Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology with
Speaker 1: tech Stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hello again, everyone,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech stuff. My name is Chris Polette.
Speaker 1: I am an editor here at how stuff works dot com,
Speaker 1: and sitting across from me, as he always does, is
Speaker 1: senior writer Jonathan Strickland. The only way to win is
Speaker 1: not to play. You know, I really enjoy our our
Speaker 1: new studio. This is so much nicer than I'm glad. Uh.
Speaker 1: The only thing is the pool. We have to kind
Speaker 1: of stay out of the pool because it makes a
Speaker 1: lot of noise when we're trying to uh, trying to
Speaker 1: record a podcasts really stir Josh and Chuck and the
Speaker 1: electricity incident. We really don't want to get in net
Speaker 1: pool anyway. So let's talk a little bit about a
Speaker 1: subject that I find endlessly entertaining. Sure, Web two point oh?
Speaker 1: The heck is it? Is it? What we think it is?
Speaker 1: Doesn't mean anything? Where am I? Where do I live? What?
Speaker 1: I'm sorry? I just I kind of get off on
Speaker 1: a whole series of questions there. Web two point oh
Speaker 1: can mean a lot of things. But I can tell
Speaker 1: you what it meant when it was coined, and the
Speaker 1: person you have to think or blame, depending on how
Speaker 1: you look at it, I think in general, probably think
Speaker 1: would be O'Riley, the publisher, O'Riley vice president Dale Doherty,
Speaker 1: who came up with the idea, uh, basically back in
Speaker 1: a retreat that they were talking about different things, and
Speaker 1: essentially what he meant at the time was these websites
Speaker 1: survived the dot com crash, and this is why because
Speaker 1: they had they sort of had a common set of
Speaker 1: characteristics that people still wanted to use, right right. What
Speaker 1: sort of qualities set those companies apart from the ones
Speaker 1: that collapsed dot com crash? Sorry I'm interrupting. These guys
Speaker 1: had a business model in a lot of cases, and
Speaker 1: some of them didn't, which helped them along. Let's talk
Speaker 1: about the dot com crash a little bit before we
Speaker 1: get into web two point. Oh so, let's let's cast
Speaker 1: our minds back to the mid nineties. Okay, but I
Speaker 1: can't throw very far. I've kind of a wimpy arm. Right, Well,
Speaker 1: your brain doesn't weigh that much, so I think you'll
Speaker 1: be able to get some more distance than you think
Speaker 1: the back in the mid nineties. The web is relatively new.
Speaker 1: You know, the web really started coming out in the
Speaker 1: early nineties, UM, and companies were just starting to kind
Speaker 1: of get a presence on the web, and we started
Speaker 1: seeing companies that with existence that existed outside the web
Speaker 1: make an entry first, right right, So, like you know,
Speaker 1: it would be some recognizable brand creating a website as
Speaker 1: a way of marketing that brand. Now, at the time,
Speaker 1: no one really knew the most effective way of doing
Speaker 1: it because it was so brand new, right right. And
Speaker 1: in addition to a lot of a lot of companies
Speaker 1: thought it was just a flash in the hand. They
Speaker 1: didn't see a whole lot of value in even bothering
Speaker 1: with it in the first place. Well, and I can
Speaker 1: kind of understand why, because at the time it was
Speaker 1: really a niche thing that at that time. Again, college
Speaker 1: students were probably the number one consumers of the web
Speaker 1: when it first came out. UM and then people in
Speaker 1: research facilities think people who are using it as a
Speaker 1: means of actually communicating their their work to one another. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so in those early days, you might have thought,
Speaker 1: if you were if you were a corporate executive that, uh,
Speaker 1: why would we market directly to these people. We can
Speaker 1: use television and print marketing the way we've always used it. Um,
Speaker 1: this web thing is never going to go anywhere. Of course,
Speaker 1: that was not the case. The web exploded, and during
Speaker 1: that explosion, a lot of people got this kind of
Speaker 1: cool idea, like, what if we built a company that
Speaker 1: was founded upon the web. Web itself was the face
Speaker 1: of the company, the interface between company and customer, and
Speaker 1: will provide either a product or a service, and the
Speaker 1: web will be the way that we uh that we
Speaker 1: present that to to the average customer. And a lot
