Web Directions

Mark Pesce — Youbiquity

• In: Resources
• By:Guy Leech
• September 30, 2006
• Leave a response

A pre­sen­ta­tion given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 29 2006.

• MP3 of presentation
• Presentation slides
• Session descrip­tion
• About Mark Pesce

Presentation slides

Session descrip­tion

The col­lec­tion of social and infor­ma­tion tech­nolo­gies infor­mally known as Web2.0 have cre­ated a rich uni­verse of appli­ca­tions — but a scat­ter­shot one. We plug lots of our infor­ma­tion into web­sites every­where — MySpace and Digg, Friendster and Yahoo!, and every­where, Google, Google, Google. Yet it’s as if we’re spend­ing all of our time build­ing infor­ma­tion silos; piles of data which are essen­tially uncon­nected. It’s get­ting dull. How many times do I need to list my friends, or my con­tact infor­ma­tion, or my favorite bands?

We know why it’s hap­pen­ing: com­mer­cial inter­ests are over­rul­ing the nat­ural pool­ing and shar­ing of infor­ma­tion that would actu­ally bring some util­ity to this moun­tain of data we’re gen­er­at­ing about our­selves. Yet the pres­sure to share is build­ing up: the recent explo­sive emer­gence of mash-​​ups, which jux­ta­pose two or three or more ser­vices in unique and valu­able ways shows us that the hybrid always trumps the thor­ough­bred. And that’s just on inter­net ser­vices. Very few of us con­trol the moun­tain of data we gen­er­ate as we pass through this world — every­one wants it (for their own pur­poses), yet we — who are cre­at­ing it — never have access to it.

It’s time to revisit the entire phi­los­o­phy of inter­ac­tion design on the Web, time to move the focus away from the site-​​as-​​resource, toward an idea of the site-​​as-​​personal-​​enabler. What we each bring to a web­site — or rather, what we should bring to a web­site — is a wealth of infor­ma­tion about our­selves. This is the real resource of Web2.0, and the next place the Web is going. The exu­ber­ance around social net­works shows us that peo­ple want to con­nect — it’s time for design­ers to build the tools which will truly enable that connection.

About Mark Pesce

Known inter­na­tion­ally as the man who fused vir­tual real­ity with the World Wide Web to invent VRML, Mark Pesce has been explor­ing the fron­tiers of media and tech­nol­ogy for a quar­ter of a cen­tury. The author of five books and numer­ous arti­cles, Pesce has writ­ten for WIRED, Feed, Salon, PC Magazine, and The Age. For the last two sea­sons, Pesce has been a pan­elist on the hit ABC show The New Inventors. From 2003 to 2006, Pesce chaired the Emerging Media and Interactive Design Program at the world-​​renowned Australian Film Television and Radio School. In February he received an appoint­ment as an Honorary Associate at the University of Sydney, and has gone on to found FutureSt, a Sydney media and tech­nol­ogy consultancy.

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3 responses to “Mark Pesce — Youbiquity”:

1. • By:webdirections » Blog Archive » Mark Pesce on the iPhone
   • January 11th, 2007

   […] Check out the whole piece, and lis­ten to his related clos­ing keynote at Web Directions South 2006, Youbiquity (along with slides, and related resources). […]

2. • By:This, That and the Other Thing | the human network
   • September 27th, 2008

   […] will be the last time for some time. You peo­ple are my com­mu­nity; where I knew none of you back in 2006; I con­sider many of you friends in 2008. Yet, when I talk to you like this, I get the uncomfortable […]

3. • By:Christobel Llewellyn
   • January 23rd, 2009
   

   I’ve been read­ing your words on this site and you just make sense. There are so many guys out there who don’t know what they are talk­ing about.

   Thanks for the insights,

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