R/WW has a great wrap up from last week Web 2.0 Summit. It seems to me that Web 2.0 now has become more attractive to business world than the geekosphere who gave birth to it.
… this year’s conference was a lot different from last year’s. It was still a great conference, but in a different way – perhaps reflected in the name change to Summit (a more business-sounding title). Last year there were a lot more developers and designers running around, this year the crowd was overwhelmingly from the media and business worlds. No doubt because of this, I also felt this year’s conference lacked in cutting edge new products – and I didn’t learn many new insights about Web technology.
So, what were those geeks working on while they missed the summit? This article from NYT might give you a clue. Apparently, they’re too busy playing around with their new toys, Web 3.0.
I don’t know who gave it that name. But obviously, it was the same people who suggest the phrase “Web 2.0”. And like the previous phrase which is meaningless from the developer’s point of view, “Web 3.0” has no meaning other than what we’ve known for years as “semantic web “.
It is a noble attempt to change the way computer see the web not only as a bunch of data but also as informations which has meaning to computer so that it can decide things for us.
In other words, with semantic web, computer will be able to give a reasonable and complete response to a 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.”
From where we stand now, it is almost impossible to do that. Since it depends strongly to the data on the web. The old wisdom about this kind of data is you can’t trust them. Too many people lie when putting data on the web. And too many people publish invalid data which is hard to understand by computer.
However, as long as it is in “impossible” state, there’s always chances to make it happen. As we all know, geeks like impossible things. They’ve done it with Web 2.0.