Making the Internet sustainable

Hallucination (Ludhic via Flickr)At the Brainstorm Tech conference this week in Half Moon Bay, industry leaders are talking about the future of the Internet. While bloggers are reporting on the cool emerging media stuff coming out of the gathering, there are some hard questions being thrown around as well. CNN Money’s Fortune magazine reports that “sustainability” is the next big thing in Internet technology. Not going-green sustainability (although perhaps there will some positive bi-products for the environment), but figuring out how to manage information overload and how to prepare the Internet for the technology that’s coming down the road. Also on the table were discussions about bringing the mobile and online worlds closer together, and how the Internet is increasingly becoming an entertainment platform … which we all know, but we’re all not exactly clear what that will mean for users, content providers, and marketers, say 10 years from now.

You can read more about the sustainability conversation here, but I’ll leave you with this quote from Xerox CTO Sophie Vandebroek on data-overload on the Internet:

“It’s like food – we have too much food with these all you can eat buffets. You have to control yourself.”