After the Web, What's Next?
Posted by: Admin
The September issue of Wired has an interesting cover story called The Web is Dead. Long Live the Internet. According to the authors, we are now living in a post-HTML, apps-dominated environment, and they describe this as "one of the most important shifts in the digital world" over the past few years.
A number of reference publishers have already started to respond, focusing less on creating new reference databases and more on new ways to push content out to users. Britannica Mobile, EBSCOhost Mobile, and Gale's AccessMyLibrary are just a few examples. It's all about discovery.
August 27th, 2010 at 2:07 pm
BoingBoing posted an interesting alternative chart that suggests Wired's argument may not hold much water.
September 1st, 2010 at 4:19 pm
I see it as a matter of levels. The Internet/Web/WWW/whatever-you-want-to-call-it is still there, only new technologies have provided software that overrides it to make it easier and more productive for users. The apps would be useless without the underlying html. And the html would be useless without the underlying ability to transfer files and send messages. Each layer builds on the ones underneath.
This argument would be like saying that printing was dead in the 16th century because title pages, columns of text, and indexes had replaced flat printed pages. New improvements will always come along, but they do not eliminate those that came previously -- just enahnce them.