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Last fall I had the privilege of delivering the keynote address to kickoff an agency event comprised of top clients, agency staff, partners and industry pundits. In an effort to give everyone a little glimpse of what’s to come, I chose to talk about the Web 3.0 environment, and what that might look like.
Web 3.0, or the Semantic Web, would be organized by ontologies, and would be characterized by ubiquitous connectivity, networking computing, open technologies, open identity and the intelligent web. This last characteristic, the intelligent web, would be powered by “smart agents” doing work behind the scenes on our behalf.
This idea of “smart agents” generated many questions. The concept, while complex, can be explained simply by using a SERP example. Today, if an apple farmer and a computer technician each type the word “apple” into Google, both will see the same results. In the Web 3.0 environment, the apple farmer gets a SERP related to fruit, while the technician gets a SERP related to, well you get the idea.
What powers this difference? What enables “smart agents”? One answer lies in social media. Last week a member of the Sitewire team, Jay Feitlinger, wrote a blog post about the recent Facebook Like Button. While the theme of the post concentrated on ad relevance, the underlying assumption was that the aggregation of personal profile data, including likes, combined with the likes and profile data of your network (your “social graph”) builds a unique and personal set of criteria that powers relevant ad delivery. Soon, this criteria will power “smart agent” driven search results…perhaps the move from algorithms to “like-orithms.”
It has been said that each web generation evolves over a decade. Arguably, we should expect to see the move from the Social Web to the Personal Web sometime in 2014. Surprise. It’s going to be here sooner than expected. And the mysterious “smart agents” that will power our personal web experiences are no longer so mysterious. They’re manifesting themselves as Like buttons on web pages today.
How do you see Web 3.0 manifesting itself? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
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Greg Chapman is a seasoned veteran with over 30 years of experience in direct response marketing and merchandising. As a former Divisional Vice President at Sears and VP of Merchandising at both Skymall and Value Vision (now Shop NBC), Greg is the ultimate frontman. He knows what clients want because he’s been in their shoes; he understands the fears they face in transitioning from traditional advertising to digital. His neo-corporate methodology focuses on building a strong, performance-based internal team to create a better performing external product.
has written 11 posts.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
It’s an exciting time, Greg, watching our computers and the Internet overall become self-aware and start thinking for us. Concerns of Skynet notwithstanding, my mind boggles that we’re truly on the verge of using technology to make every bit of human knowledge available to every human all the time.
I’m curious about “the Semantic Web would be organized by ontologies.” I haven’t used “ontology” much since college philosophy class, and I’ll admit I have a fuzzy understanding of it. But I can’t figure out what it might mean in this context. Can you elaborate?
Ed Tankersley´s last blog ..Tweaking for Dollars
Absolutely Ed, but to set up my answer let me walk you through the background logic because I used the term “ontology” conceptually rather than specifically based on the research I did several months ago for the keynote. It helps me to revisit it…
Web 1.0 was based on taxonomy – a kind of Dewey decimal system. The taxonomy system works when everyone agrees to play by the same rules of organization. The premise here is that the owner of the idea or content is the only perspective and there is little or no room for the democratization of ideas.
Web 2.0 made the way for user generated taxonomies, now called folksonomies, and this can be viewed as the rise of collaboration and web democracy in that the best ideas would rise to the top driven by popular choice. Another way of looking at it is that people drive the content and not just the owners or authors.
Web 3.0, or what is being called the Semantic Web, would leverage a kind of lattice work of taxonomies, folksonomies and personal data (created through data mining) to create Ontologies. So for the purpose of my explanation, I view “ontologies” as a catalog of the types of things that are assumed to exist in a domainor field of interest. They are not based on a fixed hierarchy of categories like a taxonomy, but on a framework of distinctions organized like a lattice-work, if you will, from which a hierarchy is automatically generated for a particular user.
So I do not profess to be an expert on ontologies. I read a lot about them but probably hosed up much of the technical stuff, however I believe in the end ontological organization of data will empower the delivery of unique user experiences rather than shared user experiences. Hence my apple farmer reference. And to tack on to your Facebook post and Jay’s blog, I think we are seeing the beginning of ontological framework being built by the data collected by the Like button. My opinion anyway…and watch out for those nasty Cyberdine System T-101′s. Greg