Instrumenting the World #1 (Cell Tower Rainfall Detection)
Recently, whenever people ask me "What's Web 3.0?" I've been saying that it's when we apply all the principles we're learning about aggregating human-generated data and turning it into collective intelligence, and apply that to sensor-generated (machine-generated) data.
A good example of this trend showed up this morning on slashdot: "An anonymous reader writes "Signals from mobile phone masts have been used to measure rainfall patterns in Israel, scientists report. From the BBC article: 'The University of Tel-Aviv analyzed information routinely collected by mobile networks and say their technique is more accurate than current methods used by meteorological services. The data is a by-product of mobile network operators' need to monitor signal strength. If bad weather causes a signal to drop, an automatic system analyzing the data boosts the signal to make sure that people can still use their mobile phones. The amount of reduction in signal strength gave the researchers an indication of how much rain had fallen.'"
There are so many non-obvious sources of data being generated by current technology. Some data collection will be explicit, but there are other sources that will depend on creative data mining. Entire business sectors will be disrupted as someone realizes how to cheaply program a service that was once manual and expensive.
This isn't quite what David Weinberger was talking about when he coined the lovely phrase "the semantic earth" (he was talking specifically about GIS, but I think it's what he meant! The implications are just now coming into focus. Location technologies such as those discussed at Where 2.0 will be one backbone for organizing this data, but there will be others.
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An alternative idea for 3.0 follows.
I think your idea about sensors is a bit too incremental. That's already here. Heck, what with fishcams and all, that's really Web 0.1.
To pick a definition for Web 3.0 I think you ought to look at some bright-line problems facing Web 2.0. One (there are many possible) that stands out to me is:
Democratization of Data and Behavior.
What in the heck do I mean? For example, if a lot of people contribute to a global encyclopedia, that shouldn't mean that the domain owner who started the collection gets so privileged. It's not enough we can download the data en mass. It's not enough anyone can theoretically "fork" the encyclopedia. Rather, in general, there should be fine grained competition on editorial policies and editorial interfaces. Articles (e.g., in cross references) shouldn't be to "an article on Wikipedia". Rather, they should be to a line of development for that article that is distributed -- not tied to a particular site. A line of development defined by who did it not who hosted it. The king is a fink, etc.
Similarly, as individuals, our blogs, photoblogs, etc..... links to those should work even if we switch hosts and hosting them should be a competitive commodity.
Web 3.0 should be about beating down the currently excessive potentials and actualities of cults of personality and cults of corporation and domain-based monopolies.
"If you ask me, which you didn't (per se), but there ya' go."
-t
Web 3.0 should be about beating down the currently excessive potentials and actualities of cults of personality and cults of corporation and domain-based monopolies.
Similarly, as individuals, our blogs, photoblogs, etc..... links to those should work even if we switch hosts and hosting them should be a competitive commodity.
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Christian Cantrell [05.06.06 09:36 AM]
Perhaps this is a much more obvious example, but my friend and I were just discussing the wealth of economic and even psychological data available in Second Life. And the best part is that you don't really even have to mine it. Just put together the right queries, and the data is right there.
Another example: many of us figured out years ago that eBay's completed item search was basically a Kelly Blue Book for everything in the world. And of course, data about how search engines are used is just as interesting as the results they return. Very interesting stuff.