Topic: The Internet and the World Wide Web

The City of Philadelphia is in the vanguard of American municipalities offering ubiquitous wireless access to their citizens. Despite legislative opposition from the cable and telecommunications industries, the city has forged ahead with a public/private partnership to build the infrastructure and skills needed to bring affordable wifi to the city's diverse neighborhoods. Dianah Neff describes the vision and the logistics of Philly's plan to shrink the digital divide and connect residents to the information highway.

Craigslist is the electronic version of a flea market. Unlike the typical corporate site, Craig Newmark, founder and customer service rep for Craigslist, believes that the regular user is the person who can best police things and that the biggest mistake he could make would be a failure to trust. He admits that things aren't always perfect, particularly with spam and organized scams, but that by nuturing the good guys, the response will be positive.

Blogging is often associated with citizen journalism and new media sources for news and analysis of topics like technology and politics. However, according to Anil Dash of SixApart, many people who blog are doing it more to have personal conversations with friends, family, and people who share their interests. He argues that the ability for people to share personal information with others, who are interested in that topic, is the real power of blogs and that personal content holds as much, if not more, value than the so-called A-list.

In the not-too-distant future, the majority of electronic devices will be connected via the Internet or wireless protocols, bringing convenience and simplicity to daily living, but adding layers of technology and complexity to devices we use everyday. Jerry Fiddler offers a glimpse to his vision of the future: "The Connected World." He discusses how this "world system" will evolve through the convergence of multiple technologies resulting in one, giant interoperable system.

How we prove who we are while controlling our privacy in an online world that offers ever more opportunities for collaboration, participation and communication is becoming an increasingly important and complex issue. In this talk from the 2005 Web2.0 conference, Dick Hardt, CEO of Sxip Identity, walks through his view of personal identity and how it could be managed more successfully in the online environment.

How have communities on the Internet changed recently? Derek Powazek of Technorati asserts that, until recently, online communities resembled company towns where the voice of each participant was at the will of a single entity. Today, however, each participant has authority over their own node in a community, making the community as a whole more self-powered and independent. Powazek discusses the essence of the new community, as it is framed by current Web 2.0 trends.

Flock is a new browser designed with the modern web in mind. In this talk, Bart Decrem demonstrates a variety of cool features which the Flock team hopes will transform web browsing from the static consumption of documents to more active participation in a shared stream of integrated services, bookmarks, tags and blogs. This new paradigm of social web browsing is likely to appeal to early adopters looking to immerse themselves in the new, social life of the web.

In this short, sharp presentation from Where 2.0 2005, Google's Bret Taylor describes just how easy it is becoming to add maps to your website. He introduces the initial Google Maps API and asserts that it provides the map as a canvas for custom content. As the API is free to all web sites that are free to consumers, everyone can now have a Google map on their home page.

Ticia Gerber sits at the center of one of the world's important current debates: How do we keep people healthy without having it cost an arm and a leg? At eHealth Initiative and LIGHT, Gerber is working across three continents to bridge the public, private, and social sectors. She talks with Globeshakers host Tim Zak in an audio interview about the role of technology in the future of health care and what it means to create a dialogue between the developed and developing world.

Although blogs originally grew from the concept of the personal journal, Scoble and Israel believe that they can also be an important way for businesses to be represented to the public. Corporations can get their messages out the public quickly and receive immediate feedback. They can also be a source of employee innovation and satisfaction.