April 25th, 2009

Web 3.0 – Just Another Buzzword?

I’m taking a class at Sloan called “Evolution to Web 3.0 and the Emergence of Management 3.0″ about what exactly “Web 3.0″ will look like. We’re tracing back historically through the evolution of web technologies and we’ll use that knowledge to sketch out what we believe web 3.0 will look like. Perhaps more importantly, we’re also exploring how changes in the web will affect the future of mangement.

The professor has not directly equated “Web 3.0″ to the “Semantic Web” (which many people do) and since our class started in January, the Web 3.0 entry on wikipedia has been deleted. Most credit Tim Berners-Lee with defining the “semantic web” in a 2001 issue of Scientific American – he’s coming to speak to our class on Monday (4/27), and I’m very excited to hear his take on how his vision has evolved over the past 8 years.

I don’t think “web 3.0″ is just some buzzword – there will be very tangible changes in search in the next few years that adopt more semantic, contextual principles. In an interview with Charlie Rose in March, Google’s Marissa Mayer pointed out that the future of search will address the difference between an “answer” and a “result” (first 2 mins of the video).

That idea – the shift from “results” to “answers” – will be central to web 3.0, should it ever move away from buzzword-only status.