Last week, we reached out to the Executive Members of IADAS to hear what they had to say about the biggest challenge facing the Internet during the next five years.

We’ve seen close to 100 responses so far about a variety of different topics.

• In light of the recent elections, during which every pro-net neutrality candidate lost, it’s understandable that it ranks first as the biggest concern about the Internet’s future.
• Tina Roth Eisenberg’s tweet about copyright infringement was one of the most popular responses,with more than 20 retweets and even more responses.
  
• John Battelle’s concerned about “the walled garden” is one I (and lots of others)  share and something I hope we can talk more about.

• We also received some answers that referred more to the existential nature of the Internet…

If you haven’t contributed yet, we’d love to hear from you! What do you think the Net’s top challenges are to solve by 2015? What do you want the Internet to look like in 2015? What challenges do we need to tackle and solve to make it live up to its full potential?

To participate, all you have to do is tweet, blog, email or share your response to the question in some way online. For those of you contributing on Twitter, don’t forget to use the hashtag #next5 so others can follow the conversation

What’s the biggest challenge facing the Internet during the next five years? 

That’s the question we are trying to answer today as we launch a new Academy project called IADAS Conversations: The ‘Net’s Next 5.  

If you are an executive member of IADAS I hope you’ll participate (and if you aren’t but want to weigh in, please do!). All you have to do is respond to the question via email, twitter, your blog, on facebook, or any other way you want to share it with us. Here are specifics:

1. Tweet Your Response: make sure to use the #next5 hashtag
2. Blog & Tweet: If you want to elaborate beyond 140 characters (we hope you do) post you response to your blog and share the link on Twitter with the #next5 hashtag, or just email us the link to your response. 
3. Email: Send your response to me via email at dmdavies at iadas dot net and we’ll share it.
4. Fax, Other: We make a lot of jokes about faxing in our office, but if you wanted to you could fax us your response at +1 212 924 3102 and we’ll share it online. If you have some other way to publish it that we haven’t heard of, you can do that too. 

Drop me a note @dmdlikes or via email if you have any questions.

I’m sure I’m not the first to waste hours futzing around with Google Autocomplete. If you don’t know what Autocomplete is, it’s that neat little Google feature that tries to guess what your searching for before you finish typing your query (see pic below).

I decided to make my futzing (slightly!) more scientific and thought I’d try using Autocomplete to find out what people around the world are asking Google.  I typed “is ” (is with a <space>) into Google.com, Google.co.uk, Google.fr, Google.sg, Google.com.au and Google.it.

The results were pretty awesome. One thing I learned is that evidently a lot of people turn to Google to find out about death or disease (or for some reason Google is overly morbid in its predictions).  About 40% of the suggestions Google made to complete “Is” across all Google sites queried were some variation of “Is Denise Dead?” (Chuck Bass, Pietro Taricone, Tiesto and the Undertaker were among 7 other individual whose death was in question) or “Is shingles contagious?” (tonsillitis, croup (!), and AIDS were among the other diseases whose contagiousness the world questioned).

Disclaimer: graphical pie chart is 100% non-statistically significant and was calculated on the back side of a paper napkin. 

A few more facts and fun searches I learned along the way:

• “Is Denise from East Enders dead?” (UK) I wasn’t able to find out the answer to this. I have emailed actual british people to find out their thoughts.  I suspect people don’t know or I have gotten much worst at searching. In any event, it was the top auto-complete suggestion in the UK for “Is “, and East Enders is a long-running TV program. 

• “Is Lady Gaga a man?” (UK, Australia, Canada and Singapore)  Evidently, Lady Gaga’s gender is questioned throughout the world?! Funny. My research concludes she wears meat dresses, yes, but is still a women biologically speaking.

• “Est-ce que Justin Bieber parle Francais?” (France, translation: can Justin Bieber speak French?)  Oui. According to several sites he is Canadian and speaks fluent French. I also learned that his dog Sam is his best friend and that all he does is “shake his hair” to style it. Cute.

• “Is it down?” (Australia, Canada)  It could be. http://www.isitdown.com is a site that tells you if any site, is, um, down.  

• “Is it Thursday?” (UK, Australia, Canada, Singapore)  Visit http://www.isitthursday.com to find out. I wasn’t able to figure out the origins or popularity of this (pseudo?) meme. Do you know anything about it? 

• “Is shingles contagious?” (UK, Australia, Canada)  It’s kinda contagious. It is also pretty scary. The deal is if you have shingles you can give chicken pox to someone who hasn’t had that virus, but you can’t pass on shingles itself. Shingles is a kind of rebirth of the virus that once caused you to have chicken pox.  Also, while it is contagious and you can in fact pass on chicken pox to someone else, they have to come into close physical contact with the actual pox or blisters. Breathing on someone won’t do it. 

• “È già ieri?” (Italy, translation: it’s already yesterday)  Turns out this is a reference to a film - an Italian remake of Groundhog Day. Cool. The funny part is that in English it’s called Stork Day. Hm. 

Stay tuned for next week when we investigate “Can___ “.

Thanks to the folks at Interbrand for having me over last Friday for their weekly Brainwash session. I focused our discussion on innovative ways some of today’s big brands are interacting with their customers online.  Here are the links we featured:

Google

• Google’s Gift of Free Wifi on Virgin
• Chrome is Fast Spot
• http://Wildernessdowntown.com

  Three Brands + Social Media

  CharityWater.org

  Uniqlo’s UTweet

  Levi’s Friends Store 

  Customer Service via Twitter

  • Comcast (manned by @comcastbill) has nearly 46 Followers
  • Jet Blue has nearly 1.6 Million Followers
  • Orange has just launched OrangeHelpers in the UK

  Nike Chalkbot

  Muppets Make Viral Videos

  Queen + The  Muppets Bohemian Rhapsody