Da Vinci Planet » Web2.0

Web 3.0: The Semantic Web

Da Vinci — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 22:24:18 +0000

There is so much hype around Web 2.0, yet very few people seem to really know what it is. I recently heard about someone suggesting that they were going to redesign their site this year to â€œmake it Web 2.0â€?; and next year to â€œWeb 3.0â€?. I thought that Web 2.0 was a stretch for many companies and few understood it, never mind Web 3.0! What is Web 3.0 anyway?! I figured this was just big talk, but decided to look into it because Web 2.0 is very real and I guess eventually a newer generation Web will follow Web 2.0.

My concern with the “next year we upgrade to Web 3.0″ suggestion is that while the term Web 2.0 has been around for a couple of years, it is barely starting to mature. Web 2.0 is all about social computing: Blogs, wikis, syndication, mashups, user generated content (UGC) and using ajax to make Websites more interactive. It trusts the community and empowers them to contribute and police content. Very few corporate Websites have ventured into this terrain. They would like to invite and build community, but dare not open the doors.

So what about Web 3.0? As it turns out people are, at this point, just speculating what Web 3.0 is going to be. According Wikipedia Web 3.0, a.k.a. the Semantic Web, is â€œan evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which web content can be expressed not only in natural language, but also in a form that can be understood, interpreted and used by software agents, thus permitting them to find, share and integrate information more easilyâ€?. Some people define it as Web 2.0 + artificial intelligence (AI). Others as a â€œworld wide databaseâ€?.

The graph below was created by Radar Networks and shows a believable prediction of the evolution of the Web.

So I believe we have a couple more years before Web 2.0 will be fully embraced by enterprises and only after that will Web 3.0 even start to get defined. I also believe that Web 3.0 will be more elegantly simple than what people are predicting because people love â€œsimplicityâ€? â€“ just ask Google.

Web 2.0 Explained in Video

Da Vinci — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 16:20:15 +0000

A picture says a thousand words and so I guess a video says a thousand pictures This video plays with words and really does explain Web 2.0 faster than words or pictures can do alone. It’s a mini lecture on social computing: The evolution of the Web into Web 2.0 and how Web 2.0, the “Machine”, is us and how it is using us to grow. It demonstrates how user generated content, tagging, blogs, and wikis have revolutionized the Web and that we need to rethink how we do things. The video moves very fast, but it’s worth watching twice.

Wink social bookmarking that combines Digg and Google

Da Vinci — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 02:30:58 +0000

I quite accidently stumbled on the search engine/tagging site Wink tonight. Quite accidently because I was looking for an update on the freeware presentation creation software called Wink: DebugMode (more on that Wink in another post). Since social bookmarking, tagging, social networking, social computing and all other social whatever stuff has been the topic at work over the last week, the Wink search engine really caught my attention.

Wink is a search engine that integrates tag results from multiple sources such as del.icio.us, Digg, Yahoo MyWeb (and we’re adding more). It gives you the freshest information on the web by serving up the most relevant tagged links for your search. We crawl and index tags from all over the web, and serve them up with web results, for a combination of freshness and accuracy. We also include other user-contributed content, such as answers from Wikipedia that you’ll find under the Wink Answers tag, which is added by people like you. We also provide Google search, because tag coverage is still thin in some areas, and while tag results are really interesting, we know what you want sometimes is best found on Google.

Wink doesn’t seem to be publicized as much as most, yet it has substantial user base. So I decided to put it to the test by comparing Wink with Digg using a few search terms, e.g. “seo wordpress”. Digg by default sorts by recency, but even when sorting by most diggs Wink still had better results (i.t.o. quality of links). I liked it enough to create my own profile

Wink
Wink Blog
102 resources on Social Bookmarking Sites – listable.com
55 Social Bookmarking Sites to Promote Your Blog Articles – webloghits.com

Website traffic comparisons using Alexaholic

Da Vinci — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 04:47:23 +0000

Alexa uses statistics gathered with it’s browser toolbar to estimate traffic to Web sites. While the toolbar’s purpose is questionable amongst those concerned about privacy, the free traffic stats can be very useful. Alexaholic uses alexa.com’s traffic data to create comparisons.

Alexaholic blends Alexa website traffic graphs with a lightweight ajax-enhanced interface to satisfy hard-core Alexa traffic chart junkies â€“ aka Alexaholics.

Webmasters, SEO/SEM specialists, and domain owners can compare and measure website statistics for up to five domains at once, switch traffic chart types and ranges without page loads, and generate report pages that are easily bookmarked and shared.

Not surprisingly though, Alexaholic reports that Yahoo gets about three times as much traffic as Google (click on page views tab).