We're moving beyond the days of a simple search box in which you type a query and get a list of results. Today, companies are trying to build a smarter web - one that understands what things are, how they relate, and perhaps most importantly, what things you're going to like. But has Web 3.0 arrived in its full semantic glory? No, not yet. But it's clear we are getting closer than ever before.

To begin, there's the seemingly minor announcement from Xmarks, the company formerly known as Foxmarks, but now rebranded thanks to their multi-browser support. Xmarks has introduced additional features to their bookmark synchronization product which include things like site suggestions and smarter search. By leveraging their large stash of data (600 million bookmarks), Xmarks is now able to recommend sites right within your search results. This is done by placing an Xmarks icon next to those results which are most popular, meaning most bookmarked, on their service. Also, when you visit a web site and click the Xmarks icon in your address bar, Xmarks will return a list of sites similar to the one you're currently browsing.

The data used to deliver these recommendations and suggestions are anonymized - a good thing considering that our browser bookmarks are often the ones we have specifically chosen not to share with others. For bookmarks to become recommended in this fashion, they must be fairly popular on the service - a level that's determined by the number of times saved as a percentage within a particular category.

In a way, what Xmarks is doing is very similar to what StumbleUpon's browser extension does too. Like Stumble, Xmarks annotates our search results highlighting those that may be of value to us. Yet Xmarks takes it a step further by discovering related sites, too.

The Smarter Tracking Tool (Evri)

Another company revealing new innovations here at DEMO 09 is Evri, a semantic search engine which understands what's called "natural language." Evri knows the different parts of a sentence (subject, verb, object) and it knows how those parts are connected to each other.

Although still too raw to be your main search engine, Evri has a new "Collections" feature which lets you follow topics (aka search queries) that are of interest to you. After returning a list of search results which include Wikipedia entries, news articles, videos, and images, you can click the star labeled "Follow this" to continue to track that topic. What's missing from this feature, though, is an alerting system which will inform you of updates via email or RSS. However, the company says that's coming later on.

Evri is also branching out from being a web destination alone by introducing Evri widgets which can now be seen in action on the Washington Post's web site. These widgets parse the content on the page to deliver smart recommendations of similar articles both on the site itself as well as elsewhere on the web. 

Another new feature launching now is Evri's browser toolbar. By clicking on a button next to the Evri search box in the toolbar, the people, places, and things on a web page are highlighted. Click on these items and pop-ups appear with more information about the keyword, what's related to the topic plus news, images, and videos.

This additional layer of information on top of standard text makes browsing the web and reading articles a deeper and richer experience. No longer do you need to perform web searches in a separate window to understand definitions, context, and meaning. Instead, Evri's toolbar adds an intelligence to the web that was never there before. It's clear that the company is still working towards making that additional layer more accurate and more relevant, though, but conceptually the idea is solid.

The RSS Reader That Learns (Ensembli)

Ensembli, an RSS reader of sorts, takes a different approach to tracking topics than Evri does with its "Collections" feature. Where Evri's UI can sometimes feel a bit cluttered with its multimedia results, Ensembli's interface is simple - you just type in a topic and it will continue searching for new articles related to what you entered. But this reader doesn't simply pull information for you - it learns what you like. Every time you read, ignore, or discard a story, Ensembli gets to know your tastes a  little bit better.

While this feed reader is far too simplified for RSS junkies like us, it's easy to see how Ensembli could be a good introductory tool for RSS beginners. Still, the sources it returns sometimes seem lacking and it's hard to say if this will ever be any more useful that a simple Google Alert, for example. Nevertheless, it's not really the feed reading itself which makes Ensembli intriguing, it's the learning element. Whatever algorithm is at work behind the scenes figuring out your likes and dislikes is what's the most important aspect of this new technology.

Getting Smarter...Little by Little

Taken by themselves, the above announcements may have seemed more evolutionary than revolutionary, but look at them within a broader scope and you can see a pattern beginning to develop. In this transitional period from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0, we're starting to see tools and services that aim to expand upon the traditional search experience in order to deliver us to a more intelligent web. On this new web, we're moving beyond SEO and PageRank to determine relevance and instead are seeing new technologies develop that better understand meaning, context, and personal preferences.

Stayed tuned...part 2 of "The Smarter Web" will continue tomorrow.

With the DSRC system in place, cars can become nodes on Muni-Wi-Fi networks, Wi-Fi hotspots, and home Wi-Fi networks. The possibilities are nearly limitless for what that could mean. Dealerships can diagnose vehicles cable-free, cars can receive real-time downloads of maps and traffic conditions, they could communicate wirelessly with toll stations, and the vehicles could even automatically download music from home PCs. (Or maybe iTunes Wi-Fi store? We don't see why not.)

In addition the numerous applications that would make a connected car both useful and fun, there's a public safety element to the system as well. Vehicles could alert their drivers of congestion and accidents, could help drivers safely perform maneuvers like lane changes, could help prevent collisions, and much more. As you traveled, the data about what lies on the road ahead could be relayed from car to car so there is no lag between when the tractor trailer overturned and when you, the driver five miles back, is informed of this. "This technology essentially equips vehicles with the ability to see around corners and predict and avoid dangerous situations," said Professor Alex Grant of the ITR project.

Lest you think the connected vehicle is just a pipe dream that won't be realized until sometime in the distant future, listen to this: Cohda Wireless has already completed over than 700 DSRC trials, for 15 distinct DSRC use-case scenarios, in the U.S., Italy and Australia. These trials covered over 10,000 km during which 100GB of random data was transmitted. The results of the trials proved how Cohda Wireless' technology excelled over other in-vehicle Wi-Fi chipsets. The company is now saying the technology will be in wide release by 2012. That's not too distant at all.

