the reflexions insider

Last week I attended the Web 3.0 Conference in Santa Clara, CA. The atmosphere was a cross between an academic conference and a trade show, trending toward the latter. Sessions were mostly organized as panel discussions split into two tracks: technology and business.

I’ve compiled some comments and insights from the sessions I attended. I thought I’d share them here for anyone who’s interested. This is the first of three rounds of comments, split into Strategy, Technology, and VC/Startups. These are my best attempts at paraphrasing based on my notes and I’ve done my best to attribute these comments where possible.

Semantic technologies are about defining an architecture of participation (Tom Tague, Thomson Reuters)

Shared ontologies are a necessary condition for web 3.0 and therefore must be community-driven (Marc Hatfield, Alitora Systems)

Semantic tech is increasing the granularity of the web’s nodes, shifting from documents to things like objects, facts, places, and people. This increase of granularity is a defining characteristic of web 3.0. An effect of this trend is to increase the number of storable data points by several orders of magnitude. This presents an enormous information management problem. Therefore we need fundamentally new tools to process, organize, and consume this amount of data. (Tom [...]

As just about everyone has already heard, Google has released its own open source web browser called Google Chrome. The open source community project is called Chromium. With a powerhouse like Google behind it, will this be a significant challenge to Internet Explorer and will it change how we use the internet? We won’t know for quite a while, but we can gain some insight by looking at Google’s motivation and the technologies they choose to incorporate.

With Mozilla’s Firefox being open source and having a few years of maturity behind it, why didn’t Google simply contribute code to the project?  One reason is Firefox’s focus on streamlining basic web browsing while Chrome’s focus is on richer web applications.  Google’s view of the web is one of increasingly complicated client-server applications.  They see a gradual paradigm shift in the internet, which they are happy to help grow, but which would require a web browser more dedicated to the task.

Another reason for starting from scratch might be one of control.  While it is open source, Chrome’s direction is effectively controlled by Google.  They are the primary developers and any project forks would get only a fraction of Google’s visibility with the public.  The [...]

Now that the Web 2.0 Expo is over I’ve begrudgingly returned to the east coast. For a New Yorker in the web development business, the bay area is like a mythical forbidden city where technology people are a kind of ruling elite. There’s no doubt that New York is a hotbed of web innovation, but web companies are still small potatoes compared to the other industries that call New York home: finance, fashion, art, music, publishing (and you thought Rodney Dangerfield had a hard time getting respect).

Coming from New York the energy around the valley is palpable. The cities themselves are woven into the history and culture of this industry. Names like Cupertino and Mountain View conjure up glowing corporate logos. And then there are the legendary hotspots like San Jose, Palo Alto, San Mateo.

At the Web 2.0 Expo you could almost sense the 6- and 7-figure deals taking shape in the bustling corridors of the Moscone Center. The San Francisco Chronicle had a special column dedicated to the event in the Business section. Web engineers, social media gurus, user experience consultants, web 2.0 designers. All there. And all using this new, amorphous language that seems to spout from Tim O’Reilly like beat poetry.

Just a few of the terms that [...]