We took a break last week from the white hot heat of building a web platform, to check out "Golden Compass".  The timing was interesting for me because I happened to be reading "Galileo's Daughter".  In both stories science combats control imposed by a large body of [percieved] powerful people, and their fear of distributing knowledge. 

We are fortunate at Microsoft Research to explore new worlds without constraints imposed by a large body of [fill in the blank, depending on where you might have encountered opposition to new ideas].  Instead, distribution of knowledge and collaboration with communities interested in this knowledge is expected in all facets of our work at MSR.

But let's bring it back to the web.  I've been thinking about control as it relates to any person who uses the web [for the sake of this blog post, will defer 'internet' to transport supporting the web].  How much control does any person have on the web?  And this gets more complicated as the web strives too become conversational, or transactional.  APIs are talking to other APIs; do humans have a say in all this cross platform chatter?  Have they been marginalized by a large faceless [not to be confused with facebook :> ] body making decisions in real time about what each person wants. 

If I can ask for an industry shifting gift [during this holiday season], it would be to return control to those who use the web everyday.  Give them the power to control their identity, their read/write operations against any platform, their data collected from searches and other discovery activity.  What would the web look like if this happened?  How would web platforms need to evolve, to support power returned to those who use the web?  

 More on this later... con paz,

 frank