Raw

I'm a bit conflicted on this New York Times piece bty John Markoff (Business section!) which talks of AI, Web 3.0 and the Semantic Web. There's good stuff in it, but it conflates concrete material with a lot of speculation and treats the lot in the same fashion (to good journalistic effect, it has to be said). For starters I have to take issue with " referred to as Web 3.0" - who else is lumping these things together and applying that label? If we are going to use such labels (and why not) then for them to be useful they have to be kept within restraint. I'd characterise Web 2.0 as:

• improved interactivity in the human-machine sense (think Ajax)
• improved interactivity in the human-human senses (think collaboration, Wikis)
• increased use of metadata (think RSS, tagging)
• increased exposure and integration of first-class data (think people on maps)
  
  

We've only just begun to see what these can provide. Now there are options beyond the HTML form and email, the first two of these can blossom. Semantic Web technologies plus things like the Atom Protocol and Microformats have a whole to offer the latter two. But despite the fact we've had the key parts of these for a while now, all of these are in their infancy. I'd give Web 2.0 another few years before considering any increment. The right words are in the NYT article:

In its current state, the Web is often described as being in the Lego phase, with all of its different parts capable of connecting to one another.

Yep, Lego.

Oh sod it, I'll continue properly tomorrow if I have the energy, I'm ready for a glass of wine. Points to go : AI is at least as misleading a label as Web x.x; Nova Spivack's " World Wide Database" is something worth taking seriously; hardly anyone sees Cyc as offering anything game-changing; I wish I knew what Daniel Hillis was up to (I did have some comms with them a while ago - got the impression it was semweb-like, but not using RDF); the last paragraph should be part of the introductory exchange with any alien beings the human race encounters:

“With Flickr you can find images that a computer could never find,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, head of research at Yahoo. “Something that defied us for 50 years suddenly became trivial. It wouldn’t have become trivial without the Web.”