Web 2.0 heads for the cloud (photos)

In a wildly inspiring, science-fiction-spiced keynote at The Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco this week, Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly put forth a utopian vision of where technology is headed, laying out ideas of what's next for a computerized world.

Speaking with the tone of a man who had come back from the future, Kelley wove a narrative of an always-on future with streams of shared, interactive, and cloud-based data in which every flat surface is a screen personalized to our needs.

Ownership, he declared, with its hassle of management and maintenance, is over.

Content will all be rented, Kelley said, and we will pay for the uncopyable qualities of items, namely convenience and immediacy.

At Web 2.0 this week in San Francisco, designers and engineers are setting out to share ideas and to build the next version of the Web.