#evolution of web

Jimmy Wales, founder of the internets largest encyclopedia, Wikipedia in 2001 envisions a “world were every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge”. Written by thousands of volunteers in many languages and to date only hires one employee (a lead software developer) is a non profitable organisation, funded entirely by donations and has 1.4 billion page views monthly worldwide.

Since 1996 Brewsted Kahle has founded the Internet Archive which hopes to build a free digital library of all uncopyrighted works and today has over 100,000 pieces and his mission is to provide "universal access to all human knowledge".

Although the web has created unimaginable wealth for some it has also encouraged others to work for free. This open-source model-way of sharing information is adopted by many professionals through out various industries and was once popular too in computer science with researchers and computer programmers sharing and distributing large parts of their code amongst other professionals in their field.

This ideology behind ‘free’ stems from the 1960’s libertarianism views shared by the founders of ‘silicon valley’ and carried through the early days of the ‘home computer’. The first person in his field to challenge this idea with a more corporate, capitalist view is now worth an estimated total of $53.0 billion and owns one of the largest computer software firms in the world; this of course is Bill Gates who founded the Microsoft Corp in 1974 at the age of 19.

Currently South Korea is our most ‘wired’ nation with more web use than anywhere else in the world. Their fibre optic broadband is ten times faster than in the UK and 62 percent of Korean 5 year olds regularly spend 8 hours per week online (twice the amount of in the UK). The long-term consequences or advantages of this are still unclear. On the other hand the web has the ability to connect even people without great wealth or power, such as African farmers who use the web abilities on their mobile phones to check market prices of commodities and to learn skilled farming methods. Mobile telephone companies failed to predict that the availability of the web on mobile devices cold have this kind of impact or were they able to predict the huge popularity of SMS messaging among teenagers. Only when the technology fell into the hands of users did the full range of its potential become clear. Seth Godin, a business entrepreneur and marketing guru, talks about the importance of creating movements or “tribes”. He says that every now and then “someone stands up and says: this one is important. This is a cause that I am passionate about and I want to organize people around me to help get something done”. An example of this is the One for One movement setup by Blake Mycoskie who’s shoe company indicate “TOMS Shoes was founded on a simple premise: With every pair you purchase, TOMS will give a pair of new shoes to a child in need”. Thus creating a story for a particular object or in this instance a pair of shoes, therefore starting a trend and a movement. ‘My Barack Obama’ was an online bottom up grassroots initiative with more than 1,000,000 members passionately debating daily government policies and being encouraged to contribute their opinions towards the Presidential Election Campaign. They were empowered “to enact the change they wanted to see” and so they did. Obama’s real competitive advantage was a man named Chris Hughes. Before he was brought on board the campaign team he’d been busy running Facebook with co-founder, and college room-mate Mark Zuckerburg.