A Response to Anti-Web 3.0 proponents, and an explanation why Web 3.0 is better than others

Mike Bergman has responded to my rather visceral reaction to his visceral reaction ("squash the "web 3.0" cockroach" - see my original post here: Web 3.0, (semantic) advertising, and why Semantic Web can't get their %&$^ together. This is my response to him, and a clarification for my position pro-"web 3.0".

Mike, thanks for your thoughtful response. I do not intend to start a flame war at all, I reacted a bit viscerally to a visceral reaction as well. We shall agree to disagree of course. I found your response organized, and a viewpoint backed by arguments. Where I come in disagreement is not on the semantic domain (e.g., to your point re "web 3.0" is meaningless), but rather on the pragmatic one (I am hereby referring to the classical syntactic/semantic/pragmatic triad, and specifically Wittgenstein's idea of "language games" - see the theory here. In it, the idea is that the meaning of a word, therefore of a semantic process moniker as well, presupposes the ability to use it). I sense in your position a rather religious/aristotelic/absolutist view of the "meaning" of a concept, etc. I believe this meaning (certainly of both "semantic web" and "web 3.0", "structured web", or "linked data" altogether) is easier understood by enterprise clients, as you rightfully mention. But no one else, certainly not consumers. Therefore, it is not better (pragmatically speaking) than "web 3.0", because of its rather limited ability to use it in language by a limited section of the audience.

The advantage of "web 3.0" is purely pragmatic, and not semantic (not any different than "web 2.0" with which I am sure you also disagree with its usage); the term has been established via public debate and contribution to its denotation, and is now accepted and well understood. Yes, not so much yet about "web 3.0", but the idea, and my goal has been to offer a much better PRAGMATIC term to the community and audience at large, void in the beginning, but with the advantage of; not being loaded with technicalities (not needing the presence of ONLY certain W3C standards but not others, in a very autocratic way); showing continuation of a process from 2.0, and thereby linking it in the mind of the public with a moniker that has been already accepted (a decent starting point). I am neither scared of public debate, not against it - in fact the reality of our debate works to better define whichever term will be ultimately adopted, and made successful to a larger scale adoption of semantic technologies, processes, etc. At this time, I think all terms you mention are doing us a disfavor: too technical, not easy to be understood by non-enterprise clients (and this is what we need the most today, the consumer imagination, because we already have better success on the enterprise side than we have at a larger scale). Yes, they may be more "meaningful", but I don't think that's necessarily the point: I can give a ton of examples of concepts that are very clean semantically, but that never lead to/supported a larger adoption by the general public. I think this is the case with the terms you have been proposing.

Quite frankly, it is my belief that the terms you propose have not been adopted by more than a few smaller communities within the technology community itself, so those are not settled either.

Bottom line: we have been debating on two different "worlds" and philosophies: I don't believe in absolutist/aristotelian/platonic ideas of "meaning" of a term as set in stone by an authority, but I rather believe meanings are co-created in the praxis of language use by people/participants to a democratic exchange of ideas. I also don't think any of the terms currently proposed do us any favor, for two reasons: 1. they are too technical for larger adoption (albeit with tighter denotation); 2. they are overloaded with negative connotations, and have limited scalability.

Lastly, I also do not think that just because "web 3.0" is meaningless, it will never be meaningful (if you consider my pragmatic approach to it): it just means that the public debate has not settled on it yet, as you rightfully agree with. Truth be told, if there is no "higher" authority to shine on us the right meanings of our concepts but ourselves in the practice of language, then any and every concept/term has been meaningless at some point, acquiring meaning in the process of its use.

Yes, I agree terminology adoption is a function of both providers and consumers and has been largely given by providers. I also agree with your comment that "Consumers vote with their attention and their wallets". But I believe consumers have not voted either with their attention, or with their wallets so far, which leads me to believe that they don't care about "structured web", "linked data", etc. Why? For reasons explained above, but also because they shouldn't: technology should in fact be transparent to them, as long as a fundamental need of theirs is fulfilled better with this technology than with another, that is what counts. Not the technology itself.