Users of large quantities of information already gathered. The growth is exponential, and innovation opportunities are even greater than he imagines “brains” of Silicon Valley.

Over the centuries, we gathered information about climate, demographic data, transactions etc. Web 1.0 has taken this information and put them to the users, who could look through them using a search engine.

Soon appeared generation “Web 2.0″. The information to be collected this time related to the news we read, where do we shop, what sites in which music listening, where we travel.

Using LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, the Web has become a “social” and the big players have started to learn all about our jobs, social and business contacts and, somewhat more detail, what we like. This is the first step in Web 3.0.

Normality technological advance

In 2009, Obama has launched an ambitious program to modernize the health system, turning to electronic methods of recording medical records.

The purpose of the American president is the digitization of all medical records.

Thus, the emergency room physician will have immediate access to patient’s medical history, medical studies will begin soon and the doctors will be able to share experiences.

Every minute, YouTube videos are loaded with a cumulative duration of 24 hours.

Cameras and collect more images worldwide. Whether they know it or not, we count our mobile phones every move.

Applications have emerged that record where we go, how fast we go and how long do we take that road.

Another case is that of the human genome. Ten years ago, I could decode the human genome cost of billions of dollars.

With technology, the price dropped to 10,000 in 2011. In two years, one million people will benefit from the decoding of their DNA service. Do not be long until this service will be available to all.

We will be able to compare DNA from to learn what diseases we may put health at risk and how to treat them.

And yet, not the U.S. leads the collection of information.

The most ambitious project of this type is in India. The Indian government collects demographic data, fingerprints and iris scans of all of India’s 1.2 billion inhabitants. This effort will create the largest database in the world.

With technological advances, safety issues will come. Today, Google can read an email received by a user before he has to realize that an e-mail in your Inbox.

Google knows what friends we have and what we write, in particular.

Does the schedule and what we have virtual habits. It’s hard to imagine what would happen if Google will be able to access information on each DNA.

Aside from these risks, the technology continues to advance.

IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Google and Facebook have dominated so far. It is among the new companies appear, based on the foundations of Web 3.0. Most likely, the next Google is now born in a dark garage.

Hollywood favourite NICOLE KIDMAN was spotted lurking the streets of Sydney in the early hours of yesterday morning, drawing giant pentagrams on the ground with chalk and lighting candles. She kept checking her watch and looking up at the sky but nothing was happening, as far as I could tell.

Teen dream JUSTIN BEBER was allegedly seen scratching his twitter address into the back windows of the cars parked along his street. His mom isn’t going to be happy when she finds out what he did!

Babe TILA TEQUILA was seen out and about trying to catch pigeons! She was doing very well with a fishing rod using piees of spiced sausage as bait. She told me every pigeon she sells comes with a free copy of her mixtape. I managed to get away while she was trying to shove a bird into a tiny cage and close the latch.

I saw popular man about town MICHAEL BUBLE doing a roaring trade hustling cocaine from the back of his car underneath a bridge. He told me he needed the drug money to finance his new album. I explained that it was the wrong thing to do and managed to convince Buble to throw all his drugs in the river. Nobody go swimming in there, for a while!

I overheard the infamous SHIA LaBEOUF trying to pick up a waitress at a cafe. He was asking what she would wish for if she found a magic lamp, he kept suggesting a box of Tim Tams that never runs out. He said he has a hookup that can get him as many Tim Tams as he wants. He put his hands into his pockets and pulled out like 8 Tim Tams. He got her number.

Spotted Hollywood icon TED DANSON outside a KFC protesting for PETA. He was stopping everyone who tried to go in, asking if they knew what’s in KFC’s burgers and telling them it was the endangered luck dragon. He didn’t hassle me too much but he told me fur is murder and he would never wear a mink coat again. Right on!

Human female KIM KARDASHIAN was spotted by a fan at a supermarket. She didn’t buy anything, she was just opening every box of cereal and feeling around inside with her hand. Hope she found what she was looking for!

Saw legend  MEL GIBSON at a screening of Black Swan. He kept complaining loudly that they weren’t dancing properly and none of the actors knew anything about dancing. He said he wanted a refund and he walked out but I saw him quickly duck into a different theatre.

This is not to say that I’m an old fart or that I dismiss this brave new world with a sneering pugnacity. It’s no more than, like a lot of people, I always feel one step behind. It doesn’t matter if I read every How-To guide or catch every techno show on TV or You Tube updates; I am behind on the technology by the time I close the book or the video ends.

This world is too fast for me, it’s as simple as that. I like to read a good novel at a leisurely pace or watch the world tick by like a zoetrope outside cafe windows while sipping a long coffee of my choice. 

