A particularly hot question, these days…

Stephen Baker came up with three criteria:

1) Easier and cheaper

2) Always on

3) More controllable

Check out the comments following his post, though, if you want to see a sea of differing opinions as to what Web 3.0 actually means.

Personally, I’m of the school of thought that prefers categorizations I can get my head around. Things like, “Web 1.0 was read-only, Web 2.0 is read-write, and Web 3.0 will be read-write-execute.” But, from what I’m reading, Web 3.0 is actually going more in the direction of “intelligence” — apps that can interpret plain English and human context.

Wikipedia defines the Semantic Web (another term for 3.0?) through W3C director Tim Berners-Lee’s vision:

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers.

Do you doubt it? I don’t. I don’t think there are any limits to human ingenuity, only to the magnitude of the leaps between flashes of insight. Even though the idea of artificial intelligence has been around for a zillion years, we’re close enough now that it’s actually a feasible fantasy. And, if it’s not, we can fake it.

The key lies in integrated communities. Think about all the great Web developments in the past few years: Wikipedia, YouTube, MySpace… they have only become what they are through community. That’s why Time named ‘You’ the Person of the Year for 2006. I think they were a bit slow to catch on: well before 2006, Google became the behemoth that it is thanks to the power of squillions of individual searches and links. Maybe Time could create a Noun of the Year: Leverage.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 19th, 2007 at 9:23 am and is filed under Web 3.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.