Web 3.0? Will AOL put that on a CD?
While most of the world is still mired in the technological dark ages of “phone calls” and “walking to the next office to ask a question,” computer scientists (see picture) are ready to push the latest upgrade to the Series of Tubes, Web 3.0.
The prior version, Web 2.0, was created in Silicon Valley in 2004, when the number of lonely men from the first Internet bubble and the number of jobless Comp Sci graduates reached a “tipping point,” resulting in the creation of web-based software that made stalking that girl from high school as easy as knowing her first name, a friend’s first name, and their likely bra sizes. (Hence Myspace.)
Web 3.0 will take stalking searching to a whole new level:
In contrast, the Holy Grail for developers of the semantic Web [Web 3.0] is to build a system that can give a reasonable and complete response to a simple question like: “I’m looking for a warm place to vacation and I have a budget of $3,000. Oh, and I have an 11-year-old child.”
Oh yeah, and I have a child. Pity that. And then there’s this gem:
Separately, I.B.M. researchers say they are now routinely using a digital snapshot of the six billion documents that make up the non-pornographic World Wide Web to do survey research and answer questions for corporate customers on diverse topics, such as market research and corporate branding.
Hundreds of I.B.M. programmers just jumped ship to join Google’s Webporn survey research group.
[New York Times: "Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense"]
