The Gastown Dialogues on the Future of the Web (Inaugural Session)

Last week, Kevin Grandia and Evan Leeson invited me along with a few other bright minds from various walks of life, all of them with an interest in the future of the web to an intimate, in-camera roundtable discussion on what we could expect in the next few years as the Internet evolves, technology advances and we become increasingly connected in a multitude of ways.

The participants of the first Gastown Dialogue on The Future of the Web were:

Evan Leeson (whose amazing new Gastown digs were the venue) President of Catalyst Internet
Trevor Junck, Junxion Strategies
Jacqueline Voci, Soya Marketing
Mitchell Anderson, science writer and the proud owner of www.freakyweather.com
Julie Morgan, longtime blogger and socialite
Raul Pacheco-Vega, researcher: http://www.raulpacheco.org/ and super-blogger
And Kevin Grandia, managing editor DeSmogBlog and New Media Director for Hoggan and Associates

Credit: Rob Cottingham

What are the Gastown Dialogues on the Future of the Web? Here, let me give you some information from Kevin Grandia’s email to all of us. I’ve edited some bits and pieces but you get the gist.

The Gastown Dialogues will be a once-a-month small (8 people max.) intense (2 hours, 2 topics) roundtable discussion (with wine and beer) with a mix of new media users and practitioners from professionals to casual users and people just starting out. The idea is not to have a 2 hour “hey look at how smart and cool I am” rap session. Instead this is an opportunity to share knowledge, create new ideas and network with like-minded people.

The roundtable will be recorded (bring your camera if you want, we have 2, but the more the merrier) and we will create a vidcast on a Gastown Dialogue YouTube channel, thus making it available for everyone to share and spur further conversation and ideas within their own networks.

While I do expect a fuller post to emerge from Kevin and Evan, I will share one of the interesting questions we discussed:

Topic 1: We’ve all heard by now and started to see what will be “Hot in 2009″ in new media, so that’s said and done. But what will be “Hot in 2010″ in new media? Will the semantic web finally come of age, will Facebook still be the behemoth, will blogging the written word be killed by video? What about mobile tech?

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