Is Web 3.0 coming?

If you read the recent MIT Technology Review piece called: A Smarter Web and are somewhat of a supporter of the Semantic Web, you can’t help it but to be excited of the prospects of a new Web emerging: the Web of Data or Web 3.0. Most of the excitement is being built around the latest clique of Semantic Web savvy tech startups claiming to finally bring to reality all of the dreams surrounding the vision of a Web of Data. The interviews, articles and blog posts are increasing each day all waiting to see as these new companies crack open their betas and show the world what we hadn’t been able to show before. Now in case you have been living under a rock and don’t know of these companies, then please go back to debugging your XML parsing scripts and checking your databases to make sure you have created all of the necessary indexes, because these companies obviously don’t need to do that. The new kids on the block are: Radar Networks, Joost, Freebase and now Zepheira. Please go and use text searching while it lasts to find more information about them if you are interested.

Anyways, please don’t take my first paragraph too seriously, especially when I am working with XML (Atom) and debugging database calls for my day job, but I will say I remain hopeful to see us take a real step forward into a richer Web. However, I’ll still say that we must be careful with our expectations because these companies are building specific applications after years of research and work that are not easily duplicated as a cool AJAX script today. In other words, their work might help people clear up their misconceptions about the Semantic Web and the range of possibilities that exist today with data, but not necessarily will empower average Joe HTML Writer right away to do in Web 3.0 more than what they can do in the so-called Web 2.0 today. But don’t fret either, Ian says we have a few more years to go…