So this new world; let’s call it Earth 2.0, is just too fast for me. Not just the technology or its need to race like a year old greyhound toward exhaustion, but all manner of modernity. The media world changes more often than an airhead hostess at an MTV award ceremony. Each month I purvey the latest interior style magazines only to find expensive purchases like the Vitra book case I ordered three weeks earlier, or the Eero Saarinen dining chairs that eventually melted my credit card are no longer post modern chic but junk shop tat.

How do people keep up?

Well they surf the net I guess. Only when I try this I swim in a different tide of on-line games, sport stories and banal forum catch-ups like a dolphin caught in a tuna net.

So I guess I’ll always be one step behind. Thing is I kind of like it that way. Nobody tells me my novel needs a firmware upgrade halfway through reading it. The sunset won’t crash if its HTML script is missing a hash when the colour deepens and playing with my kids at the park doesn’t seem futile if I don’t stop pushing the swings to Twitter that I’m…well that I’m pushing the swings.

I’m One Step Behind and maybe now and again you may like to try it too.

Some shook the world by arriving: Gandhi at the sea to make salt, Yuri Gagarin in Space. Others by refusing to depart: Rosa Parks from her bus seat, “the Unknown Rebel” in Tiananmen Square. There were those who inspired awe, who could make freedom radiate through walls of a Birmingham jail, a South African prison or a Nazi concentration camp. Others engineered machines that could fly and machines that could think, conquered infections and discovered the molecules that form the basis of life. There were people who could inspire us with a phrase, frighten us with a word, or revise the universe with an equation.

Regardless they all had one thing in common. They were great. They achieved that elusive trait which seemed to evade the majority of the population for so long. And yet when we think of great people, very few are from our modern era. So I must ask, is it a case that great men are no longer needed, or is it a case that in our world or interdependence, “greatness” is no longer simply an individual trait. Have great men been replaced by a collective greatness?

Certainly, there are individuals we could blame for the many painful and disconcerting things that are occurring around us. There is no foreseeable end for the conflict in Iraq as it becomes more and more entrenched. Vicious skirmishes continue to erupt between Israel and Lebanon. A war drags on in Sudan. Nuclear proliferation is becoming more widespread. The threat of nuclear war hovering above, dictating almost all global actions. Meanwhile nobody fixed global warming.

But look at our modern world through a different lens and you’ll discover another story, one that isn’t about conflict or great men. Where “greatness” is no longer rare, and no longer constituted by an individual. Because great men are no longer needed. It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never experienced before. It’s about the universal compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the people’s mass media You Tube and the online metropolis Bebo. It’s about the many wrestling power from the few and empowering the powerless, giving a voice to the voiceless. This will not only change the world, but also change the way in which the world itself changes, in which the world view “greatness”.

I believe that the tool that has made this possible is the World Wide Web. It has enabled those who would have otherwise been engulfed, forgotten by the history shine. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together seventeen years ago, according to Wikipedia, as a way for scientists to share research. It’s not even the over hyped dotcom Web of the late 1900s. The new Web is a very different thing. It’s tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter: creating a universal “greatness”, defining it for our generation. Silicon Valley calls it web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But really it’s a revolution.

And we are ready for it. We’re read to balance our diet of pre-digested prejudiced news with raw feeds from Baghdad, Beijing and Boston. We can learn more about how the citizens of the world live just by looking at the backgrounds or You Tube videos than we ever could have from watching hundreds of hours of network television.

And we don’t just watch, we participate, like never before. We, every individual, get the chance to take part in what constitutes “greatness”. We make Face book profiles and Second Life avatars and review books at Amazon and trade goods on EBay and record pod casts on iTunes. We blog about our political candidates losing and write songs about lost loves. We record footage or war torn countries and build open-source software.

The world may love it’s solitary geniuses- it’s Einstein’s, it’s Edison’s, its Eisenhower’s, but those isolated dreamers may have to learn to play with others. In a world where global communication is an everyday occurrence, every individual now not only has the opportunity, but the responsibility to be great. Car companies are running open design contests, CNN is carrying blog posting alongside its regular news feed, Microsoft is working overtime to fend off user-created Linux, we’re looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it’s just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into global intellectual economy.

“Greatness” can finally be achieved by everyone. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, “greatness” belongs to each and every one of us. Sure, it’s a mistake to romanticise all this any more that is strictly necessary. Web 2.0 harness the stupidity of the crowds as well as its wisdom. Some of the comments on You Tube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the bigotry and the naked hatred and racism.

But that’s what makes all this worthy of commentary. Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail. There’s no road map for how an organism that’s not a bacterium lives and works together on this planet in numbers in excess of 6 billion. This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person. It’s a chance for people to inspire others, to reach out and make a difference, to exalt “greatness”. For “greatness”, is no longer simply a quality for “great men”. To me, in the Twenty first century “Greatness” is symbolised by interdependence, inter-reliance and by a world in which “great men” are rendered redundant and obsolete, as every man, regardless of race, religion or creed, has the opportunity to be great.