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November 22, 2008
Notes 1.0 about Web 3.0
Earlier I have written about how and why I hate the "Web 2.0" shtick.
In fact, demonstrating the disregard, I've generally completely avoided any semblance of writing anything about it to anyone but an invitational or hypothetical audience. Nonetheless, the popularity of the subject leads one to things said by others that warrant being remembered and shared. In which case, there is an ethical responsibility to give credit where credit is due.
Example: by Googling the phrase "Web 3.0", find a path to Sramana Mitra and more than a year of comments about her Web 3.0 "framework". For latecomers like myself, Mitra seems to already have "celebrity status" -- albeit earned. I mention that only to point out that except for the internet's easy way of cultivating coincidences, I may have never heard of her (as I'm sure she has not heard of me). I think that very fact is one of the main and most simply profound points of having the internet at our disposal -- which is to say that it reflects more about the internet than it does about Mitra, a point about which I hope she would share my appreciation. And it should fit into her greater scope of thinking about the web.
Suffice it to say that her framework for defining Web 3.0, offered as a catchy formula (Web 3.0 = 4C + P + VS... see for yourself), provoked me to say what I have said on her website's comments and again said below. I do not agree with her definition of web 3.0, but what I'll say below is a part of a different framework that can contain the points covered by Mitra's framework or formula.
Web 1.0, 2.0 or 3.0 have different definitions depending on what kind of stakeholder is given top priority amongst the many different kinds.
Let's overgeneralize and start by pointing out that the difference between having the web and not having it is simply that the web (the "internet") is another place a person can go to do something.
The biggest difference in stakeholders is between Producers, Providers and Receivers.
All three types are consumers, but they go to the internet to consume very different classes of "content"...
- Content is simply the material that the receiver needs, that they don't already have, in order to execute individual tasks to a conclusion.
- A task can be anything from self-entertainment to industrial development.
- In every case, the task is executed to conclusion, with the content, within the "workspace" of the web, without leaving the web.
However, a better instrument for understanding the evolutionary dynamics would not restrict itself to debatable examples, but instead would explain why examples fit where they do. This calls for the abstraction of a model.
In web 1.0, the recipient acquired prefabricated content in a closed package.
- Search created a transitional opportunity to web 2.0 by encouraging choice of packages.
In web 2.0, the recipient acquired prefabricated content in a modifiable package.
- Collaboration and personalization created a transitional opportunity to web 3.0 by encouraging comparative and cooperative content sourcing.
In web 3.0, the recipient acquires modifiable content in a modifiable package.
- Lacking any better term so far, invention strikes me as the transitional opportunity to web 4.0, as ontologies and cultures begin to take over a greater percentage of activities *such as* the creation and materialization of new products, outside of (but in addition to) conventional corporate instruments and academia.
What then distinguishes one web "generation" from another is the notion that an adequate level of reliability in the given generation's degree of task support can be taken for granted by most stakeholders.
And what these definitions mean, in reality, is that at any given time, some stakeholders doing some things have already been at a different generational level than others doing other things. Meanwhile, over time, the technologies and practices that emerge and mature in a generation of the internet environment also "level the playing field" across different stakeholders.
This ongoing leveling (or maturing) allows any individual participant to go to the web for more and more of the various things that constitute the individual's range of interests. As a result, the participant inhabits the internet environment more and more.
Turn off the internet, and they go somewhere else to do all of the same things, with a lot less affordable speed and range at their disposal.
All that said, it makes less sense to talk about web 1.0, 2.0, etc. than it does to talk about the relative maturity level of the internet environment as a resource (e.g. support levels 1, 2, 3, etc.).
The most interesting implications I find are these two:
- stakeholders will remain distinguishable as types, but an individual participant will occupy multiple stakeholder roles simultaneously;
- and the individual can readily change, thanks to the maturing web, from being a recipient to a provider, or from a provider to a producer. And so on.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at November 22, 2008 9:15 PM