WWW6 logo, link back to Conference homepage Sixth International World Wide Web Conference

Keynote Speaker:
Howard Rheingold

Futurism with a Human Touch

About the Speaker

 Howard Rheingold is the author of "Virtual Reality" (Simon & Shuster, 1991) and "The Virtual Community (Addison-Wesley, 1993), the editor in chief of "The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog" (HarperSanFrancisco, 1994). His "Tomorrow" column is syndicated internationally by King Features. He is the founding Executive Editor of HotWired and the founder and CEO of Electric Minds. He is the coauthor of "Higher Creativity" and "Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming." He was the editor of "The Whole Earth Review."

Read more about Howard on his homepage on the Well.

Abstract of Talk

 Websurfing is fun, useful, and lonely. Like a marvelous but unpopulated library, the Web has, until recently, lacked the most important element of human cultural activity: a means for people to communicate with other people. Sure, there are mailtos and newsgroups, but websites in themselves have not been the locus of social communication. That situation is about to change, and nothing will be the same after the emergence of the Social Web .

Together with a team who shared my sense of mission, I created Electric Minds because websurfing doesn't have to be a solitary activity. Every person looking at a page about beekeeping or telecommunications policy is a potential member of a community of interest. While the Web has been the world's best means of publishing multimedia content to the world, it has, until recently, lacked the enabling technologies necessary for social interaction. All those beekeepers and telecom policy wonks have lacked the means of connecting with one another.

The recent advent of communication-enabling technologies - webconferencing, groupware, webchat, web telephony, web videoconferencing, 3D chat - signals a sea-change at least as significant as the transformation of the text-only Internet to the media-rich Web. The coming year will see the Web transform into what I call "the social Web."


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