Van Jakobson gives a great talk at Google about the need to create the next generation web, this time in the form of an overarching data exchange protocol. His argument is that we should do to the Internet what the Internet did to proprietary networks: Overlay it with a higher degree of abstraction. This time, it is the data, where data self-authenticates and you can use any distribution mechanism, any kind of underlying network. http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-6972678839686672840&hl=en
(If in-post video doesn’t work, try this link.)

Great history of the web, excellent abstraction. Here is his concluding slide:

• IP rescued us from plumbing at the wire level but we still have to do it at the data level. A dissemination based architecture would fix this.
• Many ad-hoc dissemination overlays have been created (Akamai CDN, BitTorrent, Sonos mesh, Apple Rendevous) – there’s a demonstrated need.
• If we are going to have a future, we should rescue some grad students from re-inventing the past.

 (Via Paul Kedrosky, who notes a wonderful little anecdote about Copernicus and his early predictions from the heliocentric system. Not a bad example of a disruptive technology, as it were.)