Intellectual Property Law

Rushing ahead

By Susan Crawford

At a meeting tonight, someone talked confidently about a “Web 4.0 consulting business,” without really explaining what that meant.

This versioning is going by awfully quickly.

If Web 2.0 is collaboration and creativity, and Web 3.0 is the apotheosis of Second Life (although there’s an alternative view that 3.0 is the arrival of the Semantic Web), then Web 4.0 is….the space-time continuum collapsed? Virtual reality in holographic form?

I decided I could risk asking what Web 4.0 was. The answer I got wasn’t entirely clear. It seemed to have a certain amount of handwaving associated with it. So I went online after I got home. Here’s one definition:

Web 4.0 involves two-way individually-aggregated communal infocommerce predicated upon the six human senses!

An Intel-related blog says

Web 4.0 is the impending state at which all information converges into a great ball of benevolent self-aware light, and solves every problem from world peace to why Lost stinks this season. All humans will begin working 24×7 to feed our new data overlord on a steady diet of email, PowerPoint foils, and cute pictures of our grandkids and/or dogs.

Sounds good.  Sounds busy. And my favorite comment so far:

If Web 2.0 is the rounded corners and the Internet as a platform, and Web 3.0 is seamless integration of the various tools built on the platform, Web 4.0 must be algorithmic incorporation of that data into something useful.

Finally!

Full post as published by Susan Crawford Blog on February 21, 2008 (boomark / email).