The Pond, an Octopz blog on communication, collaboration and coworking online.

In this new TED video from the 2007 conference, Kevin Kelly looks back at the evolution of the World Wide Web, which, he points out, is only 5,000 days old. Kelly then casts a glance forward to the next 5,000 days and asks, how can we predict what’s coming in the next 5,000 days?

In this older TED video from the 2005 conference, Kevin Kelly asks and tries to answer what technology wants.

In this prescient video from the 2005 TED conference, Clay Shirky talks about the challenges that business, educational, and media institutions face from emerging models of online and decentralized collaboration.

Using the photo-sharing community Flickr as one example, Shirky examines the potential of the new types of largely decentralized group communication and collaboration tools. But he does not shy away from taking a look at the dark side of this trend as well, citing the 9/11 attacks and anorexic teens as examples.

More recently, Shirky turned up at the April Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, to keynote and promote his new book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. The book examines what happens when people use online collaboration tools to get together and get things done without the need for traditional organizational structures.

His Web 2.0 talk, Gin, Television, and Social Surplus focuses on what Shirky calls the cognitive surplus – the amount of personal free time produced by industrialization and automation. Quote:

Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn’t know what to do with it at first–hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn’t be a surplus, would it? It’s precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.

To find out how gin fits into the picture watch you can just watch the first couple of minutes of the video. But both videos, at total running time of just over 37 minutes, are worth every second of viewing in terms of the information and entertainment imparted by Shirky in his original, accessible and wry style.

Tim Berners-Lee (TBL), the inventor of the World Wide Web, recently remarked that developing online means of fostering collective creativity is the next major challenge for the web. Berners-Lee, echoing some of Douglas Engelbart’s pioneering ideas on online collaboration, made his remarks during his keynote presentation at the Tetherless World conference on the future of the Web.

According to Berners-Lee, the Web should evolve into a system that allows people to connect and share partly-formed ideas online that with the help of others can be turned into solutions to huge and pressing problems.

How can we make the Web be an infrastructure that allows more than one person to think more effectively than one person can? There’s no proof yet that for creative thinking we’ve done that. The challenge is to build a system that allows the formation of half-formed ideas and allows collective creativity.”

A video recording (with slides) of Tim Berner-Lee’s keynote is here. The part on collective creativity begins around the 60 minute mark. Computerworld reported on the keynote here.

Related Pond post: Douglas Engelbart, online collaboration pioneer