Jamdo Marketing Blog

Web 3.0 is obviouly the next step after Web 2.0.

But what the hell does that mean anyway?

Well, as you’re surely aware by now, Web 2.0 encompasses many of these new online applications that rely on community for “quality.” Sites like Digg and ShoutWire get their content submitted by readers who then vote on it to send it to the top of the list.

I guess in some ways, Web 2.0 involves the democratization of information.

But is this necessarily a good thing?

For example, anyone can log in and start messing with Wikipedia, a web 2.0 site that allows its readers to alter its reference content. Sure, that means it has a lot of content, but it also means that the content is not great quality and can be altered to be inaccurate for personal gain or just out of ignorance.

In fact, if you actually relied on Wikipedia for research, then to be honest, you deserve to get it wrong.

Same thing with the social bookmarking sites. Sure the stories are popular, but the ones I have seen at the top on topics I know  a little about quite often make me cringe. Accuracy and quality and not necessarily qualities that a mob mentality has at the top of its agenda. As such, there is a lot of crap that tends to get voted to the top of those sites.

So what am I getting at?

I suppose it is the idea that the next evoltion of the internet will begin to correct these problems.

Being able to provide quality information that is democratized will be the key to Web 3.0 - quality being the key.

The technology behind web 2.0 applications is fine, it is the users who let it down.

Imagine how much better the quality of particular sites such as wikipedia could be if it was restricted to people who actually had a clue about the topics they choose to change. Or for example, how much better the quality of the science section of a social bookmarking site would be if only scientists could vote on stories.

Now obviously that will present the problem of exactly who is “qualified” and I certainly don’t pretend to gave all the answers on this one.

But if you can come up with an application that checks for quality as well as popularity, you will corner the Web 3.0 phenomenon.

Technorati Tags: web 2.0, web 3.0, digg, shoutwire, wikipedia

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