Web 3.0 and its discontents

Digital Reasoning Systems CEO Tim Estes recently launched our new blog with his post on “Web 3.0 and its discontents“.

As Tim notes in the opening to his inaugural post:

For my first post to our new blog, I thought I would jump into an area that is of great and timely interest: The emerging “Semantic Web” and the technologies and solutions proposed to enable it.

There has been a lot of “Web 3.0” buzz in the last year. See for example this MIT “Technology Review” article, Business 2.0’s piece on Radar Networks, the New York Times’ Metaweb article, and John Markoff’s original Web 3.0 article from the NY Times in late 2006. The reaction in the blogsphere has been equally interesting. There appears to be a combination of believers and advocates, both Web 2.0 players who are mad at the hype being stolen and those who are skeptics. If I were to put myself in a camp, I’d have to say I’m an “optimistic skeptic”.

I believe something like this vision of Web 3.0 will play out, but it might take the market six or seven “attempters” before we find a Google of Web 3.0.

Whoever eventually gets it right must overcome at least three critical issues to make the Web 3.0 vision reality. I’ll lay them out here.

I would highly recommend that anyone interested in the semantic web and where things are headed read this post. It clarifies a number of issues that are commonly confused or skipped over. Highly recommended.

And while you’re there, btw, why not subscribe to our feed to automagically get future updates?