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"Australia's Federal Government announced the National Broadband Network (NBN) in 2009. NBN's current roll-out is scheduled for completion in 2021, with market forecasts estimating optical fibre overtaking DSL broadband connections in about 2015. This paper provides a timely contribution to more critical and expansive analysis of potential Australian internet futures. First, 'schools of thought' and current technological frames (Web 2.0, 'the cloud') for the internet and its possible futures are outlined, which provide perspectives on the emergence of the NBN. We then outline five generic images of the future which, as predetermined images, enable quick 'incasting' of alternative futures for a technology topic or related object of research: promised future, social/speculative bubble(s), unfolding disruption/chaos, unintended consequences, and co-existence/'cooption'. High-level application of the 'schools' and generic images to the NBN and Australia's potential internet futures, suggests policymakers and strategists currently consider too few perspectives."

" The internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we make while we ride upon it. In order to send a message from one corner of the internet to another, the protocols of communication demand that the whole message be copied along the way several times. IT companies make a lot of money selling equipment that facilitates this ceaseless copying. Every bit of data ever produced on any computer is copied somewhere. The digital economy is thus run on a river of copies. Unlike the mass-produced reproductions of the machine age, these copies are not just cheap, they are free. "

Out there on the internet is a place where you can buy and sell anything anonymously using untraceable money. What is mostly being bought and sold in this stealth market right now are recreational drugs -- pot and acid, etc. There has always been black markets in every city of the world, but as underground and out of sight as they might be, you still needed to show up in person to trade. And there has long been outlaw areas of the internet where black markets thrive and you don't need to reveal yourself, but paying without any trace has been a problem. This new online stealthy anonymart, called Silk Road, solves these problems with two existing technologies. Silk Road uses established anonymizing Tor network to trade anonymously, and it employs the new Bitcoin peer-to-peer encrypted payment system to provide untraceable payments, which can in theory be converted to dollars or other national currencies.

Really great summary of future themes at SXSW. The less sensational headline is "the internet considered as something distinct from everyday life is over".

The principles of openness and universal access that underpinned the creation of the internet three decades ago are under greater threat than ever, according to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

Brilliant article on the insides of the struggle for control of the internet....  "For more than a year, the intelligence services of various authoritarian regimes have shown an intense desire to know more about what goes on in an office building on L Street in Washington DC, six blocks away from the White House."

Great analysis of the "spinternet".... "TED Fellow and journalist Evgeny Morozov punctures what he calls "iPod liberalism" -- the assumption that tech innovation always promotes freedom, democracy -- with chilling examples of ways the Internet helps oppressive regimes stifle dissent."

"Together, they highlight five "technologies that matter" for cities in 2020: mobile broadband; smart personal devices, whether they're dirt-cheap phones or tablets; government-sponsored cloud computing (modeled on the U.K.'s national "G-cloud" initiative); open-source public databases to promote grassroots innovation, and "public interfaces." Instead of Internet cafés, imagine an outdoor LED screen and hacked Kinect box allowing literally anyone to access the Net using only gestures."

2020 Media Futures is an ambitious, multi-industry strategic foresight project designed to understand and envision what media may look like in the year 2020; what kind of cross-platform Internet environment may shape our media and entertainment in the coming decade; and how our firms and organizations can take action today toward capturing and maintaining positions of national and international leadership.

IN library - Open-source foresight project on future media 2020 Media Futures is an ambitious, multi-industry strategic foresight project designed to understand and envision what media may look like in the year 2020; what kind of cross-platform Internet environment may shape our media and entertainment in the coming decade; and how our firms and organizations can take action today toward capturing and maintaining positions of national and international leadership.

Open FutureInterested in Open Innovation & Crowdsourcing? Follow Open Innovators on twitter or subscribe to the Open Innovators RSS feed! In addition to tracking specific trends about open innovation and crowdsourcing, it is important to build a broader view on those trends' underlying drivers and facilitators, and how they could evolve in the years to come. Trends, forecasts and scenarios about the power of the Internet, Web 2.0, the rise of virtual worlds, consumers becoming prosumers… The Open Future report is somewhat atypical, as it is build around interesting videos and quotes. It explains why and how one should constantly keep track of (disruptive) trends, build different scenarios, and have corresponding strategies prepared.

