Jeremiah Owyang discusses how web tools and social media enable companies to connect with customers

Calacanis’s “Web 3.0″ was right?

December 14th, 2007 | Category: Social Media

Jason Calacanis was laughed off the blogosphere for his definition of Web 3.0:

“Web 3.0 is defined as the creation of high-quality content and services produced by gifted individuals using Web 2.0 technology as an enabling platform.”

The folks at Google may have Been listening as today they launched Knol.

“Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it.”

and

“Knols will include strong community tools. People will be able to submit comments, questions, edits, additional content, and so on. Anyone will be able to rate a knol or write a review of it. Knols will also include references and links to additional information”

By chance Jason’s definition completely matches what Google (his competitor now) just launched. Because this is a Google product, could we expect search results to favor Google products that are correctly optimized to be found over Mahalo or Wikipedia?

Either way, this is a great business opportunity for Google, ‘you contribute content, we make you famous, and we can deliver ads’. I also think SEO and SMO firms will get in on the action, when it comes to Google rankings, search results and advertising, there’s already a booming industry here.

24 Comments so far

  1. dMix December 14th, 2007 8:50 am

    To give something a label like web 3.0 there has to be some major innovation behind it. Minus Googles credibility this product is not bringing anything new. This is more like baby steps in that direction.

  2. Aidan Henry December 14th, 2007 9:46 am

    Please don’t stroked Calacanis’ ego any more than it needs, lol

    Cheers,
    Aidan
    www.MappingTheWeb.com

  3. Dan Schawbel December 14th, 2007 11:15 am

    This is all BS in my opinion. Those definitions tell me nothing.

  4. jeremiah_owyang December 14th, 2007 12:29 pm

    If you check Jason’s twitter feed, he doesn’t see Knol as a threat.

  5. Matt Shandera December 14th, 2007 12:32 pm

    I would have to second that a “3.0″ designation should indicate a major fundamental change. While I do agree that the above is occurring on the web, I disagree that is a cataclysmic change worthy of a full point increment.

  6. Tabz December 14th, 2007 1:49 pm

    Yeah I’m not sure if this is Web 3.0 yet. Maybe.

  7. Krish December 14th, 2007 1:56 pm

    Jeremiah, Knol is not a Web 3.0 concept. Rather it is Web 1.0 concept being used to augment the processing of information. Web 3.0 is an altogether different system which lies in the idea of “machine intelligence”.

  8. Deep Jive Interests » Google’s Destruction, Step #1: Populate Search Results With Google Pages December 14th, 2007 2:02 pm

    […] and … God, is anyone keeping track of this stuff?), Google is now making a run, as you may have heard, to start populating its own search results by […]

  9. allen stern December 14th, 2007 4:03 pm

    Jeremiah you crack me up lately. So Google does a new service and that’s now Web 3.0 per Jason? What was OpenSocial, Web 2.35? Was the new Google Maps 2.47?

  10. Christopher Coulter December 14th, 2007 4:17 pm

    10. Have you hugged [web personality of the moment’s] ego today?

    20. If then = not. Why? Howdoyouexpecttogetnoticed? Goto 10.

  11. Chris Saad December 14th, 2007 4:22 pm

    Come on Jeremiah ;)

    Creating more pages on the web does not make Web 3.0

    Everyone knows that Web 1.0 is the web of pages, Web 2.0 is the web of people and Web 3.0 (shudder) is the web of data.

    Let’s just give it a more accurate name rather than a version number (DataPortability?)

    Also… Google making a Wikipedia killer? In my book this is just evil.

  12. Mathew Ingram December 14th, 2007 4:24 pm

    Thanks a lot, Jeremiah. Now Jason will be completely insufferable — er, I mean *more* insufferable :-)

  13. Fiat Lux » Google Knols - This Is Going To Be Ugly December 14th, 2007 4:29 pm

    […] there are competing knols on highly-charged topics like abortion or the state of Israel. And as Jeremiah pointed out, I expect that SEO/SEM companies are already thinking about how they could sell knol creation […]

  14. Dave Winer December 14th, 2007 4:40 pm

    Someone asked me a question about Web 5.0 last week, and it wasn’t a joke.

  15. jeremiah_owyang December 14th, 2007 4:58 pm

    @Dave Winer

    Oh dear.

  16. jeremiah_owyang December 14th, 2007 5:27 pm

    It sounds like everyone finds Jason very entertaining…funny comments.

  17. IAAdmin December 14th, 2007 6:28 pm

    Bingo…………:)

  18. Alberto Escarlate December 14th, 2007 8:45 pm

    @Dave Winer,did you know that in 5 dimensions any sphere can be unknotted? So Web 5.0 is the stage where there are no hyperlinks that would ever send you back to the original page.

  19. ryan December 15th, 2007 12:35 am

    In the spirit of self promotion, I recently left a comment on Fred Wilson’s blog avc regarding Social Blogging.http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2007/12/social-blogging.html

    I came up with the term Socialoging, which I think has some relevance to your original post.

  20. xvespa December 15th, 2007 9:39 am

    Web 3.0 won’t be called that way and i personally don’t think it will imply high quality media files (this article looks like a spam ad for knol)

  21. Darren Herman - Marketing, Advertising, Media and Technology Blog » Blog Archive » links for 2007-12-15 December 15th, 2007 11:23 am

    […] Calacanis’s “Web 3.0″ was right? (tags: trends forecasts media internet) […]

  22. Marc Lehmann December 16th, 2007 8:15 pm

    Interestingly Knol is a clear direction toward human search vs algorithm search from the biggest player.

    Surely Knol could be used to vote on what the meaning of Web3.0 will be. Everything else is uncontested opinion :)

  23. Knock-knock? Web 3.0 here! at Indubitabil, Nu Conteaza. December 19th, 2007 4:42 am

    […] Jason Calacanis has a definition of the web 3.0 for you, […]

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