A recent article in the New York Times calling out the coming of Web 3.0 caused me to think about some larger trends.

 Over the weekend the NY Times ran an article about “Web 3.0”.  It was worth reading, and provided some good thoughts on where the Internet, particularly as an information appliance, was going.  The short synopsis is that various start ups and engineers are working to provide mechanisms for us to get contextual information from the Web – moving away from using the Web through key word searches (“pizza Mclean delivery”) to semantic searches (“I want a deep dish pizza that is as good as the one I had in Chicago last month, and I want it delivered to my house in McLean in 30 minutes”.).  In other words, they are trying to make the Web and its data more useful.

Without question the ability for people to get data organized the way that they think will be an accelerator for adoption of information technology and continue to more tightly integrate people and data into the Web.  There are real implications here for privacy, technology dependency, social fragmentation, educational disparity and opportunity and the further flattening of the world, among other weighty issues.  Over time, I am sure that we’ll address many of those issues together. But, for today, I want to limit myself to a more mundane matter – the article’s gist that the so-called “semantic web” was the next stage in the development of the Internet and the Web – that it will be the basis of “Web 3.0.”

Certainly, there is a growing sense among the technocrati that “Web 2.0” is over and done.  I don’t necessarily ascribe to that view – what we are seeing now rather is that the innovations that have been labeled as “Web 2.0” are becoming adopted by the mainstream.  Inevitably this will result in missteps and me-too business plans, and there will be a shake out and some investors will loose money and founders will fail.  However, that does not mean that the innovations of  Web 2.0 will not become part of the fabric of the Web and how data is presented and consumed.  It does, however, leave the question as to where the next wave of accelerating innovation will come from.