IP protocols and basic architecture of the net.

This talk was done at the Zurich Campus of Google and as is usual with most of the high profile talks at the company, this too was put up at the Google Channel on Youtube. Check it out if you haven't already,cos it really is a wealth of interesting and informative talks.

Some of the points that struck me through the talk :
1. Vint Cerf says that the user base of the internet in absolute terms of the population is steadily but surely tilting towards the Asian countries. About 460 million Asians are already on the net compared to just about 234 million from North America. This inspite of the fact that only 12.5 % of Asians use the net today whilst about 70 % of Americans are already online. This literally means that the gap is only going to widen in the future.
Now the interesting observation here is that with an increasing user base comprising predominantly people of Asian origin, the content,style & nature of the web will be heavily influenced by this factor.Remember that Internet is perhaps the only truly 'democratic' entity that exists in the world cutting across geographies; and with user-generated content taking over the web in a big way, there is absolutely no stopping this phenomenon.

To check the seriousness of the idea, I tried a simple experiment . I opened Youtube and gave a simple search titled 'Auto Expo' . And boy, the top 5 results are from where; but India - 'the New Delhi auto expo'. I do agree that the Tata Nano launch might have influenced it to some extent, but you also have to remember that the Detroit Auto Show is currently going live in North Ameica.

There are lots of other interesting things that Vint Cerf covered like how the idea of 'letting the users on the web decide what Ads be served to them' is going to gain more momentum in the future. Another observation was that going ahead, mobiles are going to play a key role as Information dissiminators for any geographically indexed content on the web. To put it in simple words, mobiles would play an important role in telling you where the nearest salon is , just in case you feel like having a haircut all of a sudden while on a long drive !

He also stressed on the importance of the research being carried out in the area of the Semantic web . Although I was more interested in the powerful & critical idea which he calls 'Bit Rot' . It's about how most of the information that we are currently putting on the web might reduce into pure junk in some years if we don't find out a way to preserve the software that helps us read that info. The example he gave for this was imagining ourself in the year 3000 and trying to access a spreadsheet on the net dated 1000 years back created say using a software made in 1997. What would that spreadsheet mean to us other than a rotten set of bits ? As he puts it, expecting any application(in this case, a spreadsheet reader) to provide backward compatibility of the order of 1000 years would be sheer foolhardy.

Listen to more from the talk here ...