Web 3.0: Curing the Information Avalanche
I’m not complaining, but sometimes I feel like Google Reader is running my life.
Google Reader is a taskmaster. Sure, she aggregates loads of great information for me, but she can be a little demanding. If I’m away from her for a few hours, I return to find a list of new blog posts and news items. Most days I’m tied up until the evening, and when I pop in to say hello she in turn greets me with 200+ new items to peruse. And she never stops.
But here’s the thing: of those 200 items, how many am I actually reading? 25%? 30%? I love Engadget, but I can count on one hand the number of posts I’ve read about Alienware’s line of gamer laptops (yep, still zero). Google Reader and her army of blogs and RSS subscriptions keep me up to date with web trends, interactive strategies, and innovative ways for companies to engage in conversation with their customers and prospects, but how much more effective could I be if Google Reader did all the sorting and hunting work for me?
Enter one of the leading concepts of how Web 3.0 will look – the “Semantic Web.”
See, Web 2.0 was about putting control of content in the hands of users. As a result, we’ve got all this great content from more sources than ever before, and we’ve got applications that let us easily aggregate all of it. But there’s a downside: the information avalanche that threatens to bury me every night I neglect dear Google Reader.
The semantic web is the leading theory idea behind Web 3.0. According to expert Tim Berners Lee, Web 3.0 is a web that essentially uses a new language to facilitate intelligent interaction between humans and the web. It’s an internet that understands us, and understands what we need based on our actions.
For example, we recently read this Wired article about Twine.com, a semantic web application that peruses the bookmarks and documents you feed it, figures out exactly what it is you’re interested in, and then finds new relevant stuff to look at.
So Twine becomes my Google Reader solution. It sees what kind of information I’m interested in (and by action, not having me sit down and plug in keywords or tags), and in turn it extracts information faster and better than I can. And there’s no social network needed. I’m not hunting down Digg or Twitter friends and monitoring the barrage of links and bookmarks they spit out, I’m just letting Twine do all the work and send the good stuff right to my e-mail box.
So what’s next? Not a web with less information, just a more organized version of the web we’ve got now – and one that organizes itself based on how we use it.
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