Ten years on

iSociety's last event of the year was a breakfast panel this morning to celebrate ten years of the Mosaic browser, with Andy Hobsbawm (MD, Agency.com Europe), Derek Wyatt MP (Chair, All-Party Internet Group), Fru Hazlitt (MD, Yahoo! UK&Ireland) and James Crabtree of iSociety on the panel.

Panelists were agreed that gurus and forecasters have not been particularly good at predicting the future in the last ten years, so weren't keen to make any predictions about the next ten.

Most entertaining was Fru's verbatim delivery of the introduction from a speech given by Bob Geldof about the Internet: around 40% the F-word with a few others such as 'Internet', 'e-mail', 'I' and 'my children' and 'hate' providing the context.

Most thoughtful was Derek Wyatt, who has worn many technology-related hats over the years and who had few good words to say about government and ICTs. In Wyatt's view, a Chamber-ful of old codgers together with a silo-based civil service have made any kind of great leap forward in public sector use of the Internet next to impossible. But is this such a bad thing?: do we really want joined-up government if that implies joined-up personal information on each and every one of us, that might be used against our interests?