For more information about internet-connected objects, see "5 Companies Building an Internet of Things."

Ambient News is a new Firefox add-on written by Mozilla developer Atul Varma and is currently available as an alpha release. The add-on tracks your browsing habits, learning which sites you visit most frequently. It then pulls the headlines in from those sites and displays them for you in a beautifully fading list every time you open a new tab in Firefox. If you see something that interests you, just click the link and you'll be taken to the web site where the headline originated. Privacy advocates, rest assured - no data is shared outside your browser.

Intelligent Agents to the Rescue!

As Michael Calore of Wired notes, the add-on is a great workaround for the biggest usability problem facing RSS. "Many people don't know what it is or how to take advantage of it," he writes. "The first hint that a feed exists is a funky orange or blue icon. Click on it and, in most cases, you get prompted to load another application. Sometimes, you just see ugly, raw XML output."

But since we're mostly web geeks here at ReadWriteWeb, we're more enthralled with another aspect to this tool: its intelligence. As we mentioned not too long ago, cloud agents are on the rise. The term, coined by blogger Chris Arkenberg, refers to automated agents that help us better deal with the volumes of data we have to sort through every day. Although Ambient News isn't necessary a full-on cloud agent - it doesn't actually work in the cloud - it can still certainly be considered an agent, especially since it helps us sort through a barrage of information in a new way.

Other Alternatives

Ambient News is not the only alternative to the traditional RSS Reader. Over the past year at ReadWriteWeb, we've also made mention of other alternative news readers like Feedly, which puts a magazine-style interface on top of Google Reader. Another popular RSS reader is Snackr, an Adobe AIR app that scrolls headlines across your screen like a news ticker. Then there is, of course, FriendFeed, a lifestreaming application that's quickly becoming an alternative way to share information among the early adopter set.

Alternative RSS readers aren't for everyone, though - journalists, bloggers, researchers, and the like may still need to use a jam-packed feed reader in order to seek out the elusive info they seek on a regular basis. But for those of you who are more casual web surfers and blog readers, alternative RSS readers are a less stressful way to get your news without the news getting to you.

For those of you who don't know, Zigtag is another entry in the social bookmarking collection of tools. Like delicious, Diigo, and Ma.gnolia, Zigtag helps you categorize your bookmarks and share them with others. When Zigtag went into development, bookmarking was all the rage. The company's goal was to make bookmarking easier by adding a layer of semantics to the tags themselves.

Zigtag, you see, understands the meaning of the words you assign to a tag. When you tag to a page, Zigtag actually assigns it meaning rather than just a simple word. If that sounds revolutionary...well, that's because it is. Sort of.

Not the Only Semantic Tagging Service

Because of Zigtag's slow progress, they can no longer claim to be the only semantic tagging application available today. Another, Faviki, also offers an intelligent tagging service based on structured data. Both services attempt to address the problem of user-generated tags. That is, even though what you tag "NY" may be the same link that I tagged "New York," no bookmarking service ever knew the tags were related.

Zigtag and Faviki attack this problem in different ways. Faviki suggests tags for you to use, not from a community of users and their tagging history, but from structured information extracted from DBpedia, a community-maintained database created by extracting information from Wikipedia.

Zigtag, however, eschews suggestions and lets you tag items as you wish. It doesn't matter what personal system you use for tagging (one word, two words, underscores, plus signs, etc.) because Zigtag understands the meaning of the tags. In Zigtag, a link tagged "New York" is returned along with other links tagged "New_York." Zigtag also understands that one tag may have different meanings and groups those items accordingly. For example, there's a New York and Company clothing store and a New York in England that may have been tagged "new york." That level of understanding is something that's unique to Zigtag and sets it apart from other bookmarking services.

Thanks to the service's ability to understand meaning, Zigtag users can join groups related a shared interest. Since Zigtag knows what you mean by your tags, it is, in theory, easier to find links you would be interested in on Zigtag than with other bookmarking services.

Is This Really Web 3.0?

Zigtag may be one of the first tools to step out of the Web 2.0 box. Where "Web 2.0" implies there is a social element to a service, it's generally speculated that Web 3.0 will bring about the intelligent web. Zigtag delivers this intelligence, but is it enough?

The only downside to Zigtag is that it requires you, the user, to manually insert the tags. In fact, it even relies on user-generated tagging and has built its entire service around that concept. That may be where Zigtag went wrong. Although two years ago, what it offered was ground-breaking and unique, as we enter 2009, we're asking the question: "Is tagging dead?"

At first, collaborative tagging, also known as a folksonomy, appeared to be the future of the web. It was a rejection of the search engine in favor of the community. It was our collective intelligence harnessed for the purpose of applying meaning and order to the pieces of the web in ways that computer-based tools could not.

As time went on, though, the one thing that made a folksonomy appealing - it was made by people! - was also the very thing that gave it problems. User-generated tags were likely to produce unreliable results. Zigtag addresses that problem, but it does not address what may end up being the true source of failure for folksonomy-based systems: people are lazy.

Now that there are myriads of services using tagging, thanks to the explosion of Web 2.0, we're getting sick of all the manual labor involved. Tag your links, tag your photos, tag your blog entries, tag your RSS feeds, etc.

While at one time, a semantic-based tagging system like Zigtag may have seemed like a vision of Web 3.0, we've now come to a point where we wonder if it does enough. It's possible the next revolution of the web won't be a system that understands the meaning of the tags we created, but knows how we would have tagged things if we had bothered to do so and then does it for us. And if that's not the future of the web...well...perhaps it should be.