Oh, does that make us Web 3.0?

I just love buzzwords and acronyms. I’m still deeply disappointed that my Tim Bray derived PECK (People Contributed Experience and Knowledge) as a replacement for UGC never caught on. Now we have an attempt to get Web 3.0 used to describe what’s coming next.

There has been enormous reaction to John Markoff’s article in The NYT about Web 3.0 and the “Grand Semantic Web”. As anyone who has read the Argolon blog will know, we belong to the lower-case “upright semantic web” faction. And yes that was a dreadful attempt at a piano metaphor. Of all the commentary, the one I’m most aligned with is Ross Mayfield’s and in particular his statement

I’d bet the future is less the Matrix than Soylent Green. Less semantic fuzz than social discovery. Less artificial intelligence than human intelligence. Less automation and more augmentation.

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Add that to Tim O’Reilly’s Harnessing Collective Intelligence and you have the basis for a slew of new and useful services that work with current behaviours, nudge them forward and make use of appropriately structured distributed content. This is a critical stepping stone in warming up that ocean before the promoters of grander schemes have any hope of succeeding with their vision.

Call it whatever you want, the labels mean nothing, it is all in the delivery.

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Dan Farber]6 has some good stuff on this story as does the ever pointed Nick Carr.