Other Perspectives on Web 3.0

On Tuesday and Wednesday I blogged about the Web 3.0 show this week in New York City. For those readers who don't often visit internet.com's Semantic Web site, I wanted to share some other descriptions about and comments from the show.

Here's Aza Raskin, head of user experience at Mozilla Labs, during his keynote (as reported by Semantic Web's Jenny Zaino):

The Web isn't about destinations anymore, one expert said at the Web 3.0 Conference here today.

"The business model of the web where [the goal] is to get people to come and view your site -- we are moving away from that," said Raskin. "It's a little bit scary."

But how to turn fear into a force that draws profit from a world where the emphasis is going to instead be on helping users map intentions to action? Raskin put the focus on the "verbs" of the web -- like mashups.

"In Web 3.0 nouns will get very small, and we'll need a lot of 'verbs' to do something with them," he said. "Its a huge shift in thinking, that as the 'nouns' get smaller, our interconnectedness, or verbs, has to go up."

The business model, he says, is going to come in facilitating that interconnectedness, in delivering the services that turn content into nouns, nouns into verbs, and then map that all back to content again.

Here's Edmund Wong, writing in the blog at iCrossing, a digital marketing agency:

Despite how useful Google is, we still have to do a lot of search queries to find what we are looking for, usually employing lots of tabbed browsers to compare lots of information sources, and then copy and paste that info into one place.

Wolfram Alpha, which just launched, is a major step forward towards Web 3.0. It seeks to anticipate what type of information or analysis you seek. It's not just about tagging content so you can find it. People compare it to Google, but it's not really a search engine, but a computational engine.

Tom Tague, opening keynoter (again reported by Jenny Zaino):

"The hard message [to the publishing industry] is there will be winners and losers," Tague, Calais Initiative Lead at Thomson Reuters, told the audience. Spending is not moving from print to online media anymore: "There's only one pie. It's a zero sum game, and the pie is getting smaller."

Calais' mission, Tague says, is to enable the winners in the sector. If you want to be among them, you had better move fast to:

Automate/semi-automate workflow

Improve audience development

Enhance content

My takeaway from the event is that economic adversity is accelerating the demand for new ways to monetize content. And while the slow rollout of semantic technology over the past 10 years has raised unflattering comparisons to artificial intelligence (which failed to live up to expectations), there seems to be a much sharper focus on the business case for Web 3.0 now than there was last June, when I attended the Linked Data conference in New York. That event was a geekfest compared to this show, which focused far less on ontologies and more on improving ROI.

Based on what I heard in my two days at the Web 3.0 show, our Internet experience five years from now will be markedly different than the current one. I'm looking forward to it.