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I recently had a chance to have a conversation with Szavanna over at OpenCafe and talk shop. A lot of good questions were answered and I thought it would be nice to share them with you. For the full interview, point your internet browsers here.

Questions

Web 2.0

Szavanna begins with, “You say your blog is about “Web 2.0 culture, and how to survive in it” - it does sound like there are some challenges to overcome in this new online world - what are some of these?”

The short list are these: information overload, loss of identity, management of reputation, and privacy to name a few. For every new innovation there are associated challenges. Web 2.0 is no different.

The next question asked me to briefly define the evolution of the web, “Web 1.0, web 2.0, web 3.0 - how would you say the web evolved over time and where is it heading?”

Absolutely. Web 1.0 was the static web, in this web we were fed information and we consumed it. Web 2.0 is the community web. Now, information is all a part of a conversation. We have social networks, blogs and wikis that allow is to interact with knowledge. Web 3.0 will be the semantic web. When we have orders of magnitude more knowledge than any one person could ever hope to deal with, we’ll need ways to parse it down into manageable chunks. Web 3.0 will answer these questions.

Another great question asked me to expand upon Web 2.0 Culture. Specifically, how the themes associated with Web 2.0 can be expanded to include the wider culture, “I have always been interested in finding ways of ‘translating’ web 2.0 concepts to just ‘2.0 culture’ what would be possible ways of broadening this new trend and include everyone in it - be it Internet user or someone without computer and Internet access?”


2.0 culture. That’s an interesting concept, one that I agree with. The idea is simple, “2.0″ is conversational knowledge sharing.

I know something, whether it is a broad topic or a narrow niche and I make my knowledge easily available to those around me. Basically, “2.0″ thinking is evangelizing for the long tail.

Instead of thinking of knowledge in terms of broad subject we think more in terms of narrow niches, and we focus our energy on spreading that knowledge as efficiently as possible.

Web 2.0 Roundup

It’s this last point that I wanted to expand on. This idea of “Web 2.0″ is really just an expansion of previously held beliefs in community building that have been a part of modern society for a millennium. The Web 1.0 world was one where we were all hunters and gatherers, wasting vast amounts of our time to find shallow pockets of information. It was a search and find web. While this sort of web makes an useful utility, it was intellectually unsatisfying.

Web 2.0 moved the web into something that more closely resembles the way that our society functions. Information exists in silos and when that information is not readily available communities in the form of social networks exist to pick up the slack. Web 2.0 culture then is more or less modern society. It is a world where the sum total of mankind’s knowledge is distributed through formal channels and the relevance is determined by popular opinion. We have been dealing with this sort of reality since the first radio broadcast brought media into our homes.

If Web 2.0 is modern society, what then is Web 3.0? Well, as likely as not it is just a forward looking version of our society. Where Web 2.0 and the resulting “2.0 culture” values breadth of information above all else, 3.0 culture will almost certainly put more emphasis on density of information.

As mobile devices become smarter and computing hardware becomes cheaper, we will be able to carry more and more computational power around with us. As Wi-Fi and cellular networks become more ubiquitous, “always on” connectivity will take on new meaning. Knowledge may no longer be purely how much information that you can store in your memory, but how well you use that information and how quickly you can fill in the gaps in your knowledge using the available information networks.

In short the separation between the digital and terrestrial world will narrow. What this means for our society as a whole is a complicated issue, and one of the major reasons that I write. Thanks again Szavanna for the interview.

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