Experts agree: Next Web not nearly here!

Tim Berners-Lee

Two articles caught my attention today. The first is a post about a talk given by Lee Clow, global director of media arts at TBWA Worldwide at the American Association of Advertising Agencies’ Leadership Conference yesterday. The article quotes Clow: “Online advertising is still semi-nowhere. It’s very intrusive and annoying and kind of the worst of our business in terms of pop-up and flash, and jump up and down.”

But the future looks bright: “The ability to use the internet in terms of great brand storytelling is still at its infancy,” he said. “The internet advertising media, cross my fingers and hope to God, with bandwidth and with some ability, is going to become more artful; it’s going to become more interesting. … But it’s going to take creative people to embrace the possibilities of what you can do on the internet in terms of advertising and storytelling and make it a little better and smarter”. The article is worth reading as there are a few more interesting quotes.

That the web is still young is something Kevin Kelly made very clear during his keynote speech at the Next Web Conference 2006 in Amsterdam. He told the audience then that the Web was only 4000 days old and we could expect even more changes, innovation and improvements in the coming 4000 days.

The other article worth reading can be found on the BBC website. Read that one too. It is an interview with ‘the web’s inventor’ Sir Tim Berners-Lee about the 15th birthday of the world wide web today. He says that the web as we know it today is still in its infancy and expects the Next Web to put “all the data in the world” at the fingertips of every user.

If that happens, you will read it here first.