Speaker 1: of different companies sprung up using this idea. Everyone's thinking,
Speaker 1: this is going to be the future. Everyone's gonna buy
Speaker 1: everything online, um and uh. And before you knew it,
Speaker 1: companies were popping up in in the dozens every single day,
Speaker 1: and you had lots of investors interested in this idea
Speaker 1: pouring money into these these companies um that had either
Speaker 1: no business model, an unproven business model, or at least
Speaker 1: at the very least no proven revenue, right, I mean
Speaker 1: they I've heard more than one person referred to the
Speaker 1: early days of the web as sort of a wild
Speaker 1: West scene. You know, to overuse a cliche, but um,
Speaker 1: you know, essentially, you know, it kind of was like
Speaker 1: that people were in such a hurry to to to
Speaker 1: claim their territory, to to come to the web with
Speaker 1: a brand new idea or at least, you know, one
Speaker 1: that they could take ownership off before everyone else got
Speaker 1: to it, that they didn't really think through things very
Speaker 1: well well. And and these a lot of these little
Speaker 1: companies did not need the massive amount of investment that
Speaker 1: they received, and in a way that actually ended up
Speaker 1: hurting them. You get a company that what might need
Speaker 1: let's say a hundred thousand dollars investment in order to
Speaker 1: to really get off the ground and work, and what's
Speaker 1: instead get a million dollars of investment. And so the
Speaker 1: person righting the company be like, well, great, now I
Speaker 1: can hire tons and tons of people. And you ramp
Speaker 1: up faster that before you've even built an infrastructure, So
Speaker 1: before you've built the basic structure for your your business
Speaker 1: to rest on, you are going into full swing. And
Speaker 1: a lot of these companies could not maintain that momentum.
Speaker 1: And in fact, you got to hear stories about how
Speaker 1: people were going to be paid in in stock options
Speaker 1: because these companies were doing crazy amounts of of you know,
Speaker 1: the the amount of money being invested into into them. UM.
Speaker 1: Some of the ones that went public, their stocks rose
Speaker 1: dramatically overnight because everyone was interested in it. I mean,
Speaker 1: the initial public offering or i p OH for some
Speaker 1: of these companies was massive, and and in the weeks
Speaker 1: immediately following UM, some of the people who had stock options,
Speaker 1: and some of the very early pioneers of the Internet,
Speaker 1: some of the ones that are still around, especially the
Speaker 1: ones who've had real staying power, they made quite a
Speaker 1: bit of money just on the stock options that they
Speaker 1: were granted as part of their UH incentive packages. Right now,
Speaker 1: if you were if you were to make a ton
Speaker 1: of money off this initial UM Internet boom, this initial
Speaker 1: web boom, the best way for you to have made
Speaker 1: money off this would be to get tons and tons
Speaker 1: of stock and then almost immediately sell it off because
Speaker 1: because the real problem was that as the reality set
Speaker 1: in that these companies were not generating revenue and therefore
Speaker 1: not making a return on the investment that had been
Speaker 1: poured into them, the companies began to collapse. Now the
Speaker 1: stock became worthless, and so people who were paid in
Speaker 1: stock essentially made nothing. UM or or close to nothing,
Speaker 1: and a lot of these companies went away and only
Speaker 1: a few, uh by relative means anyway, survived. Now, those
Speaker 1: companies that did survive were the ones that that Dougherty said,
Speaker 1: we're web two point o companies. These were the ones
Speaker 1: that did something differently than the ones who died out,
Speaker 1: and that's why they were able to stick around. So
Speaker 1: the the task at hand at this this conference was
Speaker 1: let's look at these companies, see what sort of things
Speaker 1: they did differently, and then that is what we will
Speaker 1: now define as being what is required to be successful
Speaker 1: a successful company on the web. Yeah, and uh, over
Speaker 1: the years, I think people didn't necessarily understand what what
Speaker 1: he meant, um because web two point out of the
Speaker 1: term web two point I was kind of gotten hijacked
Speaker 1: and almost now is synonymous with social networking. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: that's that's simply because, Um, their earliest websites were basically
Speaker 1: one way websites. The publisher would put them up on
Speaker 1: the web, and I mean about the most interaction you
