The opening conference of Art Futura, “The Next Web” held on Friday night at the Mercat de les Flors in Barcelona, promised a look at the next ‘cycle’ of web development – where we are heading after the shift in how we use the Web today. While some of us are still coming to grips with Web 2.0, these panellists got together to discuss Web 3.0 and beyond.

A couple of things struck me throughout all of the talks (see the list of speakers in my previous blog post). First, the focus on the ever increasing demand for speed and ‘real time’ content. Several speakers focussed on this, highlighting microblogging tools such as Twitter and Jaiku (as highlighted by Enrique Dans), which are becoming more popular (the latter was just acquired by Google). The other thing that struck me was a desire to bring online connections back to the real world in more personal and hyperlocal ways, predicting more physical links between online networks and the physical world. However all of this left me asking myself if these small interventions in our daily life will leave us more or less engaged with the world around us? We will be connected to those we choose to include in our ‘network’ – knowing where they are, if they are eating, sleeping, sad, shocked, moving. We can pinpoint them on a map, and pinpoint ourselves as well. Enrique Dans quoted Clive Thompson in Wired magazine saying that “Twitter creates a social sixth sense”...

(On a side note, last year at the Enter_Unknown Territories festival in Cambridge, UK, I saw a presentation of a project called Loca featured at ISEA2006, by John Evans (UK/Finland), Drew Hemment (UK), Theo Humphries (UK), and Mike Raento (Finland). This mobile public artwork connects to people who have Bluetooth enabled on their mobile phones. Individuals would receive text messages as they walked through the city of San Jose that became more stalker-like as time wore on, with messages such as "You walked past a flower shop and spent 30 minutes in the park, are you in love?" to "r u ignoring me?" …) Anyway, that was a bit of a random thought…

Also related to these physical and geographical aspects of social technology sites these days was the project of one of the speakers from the US, Steven Berlin Johnson. His latest project Outside.in aims to bring real-world geography to the Web and highlight all of the hyperlocal discussions going on in blogs – covering everything from grocery stores opening up around the corner to the muggings that took place around the corner. Based on the premise that the majority of people care most about what is happening closest to them (emotionally and geographically) – and highlighting Chris Anderson’s ‘vanishing point theory of news’ in which he states that “our interest in a subject is in inverse proportion to its distance (geographic, emotional or otherwise) from us”. For example “the news that my daughter got a scraped knee on the playground today means more to me than a car bombing in Kandahar” - Johnson is working to tag blog posts with very specific real-world locations and thus enable Web users to do searches like 'find all crime that occured within 3 blocks of my house last night'. Currently the site covers the US only, but he does hope to expand…

Curiously, when I arrived home from Barcelona and was standing near a carrousel at Schiphol waiting for my luggage, I noticed an ad on the screen above that asked me (in Dutch) if I wanted to know what happened in my neighborhood while I was away, directing me to http://www.buurtlink.nl (…)

This is only a fraction of the issues raised the first night at Art Futura – tomorrow I will follow up on some provocative discussions around copyright and collaborative production…