Communicating Feelings on the Future of the Web

Two things in one here: A heads up on an event tomorrow (don’t worry, you can still catch it), and an interesting way to look at things.

Tomorrow sees a talk from Sir Tim Berners-Lee (recently voted the most important technology innovator of the last century), focussing in on web science. It is an area I am fascinated by, so I’m chuffed to be going along. Web science looks at the impact of the web on our society and economy and combines a number of disciplines dear to my heart.

He will be joined by Andy Duncan (Chief Executive of Channel 4) and Charlie Leadbeater (author of “We-think“: The Power of Mass Creativity’) for discussion on the role of governments, business and academia in safeguarding the future of the web as an open platform. The session is fully booked, but panic not, there will be a live webcast, tomorrow from around 4pm GMT (or a bit earlier to be sure!). Here is the URL:

http://www.nesta.org.uk/the-future-of-the-web-with-sir-tim-berners-lee-8-july

The NESTA Innovation Edge team polled a number of people about their hopes and fears for the future of the web, and used these to produce a Wordle cloud. I’ve seen a few Wordle clouds recently, and they can be quite thought provoking. It is essentially a word cloud (just like a tag cloud, if you are familiar with those), but more graphically rich.

Take a look and you’ll get the idea. Here are people’s hopes for the future of the web:

And here are people’s fears about the future of the web:

Word clouds are a useful stimulus for conversations. The words, freed from their semantic context, stimulate all sorts of thinking. How about building your own word clouds about your hopes and fears and then see what they tell you? Just go to Wordle - Create and paste in your text.

Here’s the wordle for this blog: