I agree with much of what Johnson says. He’s exactly right that Europe suffers from the weight of it’s own history; our inability to free ourselves from our history so often holds us back. I left the UK for California in 1996 because I felt the weight of this – real and perceived historical precedents were always being cited for why a good idea was “too hard” or simply “not what we did here”.

A common criticism you hear of America is that it has no history. This profoundly misunderstands one of America’s great strengths – it is a place where people escape from history and are free to re-invent themselves and thus invent the future. The future is a better place to be than the poorly recalled past.

I’m not so convinced by the argument that the tech industry should not look to Silicon Valley as its inspiration. Johnson writes:

The problem with ‘the next Silicon Valley’ was that we took it too literally. Focus on ‘the next’: What will the next huge technology-led industry be? What will the next center of innovation that touches everyone be?”

Silicon Valley has been the global epicenter of innovation and wealth generation for more than 50 years now. The reason it continues to be the home of so many great tech companies decade after decade is because it continually reinvents itself.

Johnson notes how Shenzhen in China has become the region where most of the world’s electronics are built. It took over from Silicon Valley, which as its name suggests, was originally all about building electronics – with companies like Fairchild, Intel, HP and Cisco. That dominance was overtaken by the microcomputer industry which became Silicon Valley’s major driver of innovation in the late 70s and early 80s with companies like Atari, Apple and Seagate.

In the ’90s the web industry — with all due respect to Tim Berners-Lee — was established in California through Netscape and the first generation of dotcoms.

In the 2000s web search and social innovation on the West Coast led to Google, Facebook, Twitter and many others.

Every decade or so, Silicon Valley profoundly reinvents itself. It has repeatedly created the next huge technology-led industry. What drives this? Is there something magical in the water? No. Silicon Valley is not a specific set of companies or industries. Silicon Valley is a way of thinking about the future and creating companies around those ideas. It is an experimental approach that allows people to solve real problems by listening to users when possible and leading them when required.

It is a set of support structures — such as a critical mass of smart entrepreneurs, great technical universities, adventurous venture capitalists, innovative tech incubators — that allow that thinking and experimenting to be quickly embodied into the next great company.

When tech entrepreneurs in Europe talk about creating the “next Silicon Valley” — whether it’s in London, Berlin or Dublin — we mean importing this way of thinking and reproducing these support structures to allow us to figure out and create the next huge tech industry. The Silicon Valley approach is exactly about freeing yourself from the constraints of the past and allowing the experimentation that generates ideas that can change the world.

So, I’m not afraid to say that in London we’re trying to create a new Silicon Valley.

The explosive growth of innovative tech companies here is proof that it’s working. There are companies exploring how to reshape finance, building the new world of personal manufacturing, processing vast amounts of data to make the world work better and even (for my part) trying to make live music work better.

There are hundreds of companies trying to invent the future. Some of them will succeed, thanks to our ambition and using the techniques that work so well in Silicon Valley.

Dan Crow is the CTO of Songkick. He was previously a technical lead/manager at Google, co-founder of Blurb; Chief Scientist at Unicru and engineer at Apple.

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This is something that’s worth thinking about as we see the social web becoming a mainstream phenomenon, with all that implies. The choices we make when it comes to the platforms we use, and the choices those platforms make about how they choose to monetize their networks, will have far-reaching implications.

The story of how Berners-Lee created the web is pretty well-known: how we was working as a researcher at the CERN Institute in Switzerland and decided to try to put the theories of earlier thinkers such as Ted Nelson and Vannevar Bush into practice and developed a series of programs and standards that would allow a scientist in one lab to connect his thoughts or research to information that was located on a computer somewhere else. The result was hypertext markup language, or HTML, as well as the hypertext transport protocol, or HTTP — concepts that most of us barely even think about anymore, as they have become such an integral part of our lives.

A critical feature: No centralized control

It’s interesting to note that the initial response to Berners-Lee’s idea was skepticism, primarily because others in the field wanted all hyperlinks to be approved by a central authority, so that no one would click on a link and find nothing (or something unexpected) at the other end. As a Time magazine feature on Berners-Lee from 2001 described it:

“When Berners-Lee attended hypertext exhibits and asked designers whether they could make their systems worldwide, they often said no, citing this need for a clearinghouse. Finally [he said], ‘I realized that this dangling-link thing may be a problem, but you have to accept it.’”

