“Web Years”

I’ve been using this term lately to describe ever increasing pace of change. I started using the term as a jest, “dog years” are faster than human years. “web years” are acceleratingly shorter.

I arrogantly imagined that I’d coined the term. Not a chance, 1996.

I blog about this to introduce the term in the context of an accelerating pace of change that is fundamental to thoughts I’ve been having about Web 2.0 changes.

I want to emphasize web years in order for me to explain my thoughts about Web 2.0/Social Computing/Communication Convergence.

If web years are getting faster, then the time we have to react is getting shorter. Worse, how do we get in front of trends?

A lot of folks that I’ve been talking to about security issues of Web 2.0 are discussing the “future”.

But Web 2.0 happened (note the past tense) in web years. The original DARPANET mesh built out over a period of years. Web 1.0 in at most, a few years (I experienced the change happening in just about a year).

Social computing happened in a few months! (of course, some of the underlying tools have been around a lot longer)

Yep, accelerating.

And the change has already happened. It’s done. Organizations are catching up with plans. Some security folks are still worrying about the perfect network perimeter. LOL!

That doesn’t mean that I think organizations have implemented Web 2.0. Please don’t mistake me. I simply believe that the way people use the web has already changed. The tools are there. We’re grappling with how to make use of these changes and how to secure them.

The perimeter is gone, gone, gone. That is not to say that we should throw away our network controls. These are a part of our security toolkit, absolutely. But information security has not equaled network security for years.

I will be blogging about changes with which I think we security folk have to catch up in another edition.

take care,

/brook