I found this gem of a quote in Influence: Science and Practice by Robert B. Cialdini that characterizes the current web “revolution” remarkably well.
Our modern era, often termed The Information Age, has never been called The Knowledge Age. Information does not translate directly into knowledge. It must first be processed–accessed, absorbed, comprehended, integrated, and retained.
The 1990’s ushered in an explosion of websites, almost all of which focused on bringing as much information as possible onto the internet. The buzzword at the time was “database”, and .com startups raced to implement “database driven backends”. This generation of websites caused an explosion of information on the internet, most of which unfortunately, is useless for any individual user.
Then of course, came the advent of AJAX that ushed us into our current wave, the aptly named web 2.0. Suddenly websites became prettier and more responsive, and the buzzword of the day became “social networking” and user generated content. Yet, two generations of the web still has not produced any “knowledge”. But hope is on the way!
There are finally efforts to process all the information on the web in the form of initiatives such as Semantic Web and Collaborative Filtering. Wouldn’t it be great if you could finally check out restaurant ratings from people who are just like you? Afterall, you wouldn’t normally take restaurant recommendations from your next door neighbor who eats dog food, and he just rated McDonald’s 5 stars online! The potential for a good collaborative filtering is virtually limitless, and in my opinion, will ultimately be responsible for web 3.0. Netflix seems to be bracing for that possibility already, and is offering a $1MM prize for applicable advances in exactly that!
