Web 3.0 as a concept, term or notion is something I didn’t particularly care to mind when it surfaced initially. Web 2.0 after all was an idea that is still new and many were still grappling with it, especially brands. Therefore I regarded Web 3.0 as nothing but as hype for those who love jargon and those who had to bring up something new to talk.
Now all that can be right as well, but that isn’t the point of the argument. What the people who believe in and propogate the idea of web 3.0 say is happening, now whether you call it web 3.0 or extended web 2.0 or quite simply the web doesn’t matter. The fact is that the web and its usage and what people seek from it is changing especially given the idea of what the one millionth word in English has done in the past few years.
Where Does Web 3.0 Arrive in The Picture?
Web 2.0 among many other things brought democratized the web and brought publishing freedom – Wikipedia, WordPress, Flickr, YouTube and countless other examples. People suddenly had so many avenues of expression – Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed and their likes. All this resulted in what we have begun to experience (to a very small extent of course) – information overload. The interesting part is that this was anticipated and tools like feedreaders were already present to make sense of the overload. However, to my mind the whole concept of aggregating content on a platform that was more self centric than community centric went against what web 2.0 stood for. So while we could assimilate this information, web 2.0 the way it was couldn’t quite change this assimilated data into personalized and relative data.
Now if you got that correctly proceed ahead to understand how web 3.0 emerges here. Web 3.0 is something that can solve this issue of information overload.
Recently, in fact just a day or so back popular blogger Robert Scoble launched a new site Building43. com. The team behind it describes it as – We’ve designed building43 to bring together thought leaders in a variety of disciplines and organizations, from entrepreneurs to those responsible for the latest technologies. They will share knowledge, experiences and advice on how you can use these cool new tools and apps to make your business more successful.
Now why did I go off on to a different topic right in the middle of web 3.0?
This is because in some of building 43′s inherent characters lies what web 3.0 propagates as a concept. So understanding building 43 will help a lot of us wanting to know of web 3.0 better if not completely, at least a practical real world demo of what’s until now has just been talks.
The tenets of web 3.0 can be loosely summarized as this:
- Create content that will travel
- Traveling content will be propelled by users
- Users thus become part of your community
- Community drives tribe mentality
- So while creating content…one needs to create it with an eye on the community
If you are lost in the above words, see what Building 43 is doing to get a better idea:
- Community43 page contains a live feed of dialogue from Scoble’s FriendFeed. In other words, if you’re one of the thousands who’ve made a comment about the project, you’re already a part of the Building43 community. In this way Building43 travels to where dialogue already exists - Traveling content
- The effort is less about Robert Scoble as the community touchstone and more about tech-based business mentorship and collective dialogue - Content propelled by users and the formation of a community
- Readwriteweb (from where these points are sourced) adds that the project will be successful only when – web-based content producers take the time to tag and add their business tips to the Building43 cause – Tribe formation
- Some of the site’s early content includes videos of Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, Four Seasons’ Kelly Nelson, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other contributors like Guy Kawasaki, Twitter investor Fred Wilson and a number of experts in SEO, iPhone development, social media and marketing – Creating content with an eye on the commuinty
As these points and the concept of Building43 would help understand – the whole point is creating content, aggregation of content, and propelling it across the board in order to get people with a common interest be abreast of it and develop the entire eco-system. This is where the web is heading (that’s my conviction), from the 100 odd articles that vie for the top spot in Google news every second, content creators would need to pursue value creating goals and bring what drives that value on a platform that can then travel across the web.
Alright, that was my way of bringing the topic of web 3.0 on board. Now frankly I don’t think Building 43 is right from the future showing how the web will be a few years from now, no. However, when I read about it I couldn’t help but find how striking its concept was in terms of what I have studied about web 3.0 and hence the post above. There are two possibilities here that I can’t really fight – one being that I haven’t quite understood web 3.0 or that I haven’t quite understood Building 43. To my mind I have, and this can only be dispelled if you can correct me, so as embarrassing as it might be to go wrong feel free to put your views on this.