That willingness to give up some form of centralized control may not seem like a big deal, but I think it was a crucial aspect of what Berners-Lee and CERN did in throwing the development of the web open to anyone, provided they abided by certain minimal standards. And it’s directly related to his other decision, which was not to try to commercialize what he had invented — something he left to people like Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, who turned the graphical browser he developed at the University of Illinois into a corporation and launched the initial wave of commercial web companies in the mid-1990s.

As Robert Wright (who did the interview with Berners-Lee for Time magazine in 2001) notes in a recent post at The Atlantic about the anniversary of the web, it would have been fairly easy for Berners-Lee to build on what he had developed and create some kind of commercial entity. In fact, he had a graphical browser/editor before Mosaic or Netscape came along (and the two-way or social web was very much part of Berners-Lee’s initial vision). But he didn’t, and one of the main reasons was that he didn’t want the web to become balkanized, with multiple versions of the browser that wouldn’t be truly interoperable with each other or the open web. As Wright described it in 2001:

“Berners-Lee envisioned competitors springing up, creating incompatible browsers and balkanizing the Web. He thought it better to stay above the fray and try to bring technical harmony.”

What kind of web do we really want?

Reading about Berners-Lee and thinking about the development of the web — and all the ways in which it could have become something very different — made me think about the recent furor over the evolution of Twitter, and to a lesser extent Facebook, and how the nature of those networks is changing as commercial pressures come to the forefront. Twitter in particular is no longer just an open platform for real-time information, with an API that anyone can use to add value to the network. Now it is a commercial media entity with corporate partnerships and advertising relationships that will determine much of its future behavior.

As Hunter Walk of YouTube has pointed out, a big part of the impetus for this change is the massive amount of venture financing Twitter has taken on over the years and its attempts to justify an implied market value of $8 billion or so. Facebook is in a similar situation, since it has gotten billions in venture funding and is now a public company with shareholders and investment bankers to satisfy. Thanks to Berners-Lee, the web has never been a commercial entity, or it probably would have turned into something like AOL or CompuServe.

Even potential competitors to Twitter like App.net, which entrepreneur Dalton Caldwell is trying to develop, are driven by their funding models: Caldwell argues his service would be better because users and developers would pay for it, but others — including blogger-turned-venture-capitalist MG Siegler — maintain that in order to become successful App.net would eventually have to do many of the same things Twitter is doing and that the only real alternative would be a truly open platform (something blogging pioneer and developer Dave Winer has been talking about for some time).

Berners-Lee has also raised a warning flag before about “walled gardens,” such as the Apple ecosystem and Facebook, which he says threaten the open nature of the web. In the end, the debate about what Twitter and others are doing is about more than just competitive concerns or even capitalism vs. nonprofit models. It’s about what kind of internet we want and what we are prepared to do in order to get it.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Fabio Venni and Faramarz Hashemi

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Not only does it feature some famous faces (Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Niklas Zennstrom, Chad Hurley and many more) but it also actually made me chuckle.

Basic premise: a panel of kids is hiring for CodeClub. And guess who turns up to the interview…

I could have done without Prince Andrew’s appearance (here’s why) but still.

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If you step back far enough, beyond the ever-present Facebook vs. Google or apps vs. browser debates, what you see is a tug-of-war that has been going on ever since the internet first started to hit the mainstream: the battle of open vs. closed, between the web giants and platforms that want to control almost every aspect of your online life and the traditionally open nature of the internet. The Pew Research Center’s latest report is a glimpse into one aspect of that, with some of those surveyed saying apps are the future and others saying they are evil, and Mat Honan’s essay at Gizmodo about the “case against Google” is another aspect of the same debate — the idea that Google, once synonymous with the open internet, is now just another web giant trying to control your online life. Where does the future lie?

We’ve talked about this open vs. closed battle before at GigaOM: how the chaotic nature of the early internet turned into early “walled garden” efforts like CompuServe and America Online, which ultimately failed as the open web reasserted itself (thanks in large part to the rise of Google and other early web companies) and then more recently Facebook and Apple and Amazon have created newer versions of the walled-garden approach — where owning the relationship with users from almost every angle is the goal. Every time Facebook comes under fire for its approach to privacy, or Amazon gets criticized for wanting to own the publishing industry, or Apple is slammed for its control over apps and the iOS platform, it’s another sign of this underlying tension.

