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Web 3.0: Tag, You're It!

by Mike Ma

Web 3.0. Yeah, I said it.

As the media darling, Web 2.0, starts to wear out its welcome, I'd like to direct your attention to Web 3.0 -- please try not to roll your eyes. It's probably not on your radar yet, but it should be -- because you should be doing as much clean, consistent tagging as possible today to make way for tomorrow.

Allow me to explain. Web 3.0 has been called the "Semantic Web," where basically different machines and databases will talk to each other to accomplish a task. For instance, imagine booking a vacation for your family during school vacation under different Web environments:

• Web 1.0 -- You have five (dozen) windows open to find the best price and availability. You toggle between windows.


• Web 2.0 -- You check kayak.com and see all airlines to find the best price and availability. It's easy to use due to kayak's AJAX-enabled search engine that lets you visualize and manipulate all that data in an easy format.


• Web 3.0 -- An application checks your children's school calendars, your price watch list on American Airlines, and your family budget in Quicken, and presents to you a set of vacation destination options within your budget.

Scary, right? Kind of like HAL 9000, or "Computer" in Star Trek.

Well, it's real and it's coming. IBM and Google are already making substantial investments in the arena (I hear these companies generally have a pretty good track record of execution). You can see a Google-funded project called Opine at the University of Washington. It's not good, but it's a start.

While it is unclear what applications are going to be built, -- and I don't recommend doing anything in the next 6 months -- I do know that all these things are going to run on data. Structured data makes these tasks easier.

As you look toward budgets for 2008, I can't recommend strongly enough that you should put enhanced tagging into your plan somewhere. If not this year, then please, next year.

Web 3.0 is coming. Really, it is. Stay tuned. This might be a chance to finally be ahead of the curve.