Yesterday, John Markoff wrote about the semantic web, rebranding it as Web 3.0. The nut of the story was that even amidst the hype of web 2.0, there is a new web emerging. As John says:
The classic example of the Web 2.0 era is the “mash-up” — for example, connecting a rental-housing Web site with Google Maps to create a new, more useful service that automatically shows the location of each rental listing.
In contrast, the Holy Grail for developers of the semantic Web 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.”
The story is then fleshed out with hints about what this new semantic web could provide. But here is the fun part -- the story generated more than a fair amount of interest in the blogosphere, with Dave Winer, Nick Carr, Ross Mayfield, Robert Scoble, Peter O'kelly and Nick Bradbury all weighing in and fueling the buzz.
Two points:
1. Like it or not, the NYT, for all the beatings it takes in the blogs and elsewhere about how relevant it is, whether it will be in existence in a year, broken business model, etc. and so on, is the big daddy of driving buzz. Two days ago, nobody was really talking or thinking about this topic, and now they are. This is influence, and those of us who think about influence would do well to remember what it looks like.
2. The Web 3.0 meme spun out in the story is even less likely to be impactful than the Web 2.0 meme playing at a theater near you. If Web 2.0 is the froth of the bubble, and I think it is, then what does that make Web 3.0? I can't come up with a good analogy. ;)