Do we need to fight for the open web or just let it evolve?

Columbia law professor and net-neutrality expert Tim Wu discussed this back-and-forth between open and closed — a battle that has also been waged in areas like the telecom industry — in his recent book The Master Switch, and other long-time internet observers such as Esther Dyson have also looked at the issue. Dyson argued in a recent essay that this tension is a kind of natural phenomenon, and that we shouldn’t get too excited about the ebbs and flows of it at any one time, but others such as the web’s creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee have expressed concern that we are losing some fairly fundamental freedoms with the rise of closed platforms, and that we should fight this trend as much as we can.

Why should you care? Because the Web is yours. It is a public resource on which you, your business, your community and your government depend. The Web is also vital to democracy, a communications channel that makes possible a continuous worldwide conversation. The Web is now more critical to free speech than any other medium.

One problem with that fight, which is highlighted by the latest Pew report and its survey of thousands of internet users (some well-known and others anonymous) is that apps and walled gardens can be very appealing from a user-centric point of view — particularly the garden is well-tended and the walls are not obvious. They make the internet easier to consume on some fundamental level, just as AOL and CompuServe did in their time. For many younger internet users in particular (and possibly some older ones as well), Facebook effectively is the internet, because it gives them everything they need: games, social contact, some information, photo browsing, etc. Others are happy to use apps on their phone for virtually everything, and barely ever use a browser.

Google is at a crossroads between open and closed

As Mat Honan suggests in his essay, Google is at a crossroads between these two visions of the internet, and has been for some time now — whether it realized it or not. It was once the upstart that disrupted search and demolished earlier giants like Yahoo and AltaVista, with a service that was so simple it consisted of just a single box into which users could type whatever they wished. Now, it is a vast empire that touches our lives in dozens of different ways through an interconnected web of services, from email and photos and calendars to videos — and all of that is being woven together with the company’s new Google+ network as a social layer, and an identity platform that connects (or chains) users to the Google platform.

At some point in the recent past, the Mountain View brass realized that owning the Web is not enough to survive. It makes sense—people are increasingly using non Web-based avenues to access the Internet, and Google would be remiss to not make a play for that business. The problem is that in branching out, Google has also abandoned its core principles and values.

The launch of “Search Plus Your World” was in some ways a defining moment for the company: it sounds like a great service, and some users undoubtedly find it to be so, since it shows personalized content from a user’s social graph (provided that social graph is connected to Google+, of course). But giving content from its own internal network preferential status in search results — even in a limited way — is still a fundamental change from Google’s previous agnostic approach to web content, one that seems almost like a breach of its initial promise to users. That’s why observers such as former Google staffer Alexander Macgillivray, now chief counsel at Twitter, said it was a “bad day for the internet” when the service was launched.

For better or worse, Google has come to the realization that in order to prosper in the current age of the social web, it has to have more hooks into what people do, and thereby more insight (theoretically) into their purchasing intent, which is what advertisers are increasingly basing their behavior on. Facebook provides this in spades — although the ultimate value of its network from an advertising or e-commerce standpoint is still very much open to debate, as I described in a recent report for GigaOM Pro (sub. required) — and this is also the territory Amazon is after, and Apple as well. Controlling the platform and every aspect of the content within it, whether it’s iOS devices or the Kindle ecosystem, is the ultimate goal.

The question we are left with, as John Battelle and other open-web supporters such as Dave Winer have argued, is “What kind of internet do we want?” And unfortunately, the answer to this question is far from obvious. Advocates of the free and unfettered internet may not want to admit it, but plenty of users don’t seem to care whether something is a walled garden or not — all they care about is whether they can get what they want when they want it, and as easily as possible. In many cases, users don’t seem to really care about privacy and other considerations either, if the services they get are appealing enough.

