When I first started writing about Web 3.0 not so very long ago, I was surprised by the amount of ire people had towards the phrase ‘Web 3.0′. Tired of hype, sick of overblown promises of the Next Greatest Thing, faithful Web 2.0 users patrolled the Net, ridiculing or removing premature references to yet another sequel.

As Thomas Claburn reported in Information Week this past Thursday, Web 3.0 has won its most recent battle:

Up until last month, Web 3.0’s future was in doubt. Wikipedians were divided about the legitimacy of the concept, and those skeptical of the term deleted the Web 3.0 entry from the online encyclopedia five separate times during 2006. After this series of near-death experiences, the article was put under protection last October…

In February, a deletion review for the entry concluded, with the majority of Wikipedia contributors voting to accept the legitimacy of the term.

The watershed moment may well have come last November when New York Times reporter John Markoff legitimized Web 3.0 in an article that described the term as a movement to add meaning and structure to the vast amount of information on the Web.

Some may say that this argument is about semantics, not substance. Substance is created from semantics, though. Pulitzer Prize winner William Safire is certainly skilled and knowledgeable enough to write on just about any topic; he has chosen to spend the past 28 years writing the “On Language” column in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. I suspect that he better than anyone understands that the person who defines the words is the one who holds the cards.

I did look it up to see what Merriam-Webster had to say:

se·man·tic (si-’man-tik) adjective of or relating to meaning in language

What could be more substantial than meaning?

In the case of Web 3.0, people are irritated by the sheer cheekiness of it, coupled with the lack of a clear, tangible definition that everyone can grasp. Among the many positive responses to Stephen Baker’s post about Web 3.0 last October were some that were positively vitriolic, such as:

If people don’t stop using this useless marketing term: “Web 2.0″, let alone plugging a “newer, improved” Web 3.0 term, then the world will probably implode.

and

Don’t you think we could finish wrapping our heads around and implementing web 2.0, learning about is standards and methods before you go on jibbering about web 3.0?

What are the other options, though, to refer to web apps that successfully integrate relationships, allowing, as Claburn pointed out, the possibility that

someone querying a Star Wars database that supports semantic protocols could search for “Darth Vader’s son’s sister” and would find documents relating to Princess Leia, despite the absence of that specific phrase in any of the found documents?

The only one that seems to have gained any traction is Tim Berners-Lee’s ‘Semantic Web’, which may take off because it sounds intelligent. The issue with that particular turn of phrase is that some people don’t know what it means, and others—the ones who like to say, “Now you’re just arguing semantics,”—imbue it with a negative connotation.

Won’t you help us, Mr Safire?

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 17th, 2007 at 4:59 pm and is filed under Semantic Web, 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.