Today’s foray into Web 3.0 will be told, in part, through the magic of the short story. Taking many of the elements of my previous articles on the new web, I’m going to give you a day in the life of a Web 3.0 netizen.

Web 3.0

First, as always, lets define Web 3.0:

Highly specialized information silos, moderated by a cult of personality, validated by the community, and put into context with the inclusion of meta-data through widgets.

The Story

Generally I try not to wake up before 10 AM. 10 AM EST that is, which is about 7AM on the side of the country that matters at all these days. The laptop hums softly in the corner of the room, it hasn’t really slept for a week now. Huge project coming up, one of us had to pull a bit of overtime.

The iPhone wakes me up with a jolt, some meme had come to the fore and it was time that I reacted. A quick look at the screen tells me everything that I needed to know. 20 articles, twenty minutes, the aggregate reputation metrics of the authors made Mother Theresa look like a trollop. I set the phone to scan, if I had to travel today I wanted some reading material to keep me busy, and made my way to the laptop.

“Randy Sanders of Montona has just been arrested for reputation fixing. Using a cluster of computers and a network of distributed IPs, he has managed to increase his reputation metrics by 57% across all pertinent networks in less then 12 hours.

This ‘RepFixing’ has placed him near the top of most searches for ‘Web 3.0′, ‘consumer electronics’ and ‘electronics evangelism’. The estimated cost of this fraud is $20 Million, advertisers who have recently sponsored Mr. Sanders are not expected to receive compensation.”

The agenting software I had recently installed on my main machine had done a good job of distilling the 500 or so mainstream media, blog, microblog and splog headlines down to a few coherent paragraphs. The question became, what was there for a reputation broker to do? One of the sponsors that Randy had defrauded was Apple Media Group, the media arm of Steve Jobs’ little empire and one of my firm’s biggest clients.

A second agent opened Joost, after wading through a sea of commercials for Green Tea (I should have never ordered that tea set off of Amazon, I had been treated to nothing be tea Ads for the last two weeks) it brought up the CNN news report on the subject. Unfortunately, this tale had been getting a bit more traction than I would have hoped. 29% of the public thought that what Randy did was perfectly acceptable in a world where Repmetrics could mean the difference between getting your dream job and spending another year in middle management.

Of those 29%, it was estimated than 67% had committed similar crimes, albeit on a much smaller scale. This affirmation had, in the last 8 hours, caused an average decline of $.05 per advertisement, per contract for everyone in the affected industries — costing my client and its publishers about $3 Million. That was quite a bit of money for a single Saturday news bite.

Too many numbers.

I mumbled something unpleasant right as my iPhone rang, informing me it may have come up with something a little more cogent than the sea of data that my laptop wanted to feed me. I put the laptop back on scan, reserving some clock cycles to continue crunching data for tomorrow’s presentation and I made my way back to my mobile. What I saw there may have saved my day.

Instead of a half dozen RSS feeds from every corner of the internet, the iPhone had a neatly CSS’d picture gallery of everyone involved including their Repmetrics, their comScore penetration and most importantly their aggregate feelings on the situation based on the entire body of material they had posted in the last 24 hours. From the looks of it, swaying to votes of about three of the biggest names on the list would turn this meme back around on itself, and shift public sentiment away from Reputation crime.

Now it was time for a bit of social engineering.

The first was Aaron Michaels, the biggest name in Tech Blogging this week and a man who had been sitting on the fence all morning. The call was brief, and what it amounted to was, “If this keeps up, the entire Tech advertising model is going to take a nose dive. More importantly, public sentiment towards tech bloggers will bottom out and mainstream media will have a field day tearing citizen journalism apart.” It was enough, an hour later a scathing polemic appeared, calling Sanders an unmitigated shill and asking the law to take all steps necessary to ensure that this did not happen again.

The other two cults of personality weren’t too much harder. Once they got wind that this wasn’t just another Saturday morning meme, they were more than happy to say their piece. More often than not, that piece was not all too flattering for Mr. Sanders.

The ripple effect was almost immediate. Where once there was an almost cult following for Randy, now the blogosphere was stringing him up on the highest social bookmarking site. Even advertainment had a field day, selling everything from VMWare to Volkswagons on the back of Randy Sanders spoofs. A few hours later, a quick scan of the polls showed what I could easily read that the meme had been cracked and all was well in the world of reputation management.

Another successful day, and it wasn’t even 4PM. Time for a trip to the beach, I haven’t seen the sun in hours.

Web 2.0 Round

I tried to be as complete in this case study as possible, the major points are the importance that digital reputation will have in the landscape of the future as well as the ripple effect that cults of personality will have on everything from advertising revenue to public sentiment.

Finally, as contextual search and the semantic web become more advanced, software agents and data aggregation tools will become the equivalent to Google today.

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