All of which suggests that fighting for an open web doesn’t just mean beating up on giant entities like Google and Facebook and Amazon — it means figuring out how to convince users that they should care.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Fabio Venni and Mark Strozier

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What’s the best way of challenging that stereotype? Step forward Britain’s brand new gov.uk, a service intended to smash those perceptions, help get citizens the information they need — and save money for tax payers.

The site, which went live overnight, is simple in the extreme: instead of a complicated nest of subject areas and atoms of information — the approach that typiied the previous one-stop shop, Directgov — it is a Google-like search bar that takes you directly to the information you need. Canny autosuggest options mean that keywords can be useful, while larger subjects of interests are clearly pushed without.

It is, effectively, the difference between the Yahoo and Google of old — one is a contents page for information that forces you to interpret somebody else’s filing system, the other is an index that allows you to find what you’re looking for more directly.

If you want to get an idea of this change, here’s a comparison between Directgov’s homepage (on the left) and Gov.uk’s (on the right).

It’s probably the biggest concrete example so far of the British government’s commitment to using technology to make the nation a better place.

So far Prime Minister David Cameron has been keen to court technology businesses and use the rhetoric of a high-tech future as part of his campaigning, with only minimal real impact or action.There have stunts aimed at projecting a futuristic — such as the development of a custom iPad app for Cameron to monitor national performance — and the creation of a pseudo-public body to promote London as a technology hub.

In reality, though, that commitment has wavered, not least when the Prime Minister decided to close down a proposed open data research organization to be led by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, before starting it up again amid a huge PR push.

This is not unusual in and of itself. As The Guardian put it recently, a sequence of leaders from the U.K. have used “rhetorical flourishes to disguise the fact that for the past century Britain has gone steadily backwards as an industrial power.”

But Gov.uk — which is still in beta, for now — seems like a good step in the right direction. I just used it to find and fill out some forms that I needed to send, a task that would have taken a few minutes in the past: now it took just a single click to get to the right place. And it’s all been done on a budget of £1.7 million, a far cry from the British government’s most infamous technology white elephant, when it famously spent years preparing a new IT system for the National Health Service that saw its costs balloon from £2 billion to more than £12 billion ($19 billion) — before the financial crisis loomed and the project was duly cancelled.

The gov.uk team, led by Mike Bracken (disclosure: a former colleague and friend of mine) is actually trying to cut costs and help reinvent government to focus on users. As the Financial Times reports, the project aims to save almost £50 million ($78 million):

“Instead of a government with an IT department, we need to be a digital government,” Francis Maude, minister for the Cabinet Office, told the FT. “Our approach to the way the public sector should be doing its digital offering is very different. We want sensible platforms with common standards and a move away from the big overarching IT projects which had a terrible reputation for running over budgets and over time.”

This change is only just beginning, and it hasn’t come without some friction. Jobs have gone in the civil service as the organization effectively used smart technology to replace humans in charge of huge libraries of media materials that were rarely seen by the public. And it may be too much of a stretch to imagine ministers used to the privileged, dusty corridors of Westminster talking about Hadoop clusters and agile operations.

But ultimately it’s a smart, sharp product, and the focus on getting users what they need, faster has got to be good news. An example for other countries to follow?

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But unlike other countries, the U.K. is not just talking about creating jobs or encouraging infrastructural projects: it’s also taking a gamble on data.

This involves opening up a whole range of new government-owned data sets to the public, as well as encouraging greater sharing of information to try and boost the amount of innovation and development in Britain around this material. In addition, there’s going to be a new organization led in part by Sir Tim Berners-Lee — known as the Open Data Institute — to help foster this process and lead development.

Osborne is expected to say the program is an attempt to “innovative, exploit and research open data opportunities with business and academia”, and over the last couple of days, news of the plans have started to leak out to try and drum up enthusiasm.

Here’s basically what is going live, soon:

All of this is significant, and is positioned as a source for app developers, software companies and technology businesses. The hope is clearly that the data will allow them to build products and services that can feed back into the economy and promote growth. And it’s a welcome change from a government keen to promote tech startups, but which had previously said that data was a “low priority”.

As Information Age reports, the Open Data Institute is actually an old plan — one originally proposed by the last government — that was first scrapped, and is now being repackaged as shiny and new.

