After a short, exertion-filled vacation, my body feels exhausted, but my mind is well rested. It'stime to flip things around...

While on my trip, I re-read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, both in anticipation of the upcoming film and because I couldn't remember much about the book as my previous reading was 10+ years ago. Curiously, upon my return, I found a thread from cre8asite member paranoidandroid, entitled "Hitchhiker's guide in your pocket".

The thread notes the existence of a pre-cursor to the Wikipedia concept amalgamating human knowledge as per Douglas Adams' (the Hitchhikers' author) idea for a guide to "life, the universe & everything". A sample for the work exists at the BBC, and is accessible via mobile, creating a virtual guide to at the very least, the Earth and a few things in, on and around it (a news article on the subject is available here).

The availability of a constantly updated repository of data was revolutionary in Adams' time (the '50s, '60s & '70s), but is realistic enough with today's technology that I imagine my grandchildren will have them as part of their wallets/purses by the time they're teenagers.

Two questions that come to mind are:

1. Could this type of mobile information access feature replace search engines for many types of queries in the future? Is delivering web page results a primitive way to answer the questions put to a universal knowledge guide?
2. How would a system like this be monetized - would advertising be available on specific entries?

The Internet's lifespan is virtually guaranteed to outlast any of its initial creators (i.e. you and I), but how it will be used in the future will almost certainly not resemble the today's methodologies.