Speaker 1: had with it was, you know, if there was an
Speaker 1: email address on there for you to reply to, you
Speaker 1: could you know, send the author an email and let
Speaker 1: them know what was going on but there were really
Speaker 1: wasn't any embedded interaction of any kind, and the content
Speaker 1: on that site in general tended to be static. So
Speaker 1: you had an animated gif alright, But the what I
Speaker 1: mean by static is that it did not change. In
Speaker 1: other words, if you visited it in May of nine
Speaker 1: and then you went back in March of of and
Speaker 1: the web page was essentially the same page because there
Speaker 1: was no you know, it wasn't dynamic at all. It
Speaker 1: would just stay the same. There wasn't really any incentive
Speaker 1: to go back to that web page, right, And a
Speaker 1: lot of companies hadn't really figured out how to leverage
Speaker 1: the web in such a way where you were providing
Speaker 1: useful information and a useful way for customers to interact
Speaker 1: beyond just saying, hey, this is who we are and
Speaker 1: this is what we do, especially not in a way
Speaker 1: that they could monetize and and try to make a
Speaker 1: business out of. So let's talk about you could put
Speaker 1: anything you wanted to on there, but if people weren't
Speaker 1: coming back and they weren't buying something from you, you
Speaker 1: really weren't getting anything from it. A matter of fact,
Speaker 1: if you were paying for hosting, then you are paying
Speaker 1: money to read your content. For them to read your
Speaker 1: content and not getting anything in returns, that really isn't
Speaker 1: a particularly practical business model. Now that's that's what we
Speaker 1: call a bad business model. Let's talk about one that
Speaker 1: actually ended up being a good business model, although it
Speaker 1: took years for it to turn around. And I'm talking
Speaker 1: about Amazon dot Com. Yes. Now, Amazon was one of
Speaker 1: the companies that Alerty would point to and say, this
Speaker 1: is an example of web two point oh, and I
Speaker 1: would agree, even though it was a company that took
Speaker 1: years for it to really start making enough money to
Speaker 1: to start and being a return on investment UM. One
Speaker 1: of the things that Amazon did that really helped out
Speaker 1: early on was Amazon allowed its users to post reviews
Speaker 1: of products. Yes, and this was a an interactive way
Speaker 1: where customers could get involved in the process and it
Speaker 1: it it added value to Amazon dot COM's service, and
Speaker 1: because of that, it was able to survive the dot
Speaker 1: com crash, or that's part of why it was able
Speaker 1: to survive. The fact that it that customers valued that
Speaker 1: particular part of the service, as well as the fact
Speaker 1: that they could use it to to shop for whatever
Speaker 1: it is they wanted UM meant that they would come
Speaker 1: back to Amazon dot Com and actually use the service,
Speaker 1: as opposed to some of these others where you visit
Speaker 1: once and then you're like, well that was cool, but
Speaker 1: there's no reason to ever come back. Another thing that
Speaker 1: Amazon had in its favor is the algorithm on the
Speaker 1: back end that enables uh, the software running the site
Speaker 1: to identify not only what you have bought, but it
Speaker 1: helps you It helps match up customers that have bought
Speaker 1: the same thing and make recommendations to you. So suddenly
Speaker 1: there's a reason to go back and shop because you go, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, I really like this one book, but you know,
Speaker 1: I don't know, I don't really know what I want
Speaker 1: to read next. And Amazon dot Com could say, well,
Speaker 1: you know what, other people who bought this book bought
Speaker 1: this book too, and you you know, read the description
Speaker 1: of it and read some of the reviews, and you know,
Speaker 1: you know what, that really does look good. And of
Speaker 1: course they expanded into many many other markets as well.
Speaker 1: But you know, just it's an experience where you go
Speaker 1: to shop, you get an idea of what people think
Speaker 1: about the product, you get an idea of other things
Speaker 1: that you could buy along with it. That's, you know,
Speaker 1: the add on sale and retail terms. Um, oh, hey,
Speaker 1: you're buying this, other people like this one, why don't
Speaker 1: you buy both for especially discounted rate. Um. You know
Speaker 1: that that really helped them survive and and thrive really
Speaker 1: in the in the post dot com crash market. Um.
