I’m at BarCamp Sydney 2008, get there if you can, lots of great people and content – a perfect storm. Clearly no-one has it nailed on what Web 3.0 will look like, including me.

The discussion turned to; web privacy, OpenSocial, OpenID, which device, on vs. off-line and semantic web. So many views and they all felt right to some degree but none felt clearly and independently correct. The one point of clarity was that Web 3.0 isn’t any one thing.

The discussion and comments just added evidence to my view that the organism or entity that is evolving out of the primordial Web 2.0 soup is so much bigger than the sum of it’s parts. It can’t be observed, it has a life of it’s own, we can’t comprehend it. Just as the flea doesn’t know it lives on a dog. We are building all the components, the cells in it’s body. Being many specialist cells, we don’t have the ability to conceptualise the whole entity yet. I’m increasingly convinced Artificial Intelligence is going to be a major component. If the web enabled applications are the cell specialisation using frameworks then the nervous system is probably somewhere in the region of AI engines and the semantic web. The cell nuclei or the distributed brain if you like.

Picture credit: Mike Licht