In what few minutes I’ve had today to reduce various folders in Bloglines, I
picked up on a few strands of the "Web 3.0" fracas initiated by yesterday’s NYT
article

"Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense." In the article, John
Markoff anticipates what he refers to almost glibly as "Web 3.0", which
proponents contend will usher in "an era when machines will start to do
seemingly intelligent things." There is no shortage of responses and reactions,
ranging from doubt,
charges of idiocy,
mild
humanism,

clarification,
dismissal of the name, and
damning
refutations. While I don’t want to rile more ire, I am intrigued by the
range of reactions, especially from the standpoint of how we account for
transformations of such a complex creature as the web with singular terms. In
some niche vocabularies, Web 2.0 refers to a class of applications; in
others, Web 2.0 describes web-supported co-presence (interaction and
connection). I mean that the label has been highly adaptable, a loose and
generous signifier. I tend to think that it is reasonable to wish for (and even
to tinker with) a better vocabulary for describing the complex and rapidly
evolving nets.

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