Web 3.0

I've rather pompously made some predictions on what Web 3.0 may constitute:

• Personal metadata ownership and management: initiatives such as AttentionTrust, Structured Blogging and Microformats are building infrastructure which supports the notion that data is the property of the user, not the platform owner. Data can be moved from one service or device to another at will, it can be exchanged for something of value, but the user has the right to know who is using it and how. Structured blogging enables user-generated microcontent to be stored in its appropriate schema and syndicated as an identifiable content-type to any third party that requires it. This new paradigm provides far greater user control, and enables a new class of web app; Edgeio, for example, aggregates specific microformats (in this case classified adverts) and builds a service around them; KritX does the same for reviews;
• Implicit data capture: architectures of participation are worthwhile in theory, but only a small percentage of users will actually add value through content submissions. The goal is to architect a system where participation happens by default. Applications such as OnLife, Octave, Last.fm and Root Markets have begun to address this problem by ensuring that metadata capture is invisible and requires no real effort on the user's part;
• Self-ethnography: some discussion is now taking place abound ‘datablogging’, ‘personal data mining’ and ‘meta-experiences.’ Once systems are capable of implicit data capture, what kinds of services will emerge for mining and presenting the resultant data? The value of these services, according to Ed Batista, is “the experience of comprehending and assessing that information is derived from a previous (or concurrent) experience”;
• Personalisation and attenuation: most mashups are currently ‘dumb’. The problem with such services is their inability to filter and personalise the huge quantities of available information. Attenuation (i.e. the reduction of ‘information noise’) is of such importance that it occupies the thematic core of O’Reilly’s 2006 Emerging Technology conference. The emergence of open-source inference engines will enable developers to build intelligence into web apps, and capitalise on the nascent ‘attention economy’.