Living in Silicon Valley has been an intoxicating and suffocating experience all wrapped up into a lavish party with gourmet food and cocktails poured through a block of chiseled ice. Everyday I live, breath, sleep everything two dot oh, and what started as a way of making the web more dynamic and interactive, is now one big pool of punch where programmers, marketers, and startup founders are the new rock stars and everyone wants to jump in to take a dip and take a sip.
At first it was playful as well as ominous, but now there’s serious development in Web 3.0 applications. Those in the know will say, yes it’s about time, we need to move on. After all, Web 2.0 is pass right? Truly, many are ready to shed the 2.0 hype and move on to something more meaningful and relevant.
But when the New York Times decided to make it official on a mass scale, it left a lot of people scratching their heads. Especially since 3.0 wasn’t really explained more than the next big thing and 2.0 still really means nothing to the masses other than the notion that it might be dotcom part two.
Courtesy of STIRR’s Sean Ness
So what is Web 3.0? For quite sometime, it’s been referred to as the Semantic web.
Currently the focus of a W3C working group, the Semantic Web vision was conceived by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Calling it the next step in Web evolution, Berners-Lee defines the Semantic Web as “a web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines.” – source
According to Markoff, “the Holy Grail for developers of the semantic Web is to build a system that can give a reasonable and complete response to a simple question like: “I’m looking for a warm place to vacation and I have a budget of $3,000. Oh, and I have an 11-year-old child.” Under today’s system, such a query can lead to hours of sifting – through lists of flights, hotel, car rentals – and the options are often at odds with one another. Under Web 3.0, the same search would ideally call up a complete vacation package that was planned as meticulously as if it had been assembled by a human travel agent.”
The Semantic Web is a web of data. The Semantic Web is about two things. It is about common formats for interchange of data, where on the original Web we only had interchange of documents. Also it is about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects. That allows a person, or a machine, to start off in one database, and then move through an unending set of databases which are connected not by wires but by being about the same thing. – source
At the end of the day, Web 3.0 is a little artificial intelligence and a whole lot more of programming intelligence. It’s about stringing the data across sites in order to provide a more informative, seamless, interconnected, and productive experience.
In anticipation of the global dominance of 3.0, Nick Carr has already locked-in Web 3.0 Conference, Web 3.0 Summit, Web 3.0 Camp, Web 3.0 Uncamp, and Web 3.0 Olde Tyme Hoedown. I’m thinking about crunch3.0, 3 point oh my god, c 3 point oh, and 3.1 anything and everything.
I will keep my eyes open for new intelligent applications and report on those I find interesting – especially as they relate to business, marketing, and communications.
Tag:
Add to 
Brian Solis is principal at FutureWorks PR, an award-winning PR and Social Media agency founded in 1999. FW PR bridges the communications gap between companies and their customers, and between products and their specific benefits for their target markets. Solis blogs at PR2.0, http://www.briansolis.com, and regularly contributes to many industry trades. He is also frequently quoted in articles relating to technology trends and Marketing/PR strategies.
