What is Web 3.0?
Some friends of mine sell T-shirts that read, "Everytime you say 'Web 3.0,' a startup dies." In a more serious vein, Wade Roush writes in Technology Review about two strains of research that are reaching for Web 3.0 status, but are still "closer to 'Web 2.1.'"
The first category of projects is related to the Semantic Web, a vision for a smarter Web laid out in the late 1990s by World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee. The vision calls for enriching every piece of data on the Web with metadata conveying its meaning. In theory, this added context would help Web-based software applications use the data more appropriately....
A second category of post-Web 2.0 projects focuses not on helping machines understand the meaning and the uses of existing Web content, but on recruiting real people to add their intelligence to information before it's used. The best known example is Amazon Mechanical Turk, a kind of high-tech temp agency introduced by the online retailer in 2005. The service allows people with tasks and questions that computers can't handle--for example, spotting inappropriate images in a collection of photos--to hire other Web users to help.
Wade is always worth reading. Alas, he seems to have led his very promising Continuous Computing blog go fallow.
Don't forget those shirts are on sale for a mean $9.99 plus s/h.
I am feeling so much spam-shame right now. :(
Posted by: Mike Love | December 07, 2006 at 10:38 AM