Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Google says Chinese will dominate web in 5 years time

The opening para on Readwriteweb reads

"Google CEO Eric Schmidt envisions a radically changed internet five years from now: dominated by Chinese-language and social media content, delivered over super-fast bandwidth in real time". More


I'm not in the least surprised.

I lecture students from some of China's leading universities and while this is a generalisation, they adopt and mash up, and their general knowledge about the West and tech is not reciprocated the other way. Reasons of course; again this is a perception.

Here I'm giving an undergrad class a task after a forty minute accelerated lecture. What is the future of the web?

Regarding broadband speeds, although the word has already been appropriated, the concept of Outernet - the net on everywhere - has been a constant theme for me, written up on Apple Pofiles.

Most likely our ambitions will run alongside these new variables, but I'd imagine there's some furious modeliing and trend extrapolation going on.

Was it John McHale that said: "The future of the past is in the future. The future of the present is in the past. The future of the future is the present".

Should that read the future ic Chinese?