1) A deep sigh: 'Leave me alone, I've just finished my web 2.0 strategy.'
2) A blank stare: 'I've got no idea what you're on about.'
3) A smug grin: 'I've no idea what you're on about, but I'm going to pretend I do.'
Digital marketers are not the only ones struggling to make sense of the latest industry buzz word. For the past year or so, web 3.0 has been doing the rounds of most influential technology blogs, getting on the end of a well-aimed boot as it passes each one.
Tim O'Reilly, father of what he admits is the "pretty crappy" web 2.0 concept, has little time for the newer term and referred to Revolution's attempt to nail down its meaning as the definitive opinion in his blog last October.
"I'd say that for web 3.0 to be meaningful, we'll need to see a serious discontinuity from the previous generation of technology," wrote O'Reilly. "That might be another bust and resurgence or, more likely, it will be something qualitatively different."
Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, when asked by a delegate to define web 3.0 during his keynote at the last Seoul Digital Forum, conjured up an off-the-cuff but fairly representative definition.
"My prediction would be that web 3.0 will ultimately be seen as applications that are pieced together," he said. "There are a number of characteristics: the applications are relatively small, the data is in the cloud, the applications can run on any device, PC or mobile phone, the applications are very fast and very customisable."
But what does that actually mean? One particularly misleading thing about web 3.0 as a notion is that it has little to do with web 2.0. If 2.0 broadly represented the emergence of the web as a platform for connecting and empowering users, 3.0 is a rag-bag of things the web currently isn't, but could be soon: inherently intelligent, seamlessly interoperable, universally accessible and intuitive in all manner of new ways.
Web 3.0 fan club
Some web 3.0 evangelists, such as Nova Spivack, founder of Radar Networks and its Twine service, more or less deploy the phrase as a synonym for their interpretation of the so-called semantic web - a term originally designated by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, architect of the world-wide web, to describe a system of linked data that can be combined and navigated in any number of ways.
The ultimate vision of this new structure is, as Berners-Lee has been saying since late last century, of a world in which computers themselves are capable of analysing information and are able to assume many human functions, including trade, bureaucracy and everyday household jobs.
Like many of the web's founding thinkers, Berners-Lee doesn't often trouble himself with discussions of buzz words such as web 3.0, but Spivack is convinced the term has a valid use.
He identifies web 3.0 as communicating the third decade of the web, beginning in 2010. During this period, he suggests, the key task involves tagging data to give a clear sense of its meaning on the way to web 4.0, starting in 2020, when we can expect software to start doing intelligent things with our information.
"This next generation - web 3.0 - is actually based on enriching the meaning, enriching the structure," Spivack told Stockholm's GRID 08 conference in August. "The reason we want to do this is so that software can understand the web like humans can understand the web. Because the semantic web is not for humans, it is for machines. It is the web for machines."
Other philosophical figureheads of this general movement, include Barney Pell, chief executive of Microsoft-backed natural search specialist Powerset. As well as academic and Clock of the Long Now inventor Danny Hillis, who some years ago said, 'I would like to make a computer that will be proud of me.'
Web 3.0 has few friends, but among the many disavowals of the phrase, a tentative definition of something new is nonetheless beginning to emerge through the cracks.
Predictions for the web
The common threads appear to be the creation of a system that can somehow be understood by increasingly sophisticated software, allied to a fluid new user interface - all gathered together under a name that is almost guaranteed not to be web 3.0. These new phenomena might sound suspiciously like science fiction to some, but they are endorsed by people who have previously been right.
"There's definitely something new brewing," is O'Reilly's view. "And it's increasingly likely that it will be far broader and more pervasive than the web, as mobile technology, sensors, speech recognition and many other new technologies make computing far more ambient than it is at present."
Another web personality, Stowe Boyd, a 'meme leader' and 'media subversive', aired his own theory that something is indeed afoot. "Imagine a web without browsers," he said. "Imagine breaking completely away from the document metaphor, or a true blurring of application and information. That's what web 3.0 will be."
And in tentative ways, some of these things are beginning to edge towards coming true. They point to the fact that, while web 3.0 might be an ill-advised media construct, among the concepts it gathers are some of our most intriguing technological challenges.
Doing the rounds on a trip to the UK last month, for instance, Google vice-president and chief internet evangelist Vint Cerf, often styled as the father of the internet, put an accessible spin on the notion of artificial intelligence that underpins the semantic web.
"I don't believe that we will see arising out of the current internet a conscious artificial intelligence, but we will probably see the system become easier to interact with; for example, voice interaction is becoming increasingly easy to accomplish," said Cerf.
"I'm almost certain you'll see products emerging that will allow you to orally interact with the network or to say something, ask for something, or demand something, or command something and have something happen. The semantic web idea will make the internet seem more intelligent, because we are extracting knowledge that other people put into it in a way that looks intelligent."
