First day of the Web 3.0 Conference here in New York City where the name of the game is to be the biggest possible fish in the smallest possible pond, fast.
What is Web 3.0 ? About 100 attendees are gathered here to try to hammer out a convenient definition. Web 3.0 draws inspiration from the loosely defined beginnings of Web 2.0: 2.0 is Ajax, UGC, community and syndication, with APIs, mashups, angel funding, and Hawaiian-sounding domain names. So Web 3.0 ups the ante and fully embraces a fully effervescent sense of creative confusion: it is a machine-linked web of meta-tagged content arising from specified or behavioural semantic discovery, aggregated along the lines of your interests and/or social graph structure, but with heavy iron serving middleware functions, RDF, SPARQL, and few, if any, customer-facing interfaces, which you will actively use daily, because it will replace, yet support, extend, embrace, and completely annihilate the ordered chaos that is Web 2.0. That, and it will save you money. Excited ? You should be. It will change the world. Any day now. Got it ? The gift shop of the New Yorker Hotel is, perhaps not coincidentally, running out of Tylenol.
Let’s put the random Lego blocks apart though and take a look at what we can build with them.
Problem: Humans, whether they be your consumers or employees, have a fairly limited attention span borne out of a mind that is still by and large better adapted at understanding the Serengeti than it is at dealing with rivers upon rivers of disjoint information. As consumers, people tend to do the day-long web gerbil run: Facebook, blogs, e-mail, Twitter, planners, and back to the start again for one more spin of the wheel. They try to synthesize it all but can’t, so they run around looking hard for an elusive synthesis. As employees, they also have a lot of difficulty making sense of the torrential flows of information cascading through their senses, and face tighter deadlines and concentration-busting pink slips.
Solution #1: let the machines augment what they can do and know. Invent a new query language (SPARQL), to query random databases of unstructured information (which can be RDF, records of user behaviours, interests, and relations with other users), discover the links, synthesize it all, and feed it back the human. In other words, let the machine find the dots, link the dots, and understand the dots, and give you back the general outlines and dynamic trends of the whole picture. Who buys this stuff ? Right now: traditional media, health care providers, and intelligence agencies. If your business is to build, analyze, or enrich links, go see them now.
Solution #2: let the people remain confused, but use machine synthesis to analyze the memetic dispersal of ideas along the influence lines of social graphs, so you can sell them more goodies (including migraine medication). Who buys this ? Right now, advertising networks. If your job is to discover how information flows in a way that augments returns on advertising investments, run, don’t walk, to their doors now.
Solution #3: build microsites and streams that let you distill a whole domain of knowledge for users, web readers, managers and employees. Who’s very interested ? As of a few days ago, Google. Take tomorrow’s plane to Silicon Valley.
Why the rush ?
If there is something that many attendees seem to agree on, is that Web 3.0 is a giant zero-sum game. To win it, you must capture sectorial knowledge in such a way that nobody else can draw better analysis from it than you, possibly obviating the visibility of the sites that are the very sources of your data. When you do, the barrier to entry becomes vertiginously high: with every day that passes, your data gets refined and augmented at an accelerating pace; with every day that passes, wannabes lose ground to your accelerating momentum. Soon enough, you’ll be the biggest fish in the smallest pond, leaving no space for anyone else to grow.
You may agree or disagree on this. Not that I’ll be around to persistently debate either side of the issue tonight. You see, I have this gigantic headache, and there are quite a few more days of deep confusion ahead for us all.