Speaker 1: And it also sort of spawned what Wired um editor
Speaker 1: Chris Anderson called the long tail, because suddenly you were
Speaker 1: finding items in the back catalog, things that may have
Speaker 1: even been published years ago, um, that other people liked,
Speaker 1: and suddenly those items were starting to sell. And it
Speaker 1: wasn't just the top ten of of you know, just
Speaker 1: the best sellers, it was pretty much anything that that
Speaker 1: Amazon carried, and um, suddenly they were able to compete
Speaker 1: with the brick and mortar stores the world, which basically
Speaker 1: were just carrying stuff that they knew they could sell
Speaker 1: right now. So UM, that was definitely a good example
Speaker 1: of that. Yeah, and uh, getting back to the dynamic
Speaker 1: ver sycstatic, this is also when we started seeing things
Speaker 1: like trends like blogging really start to take off. Blogging
Speaker 1: is another good example, and that it's if you go
Speaker 1: to a blog, then that that content changes sometimes on
Speaker 1: an hourly basis, depending on the blogger, but at least
Speaker 1: like if you visit a blog a couple of times
Speaker 1: a week, you'll notice that there's new content up. Um
Speaker 1: blogging was one of those things that really attracted people
Speaker 1: to different websites. Again, it gives you a reason to
Speaker 1: return to the same site over an over again. It's
Speaker 1: not just that you know you don't you don't go
Speaker 1: there just whenever you need something specific. You go there
Speaker 1: because you're interested in the bloggers point of view and
Speaker 1: you want to see the latest information that that person
Speaker 1: has to offer. Um also the whole Wisdom of the
Speaker 1: crowds notion. This is another one of those things that
Speaker 1: came out of the whole web two point o. And
Speaker 1: we touched on it with the Amazon dot Com stuff
Speaker 1: and the user reviews. But another, of course, another great
Speaker 1: example of that would be all the wikis, including Wikipedia,
Speaker 1: and these are websites that have become successful because they
Speaker 1: build a community of users and they rely upon the
Speaker 1: users to provide content. So you're no longer just creating
Speaker 1: content and serving it to people and telling them that's
Speaker 1: what they want. That's the Steve Jobs method. What you're
Speaker 1: doing is you're allowing the community of users to create
Speaker 1: the content that they do want and that they're all
Speaker 1: providing their own point of view and their own expertise
Speaker 1: to kind of to build it up over time. Now,
Speaker 1: this is not always success. Well, there are problems that
Speaker 1: come up because we're people, and people tend to have
Speaker 1: different ideas of what's best for any given situation, and
Speaker 1: some of them have agendas and you know that can
Speaker 1: come into play too, But the basic idea is pretty sound. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: I was, you know, the idea of user generated content
Speaker 1: folksonomy's crowdsourcing, you know, getting everybody into the act instead
Speaker 1: of just the content producers. Um. Again, Anderson said, you know,
Speaker 1: computers democratized the act of creating content, and the Internet
Speaker 1: basically democratized the act of, uh of distributing that content,
Speaker 1: and suddenly everybody's you know, creating videos to share on
Speaker 1: YouTube and taking other items and mashing them together to
Speaker 1: make new things. Um. Then you have you know, the
Speaker 1: interactivity sites where there are you know, games and and
Speaker 1: things that you can do ajax and the other a
Speaker 1: p I s that allow you to, uh to make
Speaker 1: individual sites much more interactive and and functional than they
Speaker 1: used to be for the user. And you can customize things,
Speaker 1: you know, portals, um, where you really have control over
Speaker 1: the content RSS feeds to bring to incorporate your blogs
Speaker 1: into a reader. Yeah, you can syndicate your blog feeds
Speaker 1: and aggregate them in one place, um, along with weather
Speaker 1: and traffic and stock reports and all that stuff. You know.