Evolution
One reason web 3.0 has achieved as much traction as it has is that it basically describes the likely outcomes of the constant evolution of the internet. The web's metabolism may or may not be significantly arrested by the current economic troubles, but technology will inevitably move forward, either at a run or a crawl, and many of the predictions of the web 3.0 brigade will no doubt be realised.
"While most brands and agencies are still coming to terms with web 2.0, I think the internet is going through another great evolution in the background," says Norm Johnston, Mindshare's global digital head.
Numerous companies are already working to evolve the first stages of the semantic web in a limited sense. Powerset is cutting its teeth on a search system for Wikipedia information, while another semantic search specialist, Inform Technologies, has recently announced deals with the websites of a string of US media outlets.
For marketers, the prospect of a web that is more navigable, more vivid and intuitive ought to be at least as exciting as it is for anyone else.
Those looking to provide immersive brand experience experiences have become used to setting their sights lower for the web than for TV. But as interfaces emerge that don't simply match TV but surpass it, marketers can really let their imagination take flight.
3D visionaries
One characteristic that occasionally surfaces in the web 3.0 file is the transformation of the internet into a 3D space. In this vein, Cooliris, a Menlo Park, California-based start-up, has recently been attempting to strike a blow against the online hegemony of text, devising a plug-in to frame online images and video in a 3D wall.
"The model is like flipping through a magazine or a newspaper, where you're not specifically looking for something," says Soujanya Bhumkar, Cooliris founder and chief executive.
He patiently resists the web 3.0 label and instead makes a general point about the increasing importance of graphics in an easily-digestible format. "Videos and rich media will become more of a visual table of contents, which people will then use to dive into the relevant information."
A roughly comparable technology, SpaceTime is yet another development from the US. It is a browser application that displays web, video and image search results - drawn from Google, YouTube, Amazon, eBay and other sources - as stacks of individual 3D web pages, again demonstrating how video is beginning to seep into the user interface.
Any marketer who has worked with search to refine copy and maximise the effectiveness of a sponsored link, will see the value of a browser that displays search listings as a 3D sequence of the web pages they lead to. Brands that depend on making an impact will find that, as the web moves beyond pure text and two-dimensional images, the tools with which they can create that impact will be vastly increased.
Already, there are those who are sounding out a future for the web as a multi-sensory experience. "Some outstanding work is being done in the US by companies such as Schematic that is redefining the way we'll interact with the internet," says Johnston. "They're running live trials with several brands that use sensors to enable people to navigate through online content using hand and facial motions."
Whether or not the web can yet be classed as intelligent or executable, it is certainly getting smarter, Johnston adds. "Applications such as Hyperwords enable Firefox users to select any word on any web page and take some logical action with it, thus making the whole internet connected with one click," he says.
Perhaps the least controversial of all the web's imperatives is the need to start thinking beyond the PC-based internet experience. Forward-thinking brands have come to appreciate that more of us will consume digital content via mobiles as the interface continues to improve, and as cheap and fast 3G broadband is adopted and open systems are launched.
Omnipresent
"The internet will be everywhere," says Daljit Singh, founder and creative director of Digit. "You won't necessarily be confined to a screen, room or place - it will simply be anywhere you sit."
A condition of this, touched on by Google's Schmidt, is the ubiquity of the cloud - the current favoured metaphor for the processing power of the internet. In many respects it is the promise of simplicity, heightened user experiences and seamless back-end architecture that makes the bluster and jargon worthwhile.
As tiresome as the prospect of web 3.0 is for most of the wired world, the reassuring and inevitable fact is that the web will only evolve according to consumer taste and commitment on behalf of brands to evolve content and create new experiences.
"Web 3.0 as a phrase is a bit insulting, really, because all it is actually saying is that the internet is growing up," says Singh. "That is what the internet does - it moves forward. Whatever people want to call it, the important thing is that brands need to act responsibly to deliver the next phase of the internet."
The conclusion is web 3.0 does have meaning for brands, but brands have to decipher exactly what that meaning is.
THE 3.0 START-UPS COOLIRIS
Web 3.0 is undoubtedly the most annoying of the current internet buzz words, but is it just nonsensical jargon or does it have meaning for marketers? Adam Woods finds out.
