the Webemoth

on January 15, 2007

Before Oreilly dropped the term ‘Web 2.0’ there was no Web 1.0. At this point, people are discussing the definition of Web 3.0 – while we don’t even have a definition of Web 2.0.

In his article on KurzweilAI, Nova Spivack outlines the characteristics of all three versions. All of them are valid observations I think. However, Web3.0 observations like mobile internet access, broadband adoption, SaaS, open communications etc. can also be done in the Web2.0 and Web1.0 eras.

I don’t think we’re entering the ‘third generation’ because there can be no clear definition of ‘the new version’. I think the term Web2.0 was just a joke (and intended so by Oreilly), funny, ha ha, over. Let’s just drop the dot and the whole versioning system altogether. The evolution of the Web is real however, and it’s dead serious.

The post 2006 Web – I like to call it ‘the Webemoth’ – is growing and shaping itself in numerous trends. In the Herald Tribune, John Markoff observes the following ‘next steps’:

  • natural language understanding
  • machine learning
  • the semantic web
  • data mining

I think these trends – when added to our current trends – will indeed move us towards a better web.

Natural Language Parsing is something which is popular among some of the latest ‘top secret’ start-ups like powerset.com. I also think it’s something very interesting and I bet Google has been working on it for quite some time. NLP is already being done in high-end systems like NSA’s echelon to keep track of our emails here in Europe. Just like powerful encryption, it’s the next thing to come in hands of ordinary cattle like us.

Machine Learning is something being done all over the world – like for example at your credit card company – and will advance the web enormously. Even though, some of the top ranking websites are already harvesting the power of pattern recognition for music and book recommendations (pandora.com, amazon.com). In my country there are a lot of artificial intelligence studies available and I know a lot of people attending them.

The Semantic Web is something we are missing now. Many websites are already making advances to this semantic web below the radar. Every day there are numerous new so called mash-ups that stitch together data from various sources. In order to do something useful with this data they need to know the semantics. Sites providing API interfaces like Wikipedia and Amazon.com offer only limited semantics. Sometimes they are missing and then developers switch to data mining techniques like scraping (parsing the user interfaces to ‘pick out’ the data).

I must say I’m a bit skeptical about the move towards the Semantic Web in the short run. Semantic – semantikos, giving signs – refers to the meaning of information. Current .com behemoths like youtube.com profit from the user contributed information. More specifically, they profit from displaying this information but not from the information itself (at least, not yet). Sometimes I watch some TV at youtube like sites and I guess I’m a very bad customer: I block the advertisements (so I guess they should move the adds to the stream itself). This is my skepticism:

  • Are there business models that can profit from just providing semantics?
  • If there are, will they affect the semantics/content itself?
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