It has been five years since I first began thinking about how to reinvent the Internet, and I’m still going. While I’m not ready to grace my project website with the documentation I’ve been working on, this guy is. Well, sort of.

As described in the article, Martìn Casado, with his start-up Nicira, have built onto networking infrastructure some technology that tames the network and makes it more reliable, secure and fast. Their technology is brilliant but very hard to explain. They haven’t exactly reinvented the underlying hardware, though I imagine they’ve got ideas for how to do that.

Now, reading this makes me uncertain about how to proceed with my own ideas. Since my concepts require all hardware (servers, routers, DNS, cables) to be reinvented, technology like Casado’s would be immediately obsolete and new technologies would have to be invented to makeup for the shortcomings in the new system (’cos I know it won’t be perfect). Moreover, I can only just understand his technology, which means my grasp of the current underlying technology and its shortcomings is also limited. Nevertheless, I will stick to what I’m good at—designing the concept. It’s just good to see others doing similar things. Well, actually doing things.

Incredible post by Dag Kittlaus over on TechCrunch. It’s about Siri but it’s really more about the future of how humans interact with technology. And it’s brilliant. Rarely do I read a future speculation piece that I so completely agree with. To be fair, it’s one topic, even just one aspect of it—voice commands. But I sense behind his words a very clear understanding of humans and technology. You’d expect that from the co-founder and CEO of Siri.

I have nothing to detract from his words. But I definitely have something to add. This kind of cool future tech, interacting with technology by voice with intelligent voice feedback, is indeed the way of the future. At least for those with no speaking/hearing accessibility difficulties. However, the talk can easily lose sight of the fact that this is not about man’s relationship with machine. It is still humans communicating with humans, via technology.

When you make the simple request, “Are their any hotels nearby?” an intelligent Siri-like product shouldn’t just return the five closest hotels but return the five closest hotels that you would be interested in. That requires a stored knowledge of your preferences and habits. So far, it still looks like a human-machine affair. But it’s not. The information about all hotels in the area is Internet content that was created by other parties. The end result of your Siri affair is that you interact with their content. This is human-human communication. But it doesn’t end there. Ultimately, you will arrive at one of those parties establishments and engage with them in a human-human transaction. Sure, you probably won’t personally meet the proprietor of the establishment. Technology and the hospitality staff have enabled your transaction to occur without the two of you personally meeting. But now it’s really personal.

What does this tell us about how the Internet should be designed. Firstly, all content on the Internet needs to be fundamentally linked to identities that are part of well authenticated networks. Content also needs to be posted with all sorts of context meta data—author, time of creation, time of posting, location, size, orientation. It’s a potentially endlessly extensible list. Secondly, the system that achieves this can’t be one company’s walled-garden as most are today. Such walled-garden systems are only ever accessible to a subset of humanity. And while that subset might be satisfied with the service they receive, they are missing out on access to the rest of world and vice versa.

So, while the middle technology has arrived in the form of Siri or the likes of Evi, the Internet they have to work with isn’t yet the ideal information landscape it needs to be. And that’s why I love hearing people get future speculation right.

Around the tech and social media blogs, there’s plenty of talk about what will be the biggest factor in digital evolution. Some say “content is king”, other are saying “context is king”.

The Internet initially provided a way to store, access and move content around. In the last decade, start-ups have been exploring ways to benefit from context.

Here’s how I see it. Communication only happens “in context”. Content is meaningless without context. So, in my mind, most of the discussions are pointless semantics and failures to see the full picture.

The current design of the Internet supports content but context has to be built onto it with social web services, the website layer. I think a major overhaul of the entire Internet system is needed to bring identity and user authentication down to the same level as data storage and transportation. A tough call, I know. It’s difficult enough for companies and organizations to agree on web standards for the network, transport and content levels (DNS, TCP/IP, HTML etc.). The fact that the major social networks can’t or won’t (in general) agree to standards for authentication and sharing that would bring them all together shows that context will be very hard to design into the fundamental levels of the Internet. Admittedly, there is lots of really good integration of social services but it’s ad-hoc at best.

Somehow, context needs to be built into the design of data storage and networks from the very bottom. Such a change would be the biggest tech disruption ever. But without this, the Internet will never be a truly human… thing.

Really liking the wallpapers over at Poolga.

Think about that for just a second: A well-organized, well-funded, well-connected, well-experienced lobbying effort on Capitol Hill was outflanked by an ad-hoc group of rank amateurs, most of whom were operating independent of one another and on their spare time. Regardless where you stand on the issue — and effective copyright protection is an important issue — this is very good news for the future of civic engagement. – David Binetti on TechCrunch