WEB 3.0 | WEB 3.0 TECHNOLOGY | WEB 3.0 HOT NEWS: Web 2.0, Web 3.0 - Or the Real Future?

Whilst digital agencies and web developers try and give the industry credibility through new acronyms designed to impress marketing managers, the underlying future of the internet is it's eventual ability to close the gap between search technology, knowledge sharing and streaming video.

Imagine if the video script could be rendered and returned in real time through search results and eventually categorised in some meaningful way. This will therefore lead to a knowledge base of billions of hours of video otherwise only currently categorised by title, author and other current records keeping methodologies. We could eventually search by phrase content, character ascent and much more. This change the way knowledge is recorded and published. Some way to go I think.

I'm sure other Internet visionaries have probably thought of this concept before, indeed it came to me via a conversation I had in January 2008 with a possible acquisition target for my business. Other than the obvious synergies between an internet software company and a film studio (interactive videos for our customers), I just couldn't see how there was a fit. The generic concept of how the synergies could evolve into a giant green screen portal was lost on me over the pasta and red wine at lunch.

Something though was triggered in my entrepreneurial brain. Quickly I dismissed it as something that would require all Google financial resources with years and years of voice, lip and ascent technology with billions more lines of code.

That's the beauty of software development and the internet. The benefits to society are endless. Although this idea is just abstract I could name just a few significant benefits:
¨ The search for knowledge trapped in video could unlock lost knowledge that could save lives;
¨ If the voice recognition technology converting video to script could benefit the deaf in ways I can only imagine
¨ Read the latest transcript from the Kofi Annan online in seconds rather than wait for translators to transcribe and publish the event online ... and so forth

What has this got to do with the Web 2.0 & Web 3.0 issue I have? Well it's simple, if the Internet marketers and spruikers have a true vision for the Internet and 3.0 is the roadmap to getting there then I lay down my arms and will eat humble pie. However, there isn't a technical roadmap that I know of that doesn't grow in incremental stages, such as 2.1 2.2 2.3 etc. It seems to me that the buzz created around Ajax, and browser time processing caught the attention of clients and made the spruikers look smart whilst finally dismissing the calamity of dotcom with 2.0.

I don't think 2.0 or 3.0 really have much to do with anything truly visionary or clever for the internet giving web developers and digital marketers a few acronyms to make themselves look like there are the cutting edge of the Internet. The vital question comes back to haunt those that engage - what is in it for my business and how will that help us?