Web 3.0: 'Vague But Exciting'

When computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee first submitted his 1989 paper, “Information Management: A Proposal,” his boss, Mike Sendall, wrote “vague, but exciting” on it by way of endorsing what was the blueprint for the World Wide Web.

Two decades later, Berners-Lee and others are formulating what can be called the third generation of the Web, the “semantic Web,” or “Web 3.0.” I know, I know, most of us are still trying to deal with Web 2.0 as part of a very confusing marketing landscape.

Here’s a quick primer for marketers:

Web 1.0 (the information Web), the one we all know and love, is straightforward. It’s full of content that we can surround with ads, mainly in the form of banners. Many marketers look at this as an extension of offline media — print and television. Sadly, they tend to use it the same way.

Web 2.0 (the social Web) is a little less “ad friendly.” Social networking, live chat, folksonomies, mash-ups, virtual worlds, even mobile are part of 2.0. It’s about people communicating, contributing, collaborating. Results come from the wisdom of crowds — for better or worse. This collaboration and sharing break down the traditional media model, and marketers lose control of their brands, even while they gain powerful new ways to engage their audience. (Type your brand’s name into Topsy, the Twitter search engine, to get a little taste of market reality.)

Web 3.0 (the semantic Web) derives its “wisdom” from software that learns by looking at online content, analyzes the popularity of that content and draws conclusions. Instead of people refining information and opinion, intelligent software would do the same thing.

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