This video is an amazingly simple portrayal of what the Web is really built on – not the protocol, or just the structural or formatting tags but the data and meta-data. It’s a great snapshot of where we were, and what the Web is becoming now.

If you haven’t seen this video, watch it! Go ahead, I’ll wait.

The video, “Digital Ethnography”, is a commentary on the evolution and future of the web by Michael Wesch an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University.

As to my own commentary, it seems we’re seeing 3 trends in the web:

• Lots of gradients
• Asynchronous server requests
• Folksonomy

Kind of interesting that these three trends are driving the vast majority of web development these days. It seems they represent the main underpinnings of web evolution in general:

• Design
• Technology
• Data Relationships

It prompts me to wonder how, as each of those segments undergoes a major shift, they impact the overall Web community. Which, I suppose is to say, I wonder what’s next.

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