Monday, June 9, 2008

Web 2.0 vs. Web 3.0

There's quite a bit of talk about Web 2.0 and as a result there is of course now talk about Web 3.0. I recently came across a definition of the Web 2.0 platform on Gimme The Scoop that was pretty straightfoward: "Web 2.0 is a term describing the trend in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design to enhance creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users. These concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies." Ok, so "folksonomies" is a bit of a silly word but the basic idea of "collaboration and community" is well described and that's what makes Web 2.0 so much more interesting than 1.0.

The tricky part is trying to understand Web 3.0 because definitions like "an overlay of scalable vector graphics - everything rippling and folding and looking misty - on Web 2.0 and access to a semantic Web integrated across a huge space of data" just doesn't do it for me. Neither does this: Web 3.0 "is perceived as part of digital media contribution to the evolutionary path to artificial intelligence that can provide access to information driven by laws of mathematical probability." Once this moves beyond the domain of the tech-heads and the marketing and advertising folks better understand 3.0, I'm sure we'll all start to see the light as well. For those of you want a more detailed explanation you can read/view more of what some "digital ethnographers" are saying.

Suffice it to say it may be like other media we've encountered, we'll know it when we see it!

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