posh

i have a screenshot on my work box of the front page of the Web 2.0 Workgroup's site wherein the most popular item in their tag cloud is "Web 3.0".

there's probably a startlingly narrow audience for that kind of humor, but i thought it was funny.

I think Web 2.0 is a valid word to describe general trends that are associated with the period of time from 2001 to present. Web 1.0 was our attempt to emulate RL in the online space and it was focused on connecting people with documents. Web 2.0 is about perfecting new approaches to old problems that harness the unique powers of the Internet, namely it's ability to connect people to other people.

However, I don't think we'll call the next stage of the Internet Web 3.0. The original motivation for the name Web 2.0 was coined by O'Reilly to describe the old way of doing things (see their definition of Web 2.0 here: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html ). They intended to suggest that Web 1.0 was bad and needed fixing. Web 2.0 isn't broken and won't be in the near future. Technologically it meant separating content, logic, and style, which won't loose it's value. Culturally it is the emergence of the social web, which isn't going anywhere either. The next era of the web is upon us now and is the addition of the rich media layer. The most significant of which is the merge between T.V. and the Internet. I think we'll call this phase something like the Rich Web and not. Web 3.0.

Was that schooling enough?