It’s day 4 of South by Southwest Interactive and I have been impressed by many of the speakers and inspired by the many colleagues and peers. There have been great panels that I have attended and content that I have discussed and debated. The topics have ranged from the future of the iPhone and its place as an online gaming platform to mash-ups and badges using Yahoo! Pipes and other methods. But, the hot topic continues to be social media and the social web.

I sat in sessions by Charlene Li, co-author of Groundswell, and Dave Evans, author of numerous books on social media. They both referenced Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web and head of the W3C. I am in agreement that we are very close to realizing the ultimate vision that Berners-Lee had when he first conceptualized the WWW. Read the following blurb from a talk he gave at the Bush Symposium on October 12, 1995.

“I had (and still have) a dream that the web could be less of a television channel and more of an interactive sea of shared knowledge. I imagine it immersing us as a warm, friendly environment made of the things we and our friends have seen, heard, believe or have figured out. I would like it to bring our friends and colleagues closer, in that by working on this knowledge together we can come to better understandings. If misunderstandings are the cause of many of the world’s woes, then can we not work them out in cyberspace. And, having worked them out, we leave for those who follow a trail of our reasoning and assumptions for them to adopt, or correct.”

It’s been almost exactly 20 years since Tim Berners-Lee first proposed his global hypertext project, later becoming the World Wide Web. While many of the social media tools and platforms we have are still evolving, or haven’t even yet been created, I think we are close to realizing the ultimate vision of the WWW being an “interactive sea of shared knowledge”.