The New York Times looks at the next phase for the web:
“In contrast, the Holy Grail for developers of the semantic Web is to build a system that can give a reasonable and complete response to a simple question like: “I’m looking for a warm place to vacation and I have a budget of $3,000. Oh, and I have an 11-year-old child.”
The need for such as sytem underscores the limitations of current web searches, which:
“…return thousands or even millions of documents but as a rule do not answer questions directly.”
Nicholas Carr is excited about the coming of Web 3.0, but concerned about the downside:
“While it will be easy for you to mine meaning about vacations and other stuff, it will also be easy for others to mine meaning about you.”
Dave Winer is concerned about the hype of such an evolution, which seems to have little structure to it so far.
Overall, we seem to be in an age of immense hype around digital media. When people start talking about “the next big thing,” I certainly get skeptical about their personal need to be seen at the forefront of a new movement.