Speaker 1: It's it just makes those sites interactive, you know, and
Speaker 1: to the point where, uh, you can you have a
Speaker 1: reason to come back to them every day, and there
Speaker 1: there is a way to keep you there. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: Facebook certainly has found a way to do that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you've actually touched on something else that I thought I
Speaker 1: would mention about Web two point oh, and that part
Speaker 1: of the whole idea is that you can access the
Speaker 1: web through multiple um means not just sitting at your computer,
Speaker 1: but on say a cell phone or smartphone right or
Speaker 1: tablet device or whatever. Um. That's another important part of
Speaker 1: web two point oh. A good web two point site
Speaker 1: would be accessible through multiple forms of electronic devices, so
Speaker 1: that way a person can consume that product or service
Speaker 1: or whatever however you wanted to find it, um in
Speaker 1: the way that he or she prefers. So you might
Speaker 1: have certain people who for example, Twitter is a great
Speaker 1: example okay. Some people prefer to use Twitter just by
Speaker 1: going to the Twitter website, reading the updates, and occasionally
Speaker 1: updating from there. Some people prefer to download a client
Speaker 1: to their computers so they can keep up with Twitter
Speaker 1: updates throughout the day. Some people prefer to only interact
Speaker 1: with Twitter through some sort of handheld device like a phone,
Speaker 1: where they've either got a Twitter client on there, or
Speaker 1: they're actually using the Twitter Phone API where they can uh,
Speaker 1: I can update through text messages. UM. I don't know
Speaker 1: anyone who does that specifically because it tends to eat
Speaker 1: up your text messages pretty quickly. But I'm sure there
Speaker 1: are people out there who do use that. I have
Speaker 1: done that on occasion, but that's it's a good example there.
Speaker 1: Twitter has really got the right idea as far as
Speaker 1: giving users the most flexibility to to access that service
Speaker 1: as possible, or Twitter kind of is still you know,
Speaker 1: questionable as the whole business model angle. Um. Some of
Speaker 1: these companies have great business models where they are clearly
Speaker 1: making plenty of revenue. UM. There are other companies where
Speaker 1: the business model is either emerging or still kind of murky,
Speaker 1: where we're not really sure if they figured out a
Speaker 1: way to monetize what they do. Uh, that's one of
Speaker 1: the downsides of some of the folks who are on
Speaker 1: the web is that they've got these great ideas of
Speaker 1: ways of providing really compelling services or websites or whatever,
Speaker 1: but they don't have the business expertise to find a
Speaker 1: way of actually leveraging leveraging that to make money beyond
Speaker 1: the initial investment. Sure, so I can get investors to
Speaker 1: pour money into it, but again, when we look back
Speaker 1: at the dot com crash, if you don't find a
Speaker 1: way to generate revenue so that you can repay those investors,
Speaker 1: then it just becomes a borrowing game until people are
Speaker 1: no longer willing to lend you money. And once they've
Speaker 1: figured out that you don't have a viable business model
Speaker 1: and you're not making money, all you're do is spending
Speaker 1: millions of dollars, they're not exactly likely to continue funding.
Speaker 1: It becomes kind of like a pyramid scheme. You have
Speaker 1: to keep asking more people to pay money so you
Speaker 1: can pay back the investors from the previous round as
Speaker 1: well as keep going. Yeah. Yeah, that that gets scary
Speaker 1: really really fast. And in fact, a lot of us
Speaker 1: have felt that Twitter was kind of on that path, because, um,
Speaker 1: everyone recognizes that Twitter provides a very valuable service. But
Speaker 1: until Twitter finds out a way of making money from
Speaker 1: that valuable service, it's a question of how long are
Speaker 1: people willing to pay money in the hope that eventually
Speaker 1: Twitter will get its act together and pay back investments.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure that everybody knows for sure that that's
Speaker 1: very well vluable service. I'm sure that all the people
Speaker 1: who have used Twitter and quit very early on in
Speaker 1: Twitter does have quite a few of them. We call
Speaker 1: them losers users. We don't call them that. I call
Speaker 1: them users. Um, but no, I mean not everyone agrees
Speaker 1: on that. But that's that's one of the things about
Speaker 1: web two point. Now, there are plenty, plenty, plenty of
Speaker 1: sites that offer variations of different things, and there's generally
