Posts Tagged ‘community’

Online Marketing • Social Media

Web 3.0?

posted by Jason Fleck @ December 29th, 2008

Read Write Web (RWW) posted earlier today that ZigTag (a somewhat intelligent social bookmarking service) is now live to the public. ZigTag knows the meanings behind your tags. In other words, if you tag something NY it knows it’s the same as New York, New_York, or New+York.

For those of you just catching up, a tag is a word or group of words that allows you to quickly identify content. Tags are now a part of Web 2.0 which allows users to quickly siphon through a large amount of information to find exactly what he or she is looking for.

Towards the end of their article, RWW posed the question:

Is this really Web 3.0?

I don’t think so. Web 3.0 is supposed to be all about the intelligent web. Dictionary.com defines intelligence as:

A capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, and similar forms of mental activity; aptitude in grasping truths, relationships, facts, meanings, etc.

RWW suggested that Web 3.0 could quite possibly be a system that knows what we would tag something and would actually tag it for us. As soon people start talking about computers thinking on their own, it makes me think of “The Terminator” and artificial intelligence. We’re definitely not there yet. But it gets me thinking - why does there need to be such a drastic change from Web 2.0 to 3.0? Will the next shift be a quantum leap or a glacial shift? Will it be Terminator, or self identifying tags?

Web 2.0, summed up, was all about social media. While some of the greatest minds online are saying Web 2.0 has already come and gone, the larger question is: are we looking at Web 3.0 or are we in some later release of Web 2.0 - say Web 2.200.1?

Whatever the case may be, in the near future we’ll see social media continue to be integrated within all aspects of our online lives in everything from searching to buying. And, whenever it does come, social media will still be the foundation of Web 3.0 - which is why you should be building your online community (ie: like Google) now if you haven’t already.

Related tags: community • Social Media • Web 3.0 • zigtag