Sir Tim Berners-Lee – often referred to as the founder of the World Wide Web – recently posted about what he has labelled “The Graph” – the next level of what was initially the Internet (a network of computers) and later the World Wide Web.
As I understand it, Sir Tim envisions a world where, we have access on a variety of devices to relevant information aggregated from various documents (today’s websites), but without needing to directly access those documents. To illustrate, he uses the following example:

… when I book a flight it is the flight that interests me. Not the flight page on the travel site, or the flight page on the airline site, but the URI (issued by the airlines) of the flight itself. That’s what I will bookmark. And whichever device I use to look up the bookmark, phone or office wall, it will access a situation-appropriate view of an integration of everything I know about that flight from different sources. The task of booking and taking the flight will involve many interactions. And all throughout them, that task and the flight will be primary things in my awareness, the websites involved will be secondary things, and the network and the devices tertiary.

The problem that I see with this picture of WWW nirvana, a.k.a the Graph is that whilst there is still a place for websites, it does not appear to support the means by which an ever increasing number of websites make money – i.e. advertising. If a user is going to have access to content from my website without having to visit it, what’s in it for me? You might suggest that I could charge a fee for the content, but in this age where content consumers demand and get almost everything for free, this is not always a viable option.

So as long as advertising-only revenue models persist and until the Web (or Graph) community can figure out an alternative way for content providers to monetise their content, I fear that content providers will continue to resist this so called open access to their content.

For a good summary and discussion of Tim Berners-Lee’s post on “The Graph”, see this post on Read/WriteWeb.