SocialMedia404

No, not in *that* way.

The term “Web 3.0″ was coined by the inventor the of the web, Tim Berners Lee.  It is ubiquitously referred to as the ’semantic’ web.  I prefer to think of it, as the Personal Web.

The concept of 3.0 is essentially that data on the internet will be stored in such a way that we can find it using more natural language, instead of grappling with boolean expressions and quoted combinations of terms, which rely upon indexed words,  user-supplied tags, and general popularity.  In other words, we’ll be able to ask questions, like humans, instead of trying to guess what a machine algorithm has pre-determined.

So, if I’m looking for a “winter beater” (a common term used here for a car used solely during harsh winter months), the internet will know that an obscure article on durable, inexpensive vehicles that seem to perform well in the cold could be what I’m looking for as a “winter beater”.  Despite the fact that specific term never shows up in its content or tags.

It’s been tried before (Just Ask Jeeves or Ask Me), but these were essentially machines underneath.

This has caused the industry giants to do some thinking, as you expect.  While Google relies upon a machine-oriented method, Microsoft has bet the farm on natural language, and launched a tool called Bing.

But this is not yet-another-search-engine article.

It gets interesting, when you recall Microsoft purchased a stake in FaceBook.  Facebook’s meglo-plan is to have everyone on the internet signed up with an account.  Everyone.  Lofty, for sure, but what does that mean for MS’s Bing?  Well, there is a Great Positioning War underway as FaceBook and Google are locking horns about who owns you, the internet user, and according to Wired, Google is worried.  Amazing what goes on behind closed mahogany doors, eh?

But back to Web 3.0.  Think about what 2.0 is doing now.  It is allowing us to formulate an opinion based upon content from the others in our network, or, people like us.  Apply that to FaceBook and Bing, and you now have a more natural search engine that presents trusted results.  Google understands this too, which is why they want you and your friends in their cloud of applications.

Most people will trust their network’s opinion over a machine, any day.  It’s the beginning of making the web more personal.  The next step, will be customization of the sources.

Every person will be able to apply a personal weight to the results, based upon the concept of distance.  Yes, that could mean geography, but it could also mean user-specified lists of sources, such as friends, family, experts, colleagues, newswires, specific databases, you name it.

It will mean everyone has the ability to create a customized pool of resources and sources, across all the vast stores of internet content, to find the answers they trust, before being presented with the machine’s interpretation of what it thinks they want.

The latest development towards 3.0 will give you a glimpse of how this data will be organized:  see this article on Microsoft’s Pivot browser.  It doesn’t do what I’ve talked about here, but mark my words, the next generation of tools will.

Web 3.0, the Personal Web, is coming.  And it will have enormous impact on content producers, who want to remain both authoritative, and trusted.  They are not the same thing.