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Russell Mickler, Principal Consultant, has over 17 years of professional experience leading and managing IT organizations.
The Web Announces 3.0 Beta
Written on November 21, 2006
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This week it was announced that Web 3.0 is in beta!
Now this may come as a surprise to many of you who figured there was still a lot of life left in Web 2.0, and for those who figured Web 1.0 never really got off the ground in the first place and for those who think Web 2.0 is related to Internet II or IPv6, I’m afraid you’re entirely off base because they really have nothing to do with Web 2.0 and absolutely zilch to do with Web 3.0. Still, Web 3.0 holds a lot of promise but before we get to that, let’s bring the rest of the class up to speed.
Web 1.0 was the dot-com era up to the point of the bubble bursting like a bad zit. Web 1.0 was all about over-selling and over-hyping capabilities and products. Web 1.0 was strictly “pushed” content. You logged into a website and you just received what was there; it was simply TV on steroids.
I think a lot of people take credit for what came after Web 1.0 so it’s hard to definitively say when and who coined the term “Web 2.0″. I can say that it’s been around since 2004 and it generally refers to the idea that the web is pliable medium for the end user that can be participative and engaging; that the end user/consumer helps create content as much as they receive it. Wikipedia, great example – public-edited and published content. Blogging, and by extension, Technorati, viral marketing, Flickr, BitTorrent and Morpheus, self-publishing like esyndicates.com and Cafepress.com. If you can imagine participating in the web as a two-way “push/pull” medium, you can imagine watching the web through 2.0 glasses.
Since January 2006, many have argued that the Web 2.0 is in a general stage of transition. We’re now seeing the emergence of the Internet as a vast utility in the public domain, full of software applications with open API’s (Application Programming Interfaces) that allow software developers to tap into the vast services and applications constructed on the Internet. In business terms, it’s like the Internet is an immeasurably large factory. All you need do to take advanatage of slack capacity within the factory is to introduce your data to be processed. The factory bangs and whirls, eventually spitting out a finished good where all cost of production was provided for free in the electronic public commons. If you can leverage this then you’ve got a _costless_ factor of production. It’s like somebody manufactured your widget for free and handed it to you right off the production line!
Web 3.0, the semantic web, is boundaryless computing where your computer is just an extension of all other computers connected to the public commons. Programs running on other computers are available as a program from your computer through common programming interfaces. A great example of this today is AJAX and Google Maps. AJAX is a programming language and interface so that you can pass questions (queries) to Google’s Mapping service for free. Google’s service then responds with mapping information, handing it over for free to your application. Google is the big machine out there for the public good. Did I mention this was all for free? Your application is but a tiny stub of that machine. And it was costless to produce the map.
In Web 3.0, we’re not just creating content, we’re leveraging free automation throughout the web to produce outputs. Whether or not we’re using spreadsheet applications on the Internet, video presentation tools, or, we’re writing local apps to use service oriented architecture (SOA) to retrieve data programmatically from the Internet, our computer becomes just a simple node to a much larger computer system/program offered for free in the public commons. I guess it goes back to Sun’s old idea: the network IS the computer, stupid.
So, rejoice! Web 3.0 beta is upon us! Myself, I’m ready to start passing the web my student’s papers to grade. Login to a website, upload a Word document – BANG! – receive a score on mechanics, style, presentation, citation, and thesis back from the Net. Now that’s Web 3.0 self-service on steroids!
R
Russell Mickler works a technology consultant in Battle Ground, WA, USA. With over thirteen years of experience, Mickler holds a CISSP, MCSE, a Masters Degree in Information Technology, and is pursuing his Doctorate at Walden University. His website can be found at www.micklerandassociates.com; he can be contacted at mickler@micklerandassociates.com.