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Read/WriteWeb dares to mention Web 3.0, or the Semantic Web. Talk about deja vu. If you’re new to the term, this is a must-read article. Also check out Freebase and Yahoo! Pipes. Otherwise it’s a nice overview of web API’s, services, screen scraping and other components and building blocks, of the next phase of the net.
I remember checking out the RDF Interest Group in 2001, looking at the basic Perl code they had released and thought to myself “better to let this bake for a while before serving.”
In the meantime, I started ProfileDoctor, which was the context of this discussion, a website to visitors from Google and a web service to members of our partner sites. The dual nature of the concept was exciting, perhaps it’s time again to revisit it.
Here’s a pointer to Esther Dyson writing about
Emergent Structure vs. Intelligent Design. She quotes David Waltz at Thinking Machines:
Words are not in themselves carriers of meaning, but merely pointers to shared understandings.
In other words, the meaning is in people’s heads. Brilliant. I will add one of my favorite comments in a similar vein. Bruce Sterling on “engines of meaning”:
Ultimately no human brain, no planet full of human brains, can possibly catalog the dark, expanding ocean of data we spew. In a future of information auto-organized by folksonomy, we may not even have words for the kinds of sorting that will be going on; like mathematical proofs with 30,000 steps, they may be beyond comprehension. But they’ll enable searches that are vast and eerily powerful. We won’t be surfing with search engines any more. We’ll be trawling with engines of meaning.
I see the immediate need for an affiliate-style program structure for mashups and datasharing that makes it easy for sites to control and benefit (both traffic-wise and financially) from offering access to their data.
Only a fraction of the 400 APIs listed at programmableweb are opening up information - most focus on manipulating the service itself. According to R/WW, this is an important distinction.
Many sites are terrified of cannibalizing their value proposition by opening up their datatroves. Others are more open to the idea. I think it takes a third party to see the value of a mashup of services. Now that we’re all used to Google Maps being overlaid with myriad types of data, it’s time to move on to bigger ideas.
There are going to be a plethora of new startups attempting to exploit the opportunities surrounding machine readable data, tagging, web services, open databases, aggregators, RSS and so forth.I just hope the Web 3.0 moniker doesn’t stick.
