Understanding Web 3.0

If my opinion counted, I would call this decade the decade of the buzz word.  Environmentalists made the word “Green” the word to live by and UPS made the word “Brown” the word to grow your business by.  Along with buzzwords like Mashup, Vlogging, Pork-barrell spending, and others, the term Web 2.0 deserves a place on the list of buzzword.  Experts may disagree with me, since Wikipedia calls Web 2.0 a “a perceived second generation of web development and design, that aims to facilitate communication, secure information sharing, interoperability, and collaboration on the world wide web.”  Wikipedia and web developers might define Web 2.0, according to collective experience, but the etymology of the buzzword Web 2.0 came about much like the Grand Canyon—no one built it, it just happened, and then geologists gave it a name.

In 1990, Timothy John Bernes-Lee, director of  W3.org, invented the world wide web to communicate between a HTTP client and a server.  More than a decade after Bernes-Lee announced his invention to the world via CERN, Tom Anderson announced his website Myspace.  Like all good capitalist economies competition arose, and sites like Facebook, Ning, and Linkedin took their place in the world wide web.  Like the evolution of the Grand Canyon, a Web phenomena happened, and soon internet geologists (my own term) decided they needed to give a name to the phenomena. 

Over time, the world wide web became an internet canyon left for a countless number of users and websites to fall through the cracks of, using search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN, while trying to avoid spam and hackers.  In December 2004, Bernes-Lee accepted a chair at the University of Southhampton, where he began to reconstruct the web, in a project to develop the Semantic Web or Web 3.0.  The term Web 3.0 takes on more of a concrete definition; though, Wikipedia continues to tweak the definition.

In order to understand Web 3.0, one must understand web trends that make it possible for the world wide web to take on a more semantic or personal feel.  With the current architecture of the web, when a person types in certain keywords into search engines, a plethora of sites that may or may not give that person the results he/she wants appear.  Metaspiders and Web Crawlers rank those pages, according to the SEO content and Link imbedded on that page.  For instance, if I want to know where the name America came from, I could type in “Who was the United States of America named after?”  Pages of irrelevant answers would come up; though, with Web 3.0, each user will get a more personal feel that will give them the answers they want using a more direct approach (BTW, it was named after Amerigo Vespucci).  One of the best examples of the web’s potential to take on a more personal feel is that of Facebook advertisements, which allow advertisers to target specific types of users.  For instance, I run the Facebook page for SDgreenlife.com, so the advertisements on our page reflect the keywords imbedded onto our Facebook profile, as well as our friends and the groups we belong to.  Web 3.0 will target specific users, and allow each user to gain a more personal feel from the World Wide Web.

Social sites, which took advantage of the world wide web and led to a chaotic mess, forced Internet geologists to use the term Web 2.0 to define a Web phenomena that just happened.  Bernes-Lee intends for Web 3.0 to fix all of the holes that arose because of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.

For more on understanding the meaning and implications of Web 3.0 and how SEO content will affect the internet, please visit my website and come back to this blog.  Of course, like all good bloggers, I encourage discussion.  So, for this week, I would like to ask how you think web owners and designers can prepare for Web 3.0, if they should prepare at all?