The institute will be directed by leading open data academics Professor Nigel Shadbolt and web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

The scheme recalls the Institute for Web Science, an academic research centre proposed by former prime minister Gordon Brown in March 2010, which was also due to be run by Shadbolt and Berners-Lee.
“We want to build on the outstanding work Sir Tim and Nigel Shadbolt have put in to ‘making public data public’,” said Brown at the time.

However, the current government scrapped the £30 million plan in May 2010, saying it was a “low priority”.

I spoke with Professor Shadbolt, one of the world’s leading open data campaigners, who told me that it was a significant move.

“This is about keeping the U.K. at the leading edge of the open data movement,” he said. “The ODI will be about ensuring a flourishing environment of open data entrepreneurs. In some cases we will have to secure the research to provide the tools, skills and methods to support the creation of new value using open government data.”

“In other situations it will be about supporting new and innovative companies that are seeking to exploit open data… There is a substantial training program to provide a cohort of individuals with open data skills.”

The end result, of course, will be when we see what will happen with this data in Britain. But it will be exciting to see what happens — and whether we will see other governments follow suit.

Photograph of Tim Berners-Lee used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user Tanaka; Nigel Shadbolt used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Elon University

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In 1991 British scientist Tim Berners-Lee posted a brief summary of the World Wide Web (or W3) project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup, writing:

“The WWW project was started to allow high energy physicists to share data, news, and documentation. We are very interested in spreading the Web to other areas, and having gateway servers for other data. Collaborators welcome.”

It’s safe to say that Berners-Lee’s invitation to potential collaborators went fairly well. That initial web page has expanded to more than 19 billion pages (at the last count) and there are millions and millions of workers across the globe who rely on the World Wide Web to go about their daily lives. In those 20 years, the changes to the workplace that have taken place thanks to the Internet are nothing short of remarkable. Email is as good a place as any to start.

You’ve got mail

Try to explain the workplace B.E. (before email) to someone under 30, and you could be describing life in the 19th century for all the relevance it has to their working day. Back then, we lived in a world in which quaint technologies such as the fax machine prevailed. With the fax machine, it was not unusual to wait days for a reply.

Later, when Web-based email began to grow in popularity, it transformed communication in the workplace. You could now receive a response to a question within minutes, especially once broadband connections became more commonplace. You could send information and documents to colleagues around the world at the click of a button.

Email overload

But technology was now developing at a pace that seemed astonishing even to those who worked in the industry, and email, after a honeymoon period, hit problems. “Too intrusive,” said some. “Too much of it,” said others. “Not quick enough,” moaned the rest.

When consumer-based instant-messaging technologies infiltrated the workplace – AIM launched in 1997 and Yahoo! Messenger (then Pager) in 1998 – users were suddenly able to communicate with co-workers in real-time. Years later, these tools would often be integrated into a platform that also included voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), shared whiteboards, video conferencing and file transfer features.

It was around this time that social networks also began to establish a presence. Some of these are undoubtedly more consumer-focused, but there can also be no denying that Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have had a massive impact on working life, too. The ability to communicate and share content with your extended network (and beyond) has transformed many of our traditional working practices. As well as enabling businesses to engage in two-way conversations with their customers, these social networks are now a central part of the recruitment process. Last year, I wrote a piece on how Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter can enable you to find a team of peers without breaking the bank of recruitment agencies. You can tap into your workforce’s network and find like-minded, talented people to become part of your company.

Getting ready to collaborate

The net result of all the technological developments outlined above has been to change the very fabric of how we work. We now live in a collaboration economy. To share and communicate information, ideas and innovation has never been easier, or come more naturally to the workforce. The emergence of the Web has given rise to a global working village, with location and time zone utterly irrelevant. You can work as closely with someone in another country as you would with someone sitting opposite; work from home or on the move, and even send files from your mobile handset to someone on the other side of the world.

This has all been made possible by the World Wide Web. From Skype to smartphones and social networking to SaaS, it’s all underpinned by the internet and the changes to the workplace of 20 years ago are just extraordinary. With a global mobile worker population set to hit 1.19 billion by 2013, one can only wonder what the Internet will bring us next. Bring on the next 20 years!

Andy McLoughlin, Co-founder and EVP Strategy at Huddle, can be reached on Twitter@Bandrew.

Image courtesy of Flickr user thinknew.

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