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November 27, 2008
Notes 2.0 about Web 3.0
Overview: online capabilities in search, collaboration and invention follow each other in a cycle driving the evolution of the "Web" from earlier levels of maturity to later greater levels. This diagram illustrates the interrelated dynamics.
Each of the capabilities continues to increase in functional sophistication and reliability over time. For each respective capability, this change broadens its range of usefulness, which increases the range of user-roles that may adopt it -- as in, adapt tasks to include it in the task. While each of the different basic roles -- Producer, Provider, and Receiver -- will take advantage of enhancements, the roles respectively tend to drive particular rates and types of enhancement of some capabilities more than others. This relative difference is represented by their positioning in the diagram.
Interaction of the roles is selective but continual, as all are active all the time. It is important to accept that much of the "selective" interaction is speculative; however, any person in the role may program the interactions in various ways, such as to cultivate a particular scope of interconnectivity:
- one-to-one
- one-to-many
- many-to-many
- many-to-one
... or perhaps to fulfill responsibilities or special interests that reflect the following dynamics:
- Cultural: especially involving attraction and development; driving and/or driven by identity; strong focus on designing
- Community: esp. involving development and distribution; driving and/or driven by policy; strong focus on building
- Market: esp. involving distribution and attraction; driving and/or driven by economy; strong focus on exchanging
Those three fundamental "interest groups" are not simply points-of-entry into the web; instead, they are dominant perspectives within which web interactions and facilities are discovered, recognized, weighed, formulated, and so forth, by web users. As seen in the diagram, web interaction amongst roles facilitates a point of view and goal (design, build, exchange) that is characteristic of each perspective and has a high priority in the group view of potential web operations. As the web interaction becomes more and more enhanced and reliable, the web as a whole is perceived to evolve to a next generation for the benefitting users (or stakeholders).
The table below gives a closer look at the underlying architecture of an existing facility in use on the web, in generic terms of role and task. As discussed in the companion article Notes 1.0 about Web 3.0, the notion of "web content" is a high-level abstraction signifying what the web user supplies to the web and/or accesses the web to use. The related architecture accounts for what exists on the web as components of content, which may be intermixed, coordinated or integrated across roles to generate a more complex web facility.
The terms in the table below generically label what each role is looking for on the web and why -- with the background assumption that these items are engineered and reengineered over time to fit the particular "type" of player (e.g., student, artist, businessperson, scientist, etc.) within the role. As an example, the end-to-end architecture of acquiring an email, or purchasing an item from Amazon, or manipulating an avatar in Second Life can all be described in terms of the production, provision and reception activity involved, per the different parties that see to the main roles being satisfied. So, for example, while web content such as "stock", "factory" and "platform" is specialized to the involved Producer, the combinations of web content across the Producer, Provider and Receiver ultimately makes up the facility that the receiver may call email, Amazon, or Second Life.
To reiterate a key thought from the earlier Notes 1.0 article, the most interesting thing about the "web", after all, is that the interconnectivity and maturation allows a given participant to play multiple roles -- either concurrently or differing from time to time. The significance of discussing "generations" in web evolution is mainly in the degree to which a generation indicates reliable and adequate support of the user's intended activity. This will derive mainly from the enhancement and maturity of the web content in the web architecture.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at November 27, 2008 8:25 AM