Speaker 1: a flavor that people will eventually hit on when they go,
Speaker 1: oh wait, I like this one a little better because
Speaker 1: it's got it's it's orange instead of green. Um, So
Speaker 1: there's there's there's always somebody popping up with with a
Speaker 1: new site these days, but the trick is to get
Speaker 1: them to to stay on. And then of course people
Speaker 1: ask about web three point Oh right, Well, I think
Speaker 1: the big winner of web two point oh out of
Speaker 1: everyone is the whole idea of the social network, although
Speaker 1: ultimately you can say that the big winner is really Facebook,
Speaker 1: at least for the United States. Um yeah, almost every
Speaker 1: other social network at this point in the United States
Speaker 1: isn't also ran, even my Space, which was ahead of
Speaker 1: Facebook for a really long time. And then there were
Speaker 1: a Friends too. Yeah, let's yeah, it's barely warranted a mention. Um,
Speaker 1: there's my yearbook dot com. Don't go there, so they
Speaker 1: But no, the this Facebook really definitely one out in
Speaker 1: the long run. But the social networking idea, the whole
Speaker 1: idea of connecting people together so that they can communicate
Speaker 1: and participating games and that kind of thing, that really
Speaker 1: took off, especially after like no, I'd say two thousand four,
Speaker 1: two five, Um, that's when you really start seeing the
Speaker 1: social networks start to ramp up. And then once Facebook
Speaker 1: at the scene and that was what two thou seven
Speaker 1: when they went public with everybody, Uh yeah, then it
Speaker 1: really exploded. So yeah, moving on to web three point
Speaker 1: what could that be? Well, the question is whether or
Speaker 1: not it's even a meaningful term. I I honestly think
Speaker 1: that at this point um. I think to some degree,
Speaker 1: web two point oh is a valid term, especially if
Speaker 1: you keep it in the concept of, uh what Dale
Speaker 1: Doherty was thinking of. You know, these survived because they're viable,
Speaker 1: that they can they can support themselves to that end,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure there's ever really going to be a
Speaker 1: Web three point I mean, we've made so many improvements
Speaker 1: since the dot com bust, but those you know, improvements
Speaker 1: have come gradually one by one. People sort of had
Speaker 1: their head screwed on straight, both venture capitalists and the
Speaker 1: people who create most of the uh, you know, the websites,
Speaker 1: the new style websites with interactivity and and and that
Speaker 1: kind of thing. I'm trying deliberately not trying to call
Speaker 1: it web two point out. I mean, generally, it seems
Speaker 1: like most most websites have an idea of what they're
Speaker 1: you know, the the group of people that are trying
Speaker 1: to reach, the business model they're going to do used
Speaker 1: to sustain themselves, and you know, how they're going to
Speaker 1: achieve their goals. And I'm not sure that there's a leap,
Speaker 1: a significant leap, where there's a demarcation between web two
Speaker 1: point oh and Web three point out that people are
Speaker 1: going to point back and go, oh, this this is
Speaker 1: actually when everything really changed and it's now web three
Speaker 1: point out. I can think of a couple of possibilities,
Speaker 1: although both are well really I can think of one possibility,
Speaker 1: but it's really kind of a uh, you know, orwell again,
Speaker 1: fat chance kind of thing, which is that Web three
Speaker 1: point oh becomes Facebook is synonymous with web, or Google
Speaker 1: is synonymous with Web. The idea being that you have
Speaker 1: one company that is so good at defining the web
Speaker 1: experience that it becomes the de facto definition of the
Speaker 1: web experience and slowly eats up everything else until anything
Speaker 1: else you would encounter on the web has to play
Speaker 1: ball with that particular corporation. So, in the example of Facebook,
Speaker 1: instead of having web pages that you would go and visit,
Speaker 1: you would have all these ferent Facebook apps or Facebook
Speaker 1: fan pages or whatever you want to call it, uh
Speaker 1: to interact with different brands. Now, that would take years
Speaker 1: for that to actually happen, but I could see it
Speaker 1: happening if if, in fact, trends continued the way they do.
Speaker 1: For example, the idea being that people are relying more
Speaker 1: on sites like Facebook to find information they want and
Speaker 1: ask their friends questions then they would going to a
Speaker 1: traditional search engine. They also have to beat out Google
Speaker 1: to get to that rule. Yeah, so Google and Facebook
Speaker 1: might eventually face off against one another, or one might
Speaker 1: try to buy the other one. Uh, that would be interesting.
Speaker 1: I do have a different concept of what three point
Speaker 1: oh might be. What's that the semantic web, that's a
Speaker 1: great point. Yeah. Semantic web is where you start having
Speaker 1: some artificial intelligence in the network so that the web
Speaker 1: itself is respond ending very specifically to what you want
Speaker 1: to see, so that it's it's kind of learning about
Speaker 1: you as you use the web. It relies on a
Speaker 1: technology called Resource Description Framework or RDF and UM and XML,
Speaker 1: which is by a lot of people's terms successor to HTML,
Speaker 1: although HTML five will probably call that into question. But basically, uh,
Speaker 1: the difficulty in turning things turning the current web into
Speaker 1: the semantic web is it requires people creating additional markup
Speaker 1: for each page. Because what the semantic web is trying
Speaker 1: to do is um it takes two different items and
Speaker 1: puts them into a context, and that basically will help
Speaker 1: you match up your interests to the interests of other
Speaker 1: people and it makes connections very quickly or can but
Speaker 1: it also requires people to learn this new technology and
Speaker 1: implement this new technology. It will probably require new browser
Speaker 1: technology in order to make that work. So it's not
Speaker 1: a pure, in simple, as we know it right now,
Speaker 1: web technology something that we can just throw into a
Speaker 1: website and make it work. It's going to take quite
Speaker 1: a bit of infrastructure managing in the back end. But
Speaker 1: it is something I mean, you know, it's Tim Berners
Speaker 1: Lee helps come up with it. So, I mean, it's
Speaker 1: a really neat idea that it would make the web
Speaker 1: more personal and more usable for a lot of people.
Speaker 1: And in some ways there are some web two point
Speaker 1: oh websites that sort of incorporate the concept behind it,
Speaker 1: but it's not as efficient as purely what is described
Speaker 1: as the semantic web, which requires again a lot of
Speaker 1: markup on the back end. Right, So, first of all,
Speaker 1: Tim Burners Lee for those of you who don't remember
Speaker 1: as the guy who invented the World Wide Web. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that's why why Chris was a name dropping there.
Speaker 1: But the yeah, the the whole um concept does require
Speaker 1: lots and lots of work by human beings to make
Speaker 1: the websites smarter. For lack of a better term, it's
Speaker 1: smarter than quotes here right, so that you when you
Speaker 1: are searching for something, the well quote unquote knows what
Speaker 1: it is you're searching for. UM, as opposed to you know,
Speaker 1: the old search engines. You would put in some keywords
Speaker 1: and you would get a bunch of results, and the
Speaker 1: quality of your results would largely depend upon the quality
Speaker 1: of the keywords you used. So if you didn't use
Speaker 1: the right keywords, or if used very generic keywords, you
Speaker 1: might get tons and tons of responses, but only a
Speaker 1: few of them would be relevant to what you actually wanted,
Speaker 1: and you'd have to sort through them all. With the
Speaker 1: semantic web, theoretically your search engine would be able to
Speaker 1: figure out exactly what it was you were looking for
Speaker 1: and return the things you wanted, and maybe even return
Speaker 1: some stuff that you didn't know about but it has
Speaker 1: determined you would also be interested in based upon those keywords. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it would be uh, it would be a nice leap
Speaker 1: forward or something very useful I think for most people.
Speaker 1: But um, and nobody is just racing to get on
Speaker 1: that bandwagon. Yeah, just to kind of them. Well maybe
Speaker 1: not nobody, but few people are are racing it on
Speaker 1: that bandwag and I've seen some other predictions, things like
Speaker 1: the web three point o type thing would be more
Speaker 1: of a three D experience where you have an avatar
Speaker 1: wandering through the web. I honestly don't think that's gonna happen.
Speaker 1: I don't think it's as efficient as using just very
Speaker 1: simple links. Um. It's much more time consuming, and while
Speaker 1: I can understand the science fiction appeal of it, uh,
Speaker 1: in practice, I just don't see it being very useful.
Speaker 1: And I think Second Life is a good example of that.
Speaker 1: The Second Life was adopted by a lot of people
Speaker 1: and then abandoned by a lot of people. There's still
Speaker 1: people who use it and who still find value in it,
Speaker 1: but um, but for the most part, I think people
Speaker 1: realize that it's just not the most efficient way to
Speaker 1: navigate through the web, and even though it's kind of
Speaker 1: cool if you need to get something done, it's not
Speaker 1: the route to go. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's one
Speaker 1: of those things where there are just too many people
Speaker 1: with too many different kinds of interests, and if there's
Speaker 1: no money in it for people, then they're not going
Speaker 1: to pursue it as a viable technology. And things follow
Speaker 1: by the way sign, right, right, But We'll keep our
Speaker 1: eyes open so if we do figure out what Web
Speaker 1: three I know it's going to be. If anything, we'll
Speaker 1: let you know and hopefully will be making money on it. Now,
Speaker 1: if you have any ideas of what you think the
Speaker 1: future of the web is going to be, right, let
Speaker 1: us know. Are just as tech stuff at how stuff
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