Introduction to the internet

The web has become such an integral part of our lives that it is hard to imagine life without it.

Despite our familiarity with browsers and bookmarks, some of us have little knowledge about the web's history. In the early 90s, computers were separate islands of information which only one user could access the information to a particular computer. Lee sought to create a single way to get at the information stored on many different computers at once. With that concept in mind, Sir Tim Berners-Lee developed the web at the Cern physics laboratory near Geneva , through initially creating a web server to allow physicists to trawl through a database of 200,000 physics papers more easily than ever before.

This proved so useful that soon even Cern scientists were querying the database via the Slac webpage rather than using the copy on their network, and after that the World Wide Web project finally got some attention and recognition in April 1993 and evolved into what we see today.

Web 1.0

Web 1.0 is the world wide web at its infancy stage, with static non-interactive HTML websites which users could visit and view. You could see it as an extension of television whereby browsers can look passively at whatever content the web provided but not be able to add or respond to the information in any way.

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is the second generation of the World Wide Web that is focused on enabling people to connect, collaborate and share information online. Web pages transited into a more dynamic network platform which allows open communication within and between communities of users, and more open sharing of information. Social net-working sites, like Myspace or Facebook ,blogs and micro-blogs, like LiveJournal or Twitter, sites that allow users to contribute content, like wikis and sites that let users share content, like Youtube are all components of web 2.0.

Web 3.0

Tim Berners-Lee originally expressed his vision of the semantic web as follows: “I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.” [Wikipedia] and I believe that web 3.0 is the answer to this. In time your computer evolves into your personal assistant who comes to understand all your needs; through looking at the websites you frequently surf and analyzing those patterns; it will eventually be able to quickly predict what you want and require, with the minimal prompting and then organize those results for you. Web 3.0 will attain the ultimate intelligent personalization of the web to fit every individual’s needs and enable us to easily access and maximize usage of useful information applicable to us at the right time and whenever we need it. That ideal has also led to the creation of mobile gadgets which would enable us to access the net anytime from anywhere, eg: iphone, gps devices in our cars.

So what next?