It’s going on today in Paris, LeWeb3 2007. As the name suggests it’s about Web3.0 and it seems many people don’t feel silly to mention „web 3.0“. Mostly they mention it in terms of their own business model. This is web 3.0. Thus it seems web 3.0 is already here and we might just have forgotten to adjust our version counter accordingly. Problematic is of course that all those businesses have not too much in common.
You hear it in a lot of places. At some event about Long Tail in Cologne we heard it from Stefan Weiss who was talking about the european project „Theseus„. Because he mostly stressing the fact that Theseus is not a search engine and never will be I unfortunately still don’t know what it actually is. It just became clear that they spend (some say waste) quite a lot of money in something related to the semantic web. And it’s Web 3.0.
Then there is Mahalo, which also was coined to be Web3.0 by it’s founder Jason Calacanis. According to him it’s „Web 3.0 is defined as the creation of high-quality content and services produced by gifted individuals using Web 2.0 technology as an enabling platform.“.
Some also say it’s virtual worlds.
At the conference some more people of course used that term.
Of course in the end nothing of all this will be web3.0. Web 2.0 already is sort of a silly term but maybe quite suited back then when Tim O’Reilly coined it in that it expressed something different. Something which is about more collaboration, user generated content, social interactions and so on. This maybe was quite a drastic change and shows the power which is in the web. I am not sure though we will see such a change again. Even if things change sort of drastically e.g. in terms that the web gets replaced by virtual worlds (which will not happen anyway), the underlying principles will probably not change that much. There is user generated content, there are social interactions and so on. Not really much more but maybe on a different level.
If we also look at things like open or portable social networks then even this is not something dramatical new. It’s maybe getting to the next level and ironing out the deficits of the first implementation in making it decentralized.
And using the term Web 3.0 for everything is really even counterproductive in getting your message out. It’s even hard to grasp for many people what actually Web2.0. Thus I would prefer to say that Theseus is Theseus, Mahalo is Mahalo and Second Life is Second Life. There are probably better ways to say what makes you unique instead of hiding that in a very blurry term.
If it comes to Web 4.0 it’s a completely different story of course….. ;-)
Le Web 3
First of all thanks to Zennie Abraham for doing this interview with Cathy Brooks about what Le Web 3 actually is:
So I am not at the conference but of course I would like to be there as I heard there is great food ;-) But I am was following the live stream today and also heard some nice stuff. OTOH there also has been some boring stuff. I guess this is the usual mix.
But then again I think I am missing some more participatory style again. Usually there are quite a lot of people in the audience (also in the remote audience) who might know quite a lot about this topic. Here it really would make sense to get them talking. I also heard that Loic was interviewing many people about what they think about it and decided to not make it more like a Barcamp. But then again I wonder if those people have been to a Barcamp before. Maybe it differs from person to person but those I know who have been to a Barcamp like those more. And of course it does not need to be completely like a Barcamp I’d really encourage conference organizers to try more in this direction. I think everybody will really benefit from that.
I also would encourage conference organizers to try more in Second Life. In fact there have been 3 sessions today on gaming and virtual worlds so one really should utilize these environments. Not everybody can come to Paris and not everybody wants maybe. Second Life and other means ot virtual participation might be a great way to at least share part of the experience. It might even cost something, make it a SL pass or a web pass for a reasonable price and then enable us to see all tracks with a decent stream.
So tomorrow is another day and I am looking forward to the talk of Doc Searls who was today chatting a bit in the unofficial LeWeb3 backchannel (which you can find at #leweb3 on IRC at irc.freenode.net). I hope I also get some work done, though ;-)
Tags: leweb3, web3.0, paris, conference, barcamp