Dr. Vinton Cerf - Internet, Infinity and Beyond - Page 11

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Unlike in the past where most users were simply consumers, passive consumers of information that was owned by and produced by others. Lots of self-service showing up on the network Amazon and FedEx and others will respond to queries like FedEx if you put in FedEx control number it will tell you where your package was last seen. Now I’m very careful to distinguish last seen from where it is now. You don't know and they don't know where it is now until it’s finally seen again but at least seen is better than not knowing at all.

There are just lots and lots of things that people can do using the Internet today including very interesting virtual environments that can be intermixed with the real world in ways that we would not imagine to be possible years ago.

We are also seeing the notion of communities of interest being a very strong force in structuring the way the Internet is used, you see the social networks like MySpace and Face Book or Orchid and Google groups and so on are organized around people's mutual interest or World Of Warcraft or Second Life similarly.

I think that we're learning more and more about how to take advantage of the natural structuring that the Internet produces when people are interested in each other interested in discovering other people with common interests, in fact I've been told that the World Of Warcraft is now being examined by economists to observe experiments in economic practices that could not be tried out in the real world but are realistic in this virtual environment because there are real people making real decisions in the context of that virtual space.

I’m not enough an economist to know whether the results of the analysis are revealing or not but it's certainly interesting when what started out as a rather simple game like environment is turned into an object of serious scientific study.

Sometimes you will hear the phrase “information is power” or “knowledge is power”. I think that we don't quite have that right I think that real power comes from the sharing of information you can see this happening in Wikipedia where people are putting information online that they just want to share with other people. The system has an ability to refine itself and certainly there are oscillations were two people are arguing with each other about the correct interpretation or the definition of something.

And you occasionally have to exert editorial controls in order to stabilize the definitions, but in general I'm amazed by how willingly people will take time to put information on the net that they believe that they have accurate knowledge of.

It really is a manifestation of the possibility that some day all the world's information past and present current knowledge of users of the network will become part of an online environment that we can search in real time all of the information of the world available at our finger tips. So I can certainly tell you that Google is very much committed to helping to realize that vision along with many other people who are equally committed.

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