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Webby Awards: 10 Web Moments That Changed The World

Webby Awards: 10 Web Moments That Changed The World

The folks at "The Webby Awards" recently published their list of the "ten web moments that changed the world." The moment that made me a believer that the web might change the world happened sometime around 1994 or 1995. I got on somebody's list [probably because of my involvment in Georgia Tech's GVU annual WWW user survey, which was pretty unique at the time] and I was invited to become an early user of something called PointCast. I became a very enthuastic PointCast user long before Yahoo, Excite, etc. had really developed anything comparable. PointCast was, to my knowledge, the first to recognize the potential of automated delivery of [nearly] real-time news and information to the desktop, personalized to an individuals particular interests. They ultimately failed because they didn't adapt their clunky [push] technology, but the idea and the early execution, including the user interface, was brilliant.

As significant as PointCast was and perhaps deserving of its own "web moment" for early recognization of the power of personalization, PointCast itself wasn't exactly the moment that I had in mind. The moment "that changed the world" for me came one day when I was on the phone with a friend who had the annoying habit of trying to impress me with the wealth of his knowledge about current events, particularly in my business. His phone calls typically began with "did you hear that so and so did such and such" with the implication being that he was in the know and I wasn't. On one fateful day I realized when he called that I could bluff him and say "oh yes, I heard that too." The trick was to quickly skim PointCast [it ran, supposedly in the background all the time on my PC, also making it one of the first always-on applications] and to get enough of the story to make my bluff work before he could figure out that it was a bluff.

From that moment on, it occurred to me that if I could do that, I could never be completely sure that others weren't doing the same thing to me? So "who really knows what they're talking about" is quite a different question than it use to be. The baseline that "everybody knows" [from merely parroting the results of a web search] is often substantial and may be seducing us into thinking we understand things we really don't. Ester Dyson and others have written about the development of "reputation systems" and other techniques to identy the reliability and trustworthiness of sources. It seems to me that a future "web moment that will change the world" will be when we can use technolgy to tell what is true and what it means.

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