So apparently in five year’s time the Internet is all going to be in Chinese.

Okay, so we exaggerate. But Google CEO (and we all know Google is still the guru of everything) Eric Schmidt does believe that five years from now the Internet will be dominated by Chinese language content. What’s more, he made this revelation at recent techie heaven expo – Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando 2009 – in front of thousands of IT gurus, so it must be true!

The good news for those of us who don’t speak Chinese is that other radical changes will occur in the next five years which will actually benefit us. We won’t send you to watch the full 45-minute interview available on YouTube – it’s a super-snooze fest and besides, the kind, now-snoozing-no-doubt ReadWriteWeb (www.readwriteweb.com) folk already did that for us. But we did think these points he made were interesting (highlighted by aforementioned now-snoozing ReadWriteWeb folk):

1. The Internet will also be dominated by social media content. (We could have told him that!)
2. It will be delivered over super-fast bandwidth in real time. (Super-fast? Well, us South Africans can live in hope.) We’re talking broadband well above 100MB in performance.
3. Content will move towards more video. We love us some YouTube.
4. Real time information will be recognised as being just as valuable as all other information, and will be included in search results.
5. Google specifically will also be looking at how to rank real time info. “The fundamental shift towards user-generated information means that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that is the great challenge of the age.”

That, and learning how to speak Chinese so we can follow it all.

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