Web 3.0 for Writers

Brace yourselves. There's a new web arising, or at least a new designation. Remember the fun we had with Web 2.0? This post, for example and a few others. Faster than we can catch up to the new functions, mash-ups, programming comes Web 3.0. John Markoff of the New York Times News Service 'splained it all in a recent article. He says the "goal is to add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide--and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion." Um, I think that's called "AI" for artificial intelligence, right?

Halfway through the article, he leaks the info that this is just the ol' semantic web that ubergeeks have been speaking about for several years. I could never understand what they meant. Turns out that Web 2.0 concerns connecting applications for functionality. I'd already figured that one out. But Web 3.0 is all about the content of web pages, the information carried and, in too many cases, buried in the Internet. The aim of Web 3.0 developers is to leverage bigger, better, faster computers to perform searches that will collate information to provide a complete package to answer questions like how to plan for retirement or select a college; more personalized returns than we can get now with existing search engines.

Now, that's what I'm talkin' about! For writers who use the Internet for research and writers who maintain websites with information about their works, this could be a jackpot. Anything that speeds up, and especially improves the results of web searches has my thumbs up.