Semantic Identity Crisis

Great topic, I will definitely keep track as I'm doing related research for a talk I'll be giving in an Early series on this subject coming up in October. As you point out, the Web 3.0 is just about to hit fruition (5 years ago, no one wanted to hear me talk for an hour about Semantic Web, even if I paid THEM :) I think that the most important component of one's identity is one's name. I was delighted to see the use of the Web 3.0 handle, it's more marketable than Semantic Web, e.g. if you ask someone "hey, we're building a Semantic Web", the response is typically "Semantic what?". If you start by saying "hey, we're building Web 3.0", then the reaction is more likely to be something like: "hmmm, the sequel to Web 2.0, what's that all about?". I don't suppose there's any formal process for giving a meme get a moniker, but I cast my vote for "Web 3.0", with the hope that it sticks.

[WARNING: You did say "jump right in"]

Secondly, I think the Web 3.0 is as much a political/social/philosophical revolution as it is a paradigm shift for the Web (on par with e.g. FOSS), and therefore, our identity is tied to a core set of principles about what data fundamentally is, what is the responsibility of data publishers to the data consumers. Whereas before, these issues were moot because even if we could all agree on a core set of principles about what eBay or Amazon or Hotmail should and should not allow me to do with data/content I generate, the absence of technical standards presented a roadblock to creative and productive discussion/debate. Now that the standards and principles have been established, the King is naked, and we can now, at least, draw these issues to the forefront. Make no mistakes about it, the Web 3.0 is a bold insurrection against the thinking of Web 1.0 and 2.0 and its motley crew of cohorts who declare that metadata is evil and that the Web's current, crumbling foundation is sufficient, it's about empowering the individual content creators and lessening the control of data/content publishers, it's about inverting the current power structure of the Web with a transference of power from the corporate monolith to the layperson and the crowd, it's about giving me the power to create an ad-hoc marketplace around all my esoteric wants and needs, and doing away with up-side-down marketplaces where the customer (instead of the seller) actually must compete for the transaction!, it's about the continuation of leveling the entrepreneurial playing field (initiated by the PC then exacerbated by the Internet), and although a significant part of the Web 3.0 discussion tends to focus on opening the web up to the machine, it's as much about freedom "from" the machines as it is freedom "for" the machines in that it finally allows computers to confederate and leverage one another's knowledge to carry out OUR tasks with much greater efficiency and autonomy, thus freeing us from repetitive and mundane tasks and returning to us more freedom and time to participate in that one activity which humans are more suited to perform: Imagining... creating ideas that can flourish, unhindered by those "minute-snatchers" so prevalent in modern life (filling in the credit card details the 100th time, coordinating a meeting time and place for a 8-person project team, spending 2 minutes to remember the tag you gave to that bookmark), those subtle little thieves which have rendered many otherwise brilliant and fruitful minds into a state of creative poverty; we belonged to Web 1.0 and 2.0, but Web 3.0 belongs to us.

And as the Web 3.0 comes into its season of harvest, it will become more and more important for the community to draw sharp lines around these principles, and to venomously protect them, because this is (finally) about taking the time and effort to lay a proper foundation for someone else, doing what's right for posterity and shunning the temptation to neglect interoperability and standardization even if the profit isn't as apparent to us. And it's about a whole lot more, much of which I hope you and others will begin to pull out into the community discussion, but those are some of my convictions.

Yeah, Sherman - I couldn't agree more about Web 3.0 saving us from 'minute-snatchers'. I see the Semantic Web, or Web 3.0 as fundamentally something that 'gets' what a person is saying and saves humans time. I see Web 3.0 as a smart tool, my image for it (on one of my project sites) is as a magicians' familiar.

We don't yet want a Web that thinks more than us, but at least one that understands the meaning of what we're saying and does more than search for a text string in the universe (even if google does a pretty amazing job of searching for strings in the universe, its not enough). So a web that knows us, understands us, and helps with tasks. More user-centric than knowledge-in-the-world centric.