"With the deflation of the Social Media bubble, people have been asking us where the next bubble is going to be. One that is starting to froth is the "Makers" movement - ever since Chris Anderson's latest book, Makers*, the area has been rocketing up our Bubblewatch, overtaking Internet of Things and Quantified Self. The claims for this area are becoming truly hyperbolic"

"Futurescaper creates bespoke solutions for futures research and scenario planning studies, using the power of the internet to gather stories from an unlimited number of individuals. This approach combines the qualitative richness of a traditional scenario planning workshop with the breadth and diversity of online collective-intelligence systems, producing faster, cheaper, and more effective outcomes."

Do new information and communication technologies (ICTs) empower repressive regimes at the expense of civil society, or vice versa? For example, does access to the Internet and mobile phones alter the balance of power between repressive regimes and civil society? These questions are especially pertinent today given the role that ICTs played during this year's uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and beyond. Indeed, as one Egyptian activist stated, "We use Facebook to schedule our protests, Twitter to coordinate and YouTube to tell the world." But do these new ICTs-so called "liberation technologies"-really threaten repressive rule? The purpose of this dissertation is to use mixed-methods research to answer these questions.

"Late last week, Google representatives unveiled a significant enhancement to the company's ubiquitous search engine. They're calling it the "Knowledge Graph" and claiming it will support "more intelligent searching for real-world things on the internet"."

ONE of humanity's ultimate dreams, to peer into the future, may be moving a step closer with a controversial €1 billion ($1.3bn) EU plan to recreate the entire world in a computer system. The Living Earth Simulator project would take the vast streams of data pouring into the internet, ranging from Facebook and Twitter to dry-as-dust government statistics, and try to spot the economic and social trends that will shape the future.

Most popular web-based businesses are deflationary. They substitute expensive forms of content consumption for cheap ones, they make it logistically easier to deliver discounts to people who will respond to them, and they create numerous financially cheap forms of social status. As more activity moves on to the web, the main effect on the economy will be broadly lower prices and less need for employment.

DataSift offers the most powerful and sophisticated tools for extracting value from Social Data. The amount that Internet users are creating and sharing through Social Media is exploding. DataSift offers the best tools for collecting, filtering and analysing this data. Social Data is more complicated to process and analyse because it is unstructured. DataSift's platform has been built specifically to process large amounts of this unstructured data and derive value from it.

In computing, ambient intelligence (AmI) refers to electronic environments that are sensitive and responsive to the presence of people. Ambient intelligence is a vision on the future of consumer electronics, telecommunications and computing that was originally developed in the late 1990s for the time frame 2010-2020. In an ambient intelligence world, devices work in concert to support people in carrying out their everyday life activities, tasks and rituals in easy, natural way using information and intelligence that is hidden in the network connecting these devices (see Internet of Things). As these devices grow smaller, more connected and more integrated into our environment, the technology disappears into our surroundings until only the user interface remains perceivable by users.

Yesica and her lawyers have exercised a legal right now dubbed the "Right to Be Forgotten" that allows you to remove embarrassing pictures or information you put on the Web - and do it permanently, totally. Which means you can tell Yahoo or Google or Facebook, "I don't want that there anymore. I want this to be forgotten. You have the image or the email or whatever in your computers. Remove it. And if you don't, you are breaking the law."

"Our activities on the net are being closely monitored and there are plans in several countries to allow governments to shut down communications, as recently happened in Egypt. Tools are needed to help circumvent such blocks, so as to keep communications going even in adverse conditions. While hardware is an important choke point - physical connections can be severed - software is no less important. As the attempt to suppress Wikileaks has shown, taking an internet address off line is quite possible, but the direct connections of p2p are less susceptible to such disturbance. "