Web 3.0 - When "the Internet" becomes "the Intranet"

When I was updating my information on LinkedIn.com, a business networking site that allows professionals to create and expand their own private networks of colleagues, clients and consultants, it occurred to me that in an open Internet environment where it's hard to know who you can trust (e.g. what used to be called "cold calling" in the pre-Internet sales world is now called "spam"), the idea of a private network is more and more appealing:

What if you could share your own private network with the people and organizations you trust, exclude all other Internet connections (Web, email, etc) unless it passed your own criteria for inclusion, and could police your network by blocking any sites or emails that violated your rules in any way? What we think of as "the Internet" could fast become "the Intranet (capital 'I')".

While everyone's still garnering an understanding of what Web 2.0 means, a Web 3.0 could creep up and overtake it because of bandwidth, security and proprietary content drivers.

EXAMPLE 1: BANDWIDTH AND ACCESSIBILITY

SavetheInternet.com is a coalition that has "banded together to save the First Amendment of the Internet: network neutrality." Their site defines Net Neutrality thusly:

Net Neutrality is the reason why the Internet has driven economic innovation, democratic participation, and free speech online. It's why the Internet has become an unrivaled environment for open communications, civic involvement and free speech. Who wants to get
rid of Net Neutrality? The nation's largest telephone and cable companies