Web 3.Oh No!

We are on the verge of the next Web development. For those of you who lost track, we have had Web 1.0, which was the development of browsers to help us store and find data. For those of you who have shut off all media (in which case I imagine you wouldn't be reading this, so why should I acknowledge you?) we are in the midst of Web 2.0, the development of social networks, allowing us to find each other. We now are about to enter Web 3.0, or the semantic Web. Web 3.0 applications hope to – through better description of the data and linkage of previous apps – make existing data easier to locate and analyze.

Think of it as social networks for data. (I guess the data are lonely now that the humans spend all our time on social networks.)

For those of you, like me, who need a way to keep these things straight, I offer the following handy, wallet-sized program.

WEB 1.0 (browsers) – Users find data
WEB 2.0 (social networks) – Users find each other
WEB 3.0 (semantic Web) – Data find each other

Of course, a lifetime of science-fiction reading and viewing leads me to fear we can look forward to the following developments:

WEB 4.0 – Data create their own Facebook page, restrict friends.
WEB 5.0 – Data decide they can work without humans, create their own language.
WEB 6.0 –Human users realize that they no longer can find data unless invited by data.
WEB 7.0 – Data get cheaper cell phone rates.
WEB 8.0 – Data horde all the good YouTube videos, leaving human users with access to bad '80's music videos only.
WEB 9.0 – Data create and maintain own blogs, are more popular than human blogs.
WEB 10.0 – All episodes of Battlestar Gallactica will now be shown from the Cylons' point of view.