I knew little about Web 3.0 (WP and Facebook and don't care having shown
Web 2.0 to be something rather than nothing) until I talked to Andrew
Turvey and Mike Peel of WMUK in a Starbucks one day. And I later
realised that some of what I had heard made sense. I floated this at the
London meetup on Sunday. Like an old IQ test:
Yahoo is to WP as Google is to ???
??? is supposed to be essence of Web 3.0 or something. Anyway I may have
the terminology hilariously wrong but the question remains. But needs
background, so here goes.
Tim Berners-Lee wants us to be interested in the "deep Web", i.e.
crawler-baffling pages such as those in databases that you only get to
read by filling in a web form with "open" and "sesame". WP uses such
pages by citing by hand, often with a citation template that contains
the page identifier so one person searches the database, thousands get
the right page for the article. This is a real plus: call it "dredging",
given that most WP pages are "shallow Web", in fact hardly over the ankles.
So what would the successor paradigm be? If Yahoo is to Google is as
hand-compiled lists is to pages algorithmically sorted for relevance
(close enough to what I mean), we should be looking at some "does not
suck" aggregator type model that produces readable prose: articles,
dammit, not 367 hits to scroll through.
I floated another model, though, "mother of all infoboxes", i.e. reduce
prose to minimum. And we should remember that in hypertext the article
is _not_ the unit. That is like saying that in an academic book the
footnote is the unit.
These ideas still seem to be half-baked.
Interesting times still await after the 10th anniversary. BTW anyone
here also on LinkedIn (that means you Phoebe, and others) simply must
join the Wikiversary group there which has just been founded. Not by me.
Charles