Cooliris, formerly known as PicLens, is a start-up whose eponymous application is a simple but thoroughly engaging way of accessing the huge volumes of images and video piling up on the web. The Cooliris software eschews web pages and conventional listings for a pretty dazzling 3D wall, that is populated with content from Flickr, YouTube, Google, PhotoBucket and others. Either choose a portal and pick a term, or pan across Cooliris's categories of content, calling up anything interesting. One for the search enthusiasts who can't think of anything to search for.
www.cooliris.com
PEER 39
Peer39 is the company behind SemanticMatch, a technology it claims is the world's most advanced semantic advertising platform. Peer39's algorithms aim to decipher the meaning and sentiment of a user's enquiries, but it does so by identifying the meaning of particular pages, rather than keywords. Advertisers specify the point in the 'marketing sales funnel' at which they want to put ads in front of consumers, and the system targets those ads to particular pages, with no cookies or keywords. Advisers include Google AdSense developer Eytan Elbaz.
www.peer39.com
THE 3.0 START-UPS POWERSET
For web 3.0 to be meaningful, we'll need to see a serious discontinuity from the previous technology.
Tim O'Reilly, founder and chief executive, O'Reilly Media
Powerset is as clever as Google is and as useful as search has come to be. If the web could 'understand' your question the way a person could, would it lead more of us to the right information, more rapidly and more often? San Francisco-based Powerset believes so and it is among those attempting to apply its natural language processing technology to the web. Wikipedia already benefits and Microsoft clearly approves - it bought the firm in August. Among the investors are PayPal founder and Facebook backer Peter Thiel and LinkedIn founder and chief executive Reid Hoffman.
www.powerset.com
WEB DEVELOPMENT
Web 1.0 The web's original party trick was as a framework for pages and sites, and a way to link them. Pages were static, framesets were numerous and humble users couldn't influence content. The web was born in 1991, when Tim Berners-Lee and his CERN (European Laboratory for Particle Physics) colleagues, proposed a protocol for distributing information. Its first incarnation was based on hypertext.
Web 2.0 Web 2.0 was originally an O'Reilly Media conference intended to inject excitement into the web after the dotcom bust. The phrase was adapted by Tim O'Reilly to describe developments with shared characteristics. Web 2.0 applications connect vast numbers of internet users and draw power from their input. Examples include Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
Web 3.0 Coined by John Markoff of The New York Times for the third generation of internet-based services that comprise 'the intelligent web'. The intelligent web tries to understand information the same way humans do. Web 3.0 will connect all aspects of our digital lives. When you're typing an email it will, for example, know what the subject of the email is and be able to suggest any saved websites, books, documents, photos and videos that may be relevant.
QIK
Qik is a mobile download that allows your phone's built-in camera to stream video directly to the internet in real time, via any 3G/GPRS/Wi-Fi connection. Once the stream is complete, it can be embedded on any website profile page or blog with a YouTube-style code. The technology adds a new dimension to existing modes of mobile interaction, such as that offered by the increasingly popular Twitter, which has built its empire on short messaging. In June, Qik announced that it would be present on Apple's iPhone, which is becoming popular with affluent young consumers.
www.qik.com
THE 3.0 START-UPS TWINE
Radar Networks has been unapologetic in its use of the web 3.0 brand and its first product is Twine, a means of collecting and sharing all kinds of online content. As well as addressing the data-collection theme of web 3.0, Twine is apparently powered by 'semantic understanding', which means it learns more and more about you as you fill it up and link to other content. Unlike some web 3.0 concepts, Twine also aims to build on the social networking principles of web 2.0, developing communities of interest within the network.
www.twine.com
GNIP
Gnip (pronounced guh-nip) owes its existence to web 2.0 services such as Digg, Delicious and Twitter. Set up by MyBlogLog co-founder Eric Marcoullier, Gnip's tag line is, in tune with Silicon Valley slang, 'Making data portability suck less'.Basically, Gnip gathers all of the information people seek from providers such as Digg and Twitter, and delivers it where they want it. This means users don't have to visit individual social media sites to get this information. Consumers can use the service for free, but are charged when they exceed a threshold of data feeds. Gnip is ping spelt backwards.
www.gnipcentral.com
WEB 3.0 JARGON
- Talk of the intelligent web ought to set alarm bells ringing, since it is essentially a sci-fi way of describing a laborious behind-the-scenes effort to improve the quality and interoperability of data, software and hardware in order to give the appearance of intelligence. People like to use it though, because it conjures up Frankenstein-style visions of man giving life to machine, probably at midnight and powered by lightning.
- The semantic web is a less flashy, rather more forgivable term for the same general process. Many of those who use both phrases cluster around Silicon Valley, which sometimes refers to itself as 'the web's edge'. Again, it's silly, but they can have it if they want.
- The cloud is perhaps web 3.0's nicest piece of jargon - a way of simplifying the technical infrastructure of the internet and redefining it as a benevolent thing, high above our heads, which feeds us services and holds onto all the data we might ever need. The cloud metaphor is obviously an incomplete one, as it is hard to send anything, even water, up into a real cloud. And if you did, you'd never find it again.