Doing business with web 3.0

Source: Exec Digital UK

Date :13/05/2008 08:43:01

Is ‘Web 3.0’ something that will impact on business or just another wave of marketing hype? Exec pulls the strands together to build a clearer picture.

Written by Ruari McCallion

There are times when people’s choice of phrase or name for their favourite cause can work against them, and that may be the case with ‘Web 3.0’. The original designation was ‘the semantic web’ but this wasn’t thought to be sexy enough after the excitement of ‘Web 2.0’, so Web 3.0 it has become. But what happened to Web 1.0 and what was Web 2.0? Has it disappeared like a page trying to renew itself when the connection goes down? No, it’s still growing but a brief resume of the different versions can help to put the discussion in context – and maybe help to understand potential opportunities and challenges for the future.

Web 1.0 – as it is being called now – was the original World Wide Web. Essentially static, a collection of files that could be read by accessing the correct address. As the reservoir of data and pages grew, search engines were developed to enable users to locate all the available information on a particular subject. In essence, the web crawlers were automated librarians. They would find what they knew was there and, if they couldn’t find it, they would assure you it didn’t exist. All content was generated by the providers. Google, the most popular search engine, moved things along a bit by ranking web pages not just in the order of most clicked, but weighted each click by reference to where it came from – the more authoritative a referring site, the more weight its clicks have. Ebay is just one still successful example of a Web 1.0 site.

Web 2.0 has added user-generated content and is, currently, the fastest-growing sector. Facebook, MySpace and YouTube are just the best-known Web 2.0 sites. What it has done is make the Web more of a two-way experience. There’s always a problem with giving more involvement: people are never satisfied. They continually expect more.

Web 3.0 is another step along that road – and it’s not actually a brand-spanking new, 2008 idea. The father of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee (pictured), first spoke of ‘the Semantic Web’ back in 1999. In the way of these things, the idea was ignored for a few years until the technology seemed to be catching up with the imagination. Over the last couple of years Web 3.0 has been spoken of more and more – but the problem has been that different folks have pulled different strokes for it. To some, it’s the gateway to a super-efficient search engine.

On March 14 this year Amit Kumar, director of product management for Yahoo’s search site, said on its blog that the company was “…starting to back key semantic web standards”. From its perspective, the emerging ‘semantic’ underpinning is important because it helps to capture more than just the binary code of data on the page, but the actual meaning…

May 13, 2008

Click here to read the full article on Web 3.0