October 11, 2006

regarding web 3.0

I note with amusement that the Wikipedia article called "Web 3.0" has been proposed for deletion. Given that the article currently equates web 3.0 to the semantic web (and there has apparently been something of a campaign to make this connection), I say delete away. The semantic web is just one of a host of speculative future concepts that would love to usurp the throne of popular acceptance implied by the term web 3.0. The Wikipedia imprimatur, such as it is, should not be used to endorse wishful thinking.

Which is just too bad, since I was doing a bit of my own wishful thinking about web 3.0, and a certain alternative speculative future where the social media web crawls out of your PC and spreads like fire ants into the physical world, into things and places and people, into all kinds of new devices, across all manner of networks. I may have even described this future as "web 3.0" last year in my Web 2.0 conference talk, although I can't honestly say for sure. Funny how being live on stage is a little different from rehearsals ;-) I know that Bran Ferren did use the term in his Web 2.0 talk, you can hear him talk about it in this podcast (around 18 minutes in), where he defines the 3.0 challenge as one of moving human-computing interfaces from the simple, intuitive kazoo-like stage of KVMs to the subtle, expressive and communicative violin stage of rich, specialized, multimodal interfaces. Anyway, I suppose my point is that the term "web 3.0" could plausibly be applied to the emerging world of web-based social media, created and delivered via the emerging platform of diverse, distributed, ubiquitous computing.

Just don't try to put that in wikipedia.

Posted by Gene at October 11, 2006 4:35 PM | TrackBack