Psychobabble 3.0

Of course, there is no objective reality, so we have to live in a world where truthiness really means something. But the Web 3.0 meme -- which has been offered up many times before, like the presentation by Tony Perkins at OnHollywood -- seems destined to plunge its barbs into our DNA.

John Markoff's piece in the New York Times can be looked at as a softsoap pattycake article debuting Nova Spivack with this preamble:

From the billions of documents that form the World Wide Web and the links that weave them together, computer scientists and a growing collection of start-up companies are finding new ways to mine human intelligence.

Their 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. That level of artificial intelligence, with machines doing the thinking instead of simply following commands, has eluded researchers for more than half a century.

Referred to as Web 3.0, the effort is in its infancy, and the very idea has given rise to skeptics who have called it an unobtainable vision. But the underlying technologies are rapidly gaining adherents, at big companies like I.B.M. and Google as well as small ones. Their projects often center on simple, practical uses, from producing vacation recommendations to predicting the next hit song.

Note the little rhetorical trick: "Referred to as Web 3.0...". Who is referring to it that way? Nova Spivack, and now, a whole herd of others. But this article is the precipitating event leading to this spreading. In a classic Heisenberg effect, stating that such a meme was being talked about has led to it being talked about.

The projects aimed at creating Web 3.0 all take advantage of increasingly powerful computers that can quickly and completely scour the Web.

“I call it the World Wide Database,” said Nova Spivack, the founder of a start-up firm whose technology detects relationships between nuggets of information by mining the World Wide Web. “We are going from a Web of connected documents to a Web of connected data.”

Web 2.0, which describes the ability to seamlessly connect applications (like geographic mapping) and services (like photo-sharing) over the Internet, has in recent months become the focus of dot-com-style hype in Silicon Valley. But commercial interest in Web 3.0 — or the “semantic Web,” for the idea of adding meaning — is only now emerging.

Is only emerging because of this article, John.

Nick Carr, who has been no fan of Web 2.0, jumps right on the bandwagon:

[from Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Welcome Web 3.0!]

Web 3.0 thus promises to be much more useful than 2.0 (not to mention 1.0) and to render today's search engines more or less obsolete.

Wow. Web 2.0 is still gathering steam, and its greatest benefits have yet to be achieved, but now we are proclaiming an soon-to-be-automated goes-better-thean-search handwave as being better than Web 2.0.

Perhaps its the case that so many of those who are hopping onto Web 3.0 as a new rallying meme are those that are unimpressed with Web 2.0, or quite distant from it. Have these folks built any Web 2.0 applications? Do they use them? Do they participate in Web 2.0 type activities, other than conferences and reading blogs?

I am no believer in super-smart algorithms that will discover and offer up "meaning" for us. Meaning is something found in our minds, based on beliefs.

Ross Mayfield, who has real down-in-the-trenches experience with app development and use, has a different take:

[from There Is No Web 3.0, Part, uh, 2]

John Markoff writes in the NY Times that Web 3.0 is coming. Apparently he missed my post last week, for There is no Web 3.0. The funny thing about my summation last year (Web 2.0 is Made of People!) is the web has always been that way -- and always will. At first glance, John seems to think the next web is made of machines.

From the billions of documents that form the World Wide Web and the links that weave them together, computer scientists and a growing collection of start-up companies are finding new ways to mine human intelligence.

Their 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. That level of artificial intelligence, with machines doing the thinking instead of simply following commands, has eluded researchers for more than half a century.

I'd bet the future is less the Matrix than Soylent Green. Less semantic fuzz than social discovery. Less artificial intelligence than human intelligence. Less automation and more augmentation.

More people, and less gears.

I am uninterested in the alchemical delusion of thinking that machines that will reason for us. I am only interested in improving the way that people interact -- to reduce the friction in those interactions, and find new angles to help them come into being -- so that we can discover new meaning from our relation to each other and the world. I don't expect some Web 3.0 program to do that for me, especially one that thinks the Web is a huge latent database.

I hope that a big troop of folks that have been howling about Web 2.0 drink this koolaid and start marching off toward the horizon with pied pipers like Nova Spivack and Nick Carr leading them. Then the rest of us can get back to business and work on Web 2.0.

[Update: Scott Karp comes down with Ross and me on this one.

The Times article equates Web 3.0 with a newly discovered quest for artificial intelligence — even though that quest has been around for decades. The web has indeed buried us in content, with precious little useful information, and machine intelligence on the network will undoubtedly help us dig ourselves out. But I’m with Ross Mayfield on this — I’m still betting on human intelligence in the near term.

]

tags: web+2.0, nova+spivack, nick+carr, ross+mayfield, john+markoff, web+3.0

Comments

[Bill Anderson]

Stowe, great post. I would just call it "babble". I agree with you 101% re "meaning". Meaning is something people make. Computers and their software don't even know they are running, much less why. Maybe someday we'll invent or discover machine intelligence ... maybe. And I will be very interested to interact with such a system. And while I hate the monikor Web2.0" it is really about people more than machines. That's the good news.

[snarkston]

Advisory capital gets a big mention on my blog today, snarkston.blogspot.com