Who decides that something is Web-3.0 ? Why is it labeled as Web-3.0 ? Can it just be called Web?

These technologies are already available (ie, commercially), so why is there a need to hype up the Web?

In the world today, everything that is differentiated needs a label, otherwise there is no difference between anything. The web 3.0 term was coined or at least popularized by John Markoff of the NY Times as being the semantic web. We have taken liberty to broaden the term, but that is the essence of it.

If we just called it the "web conference" it would not signal any difference between, for example the web 2.0 conference. And by the way who decides what web 2.0 is either.

Finally, if you are against "hyping" or promoting things, I fear lots more things than this conference frustrate you, as marketing, sales, and promotion is a necessity of modern business.

Hank Williams
Web 3.0 Conference, Co-chair

But don't get me wrong, it's fine for advertising-tech firms to focus on advertising -- my problem was really that there was little else at the conference besides advertising. Apart from ads, there was a lame PowerSet demo and presentation which focused entirely on indexing content from FreeBase. But why not just use FreeBase directly? The PowerSet CEO acknowledge his engine has severe problems with performance in both time and space, so it's unlikely IMO that Microsoft will wind up doing much useful with them. The FreeBase talk was actually quite interesting, but that was the only really worthwhile thing there.

I was also hoping for a decent set of vendor presentations, but there was only a half dozen little kiosks, few of which were actually staffed.

Finally, "web 3.0" as a term has almost no traction, and is even more vaporous and ill-defined than web 2.0.

So in other words, if this year's conference is similar to last year's, IMO it's not worth going unless you are in NYC anyway and have a free pass.

Product Marketing needs differentiation. Otherwise, why call it even "Web" as you proposed, why not calling it "Communication", or "Human Products/Artifacts" (to go higher on an imaginary taxonomy of "things")?

On your question "who decides what is Web 3.0", the answer is: you, the reader, audience member, participant. The goal of the conference is to propose, and set a public debate and offer a forum for it. Truthfully, I heard a lot of people complaining about nomenclature, but proposing nothing, or even worse, nothing better.

Miramon, while I agree that last year's conference was heavily focused on advertising-applications of semantic technologies, I disagree with your hatred of the "parasitic" nature of advertising. I really don't want to get into the problems with that approach (see my blog, see my comments to last year's RWW Web 3.0 coverage), etc. I do want to say this:

you're confusing a couple issues here: advertising is one application of semantic technologies, not the only one, agreed. This year's conference (and moving forward), we paid particular attention (and used audience and participant feedback) to balancing advertising with enterprise applications, and others.

I do take a reaction to your statement that advertising tech is such a "minor" area. Your term is both loaded and relative, and we would ge nowhere if we started to debate on what "minor" is, but let me attempt:

minor = minuscule in terms of success factor for Internet companies? Methink you're wrong: advertising is one major way of driving revenue for Internet companies, startups, publishers, etc. (I don't have to point to data to support this, just do a Google search for "eMarketer online advertising spending", or see how much money is Google, or any other successful Internet company are making out of advertising).

The other way to make a successful company is via subscription (aka, freemium model), LinkedIn (which also uses advertising by the way), etc.

Yet the other way is to use semantic technologies to enhance existing enterprise infrastructure (better data, better insights, etc.) so more a B2B play. That's still valuable, and will be covered in this year's conference.

My point is: I don't see why advertising is so bad for business since it's the most successful way of monetizing that we know of, to date (if you come up with a new different one, you will be Internet's hero). I don't see how is it "minor". The only alternative from the perspective of the consumer I can see is the equivalent for the Internet to what cable companies are trying to do nowadays (charge subscribers tiered pricing dependent on how much bandwidth they consume). I didn't hear a single peep from the public reaction that that's even "cool". So in other words: either we stop hating advertising if we want our businesses to be successful (=make some money in the process of improving humankind), or we scale down our dreams of success to a much smaller scale.

Either way, our conference next month will cover all of the above so will address your issues.

There is no point to going on about how things with real value have people who are willing to pay for them; this is very tired and old hat by now, and it's clear that the current notion of value is in flux -- viz. the troubles of the newspaper industry.

I don't say advertising is bad for business. You put words in my mouth.

I do say that when a supposedly advanced and groundbreaking technology or set of technologies can find nothing better to do than to focus on advertising tech, there is something seriously wrong. The W3C vision of the "semantic web" has little if anything to do with advertising. Web 3.0's definition is unclear, but it certainly has something to do with the word "semantic", and there is certainly some nexus or linkage between the semantic web and Web 3.0.

However, this focus on advertising suggested last year that in fact Web 3.0 is not a worthy successor to Web 2.0, which while almost as poorly defined, has created a myriad of sites and services that evidently deliver direct value to users and subscribers. Sure, lots of Web 2.0 sites are badly monetized, or are monetized almost exclusively by advertising (or both), but the point is that Web 2.0 isn't actually *about* advertising.

Web 3.0, judging from last year's conference, *is* about advertising, and so it is necessarily more minimal, fringe, and unimportant if that is the case.

Let's not bring TBL and the "original" vision of the "Semantic Web", that's been an over-discussed topic, and whether his vision had anything to do with advertising or not. I believe the first is a set of technologies, the other is an application and/or monetization method. They can and should be separated.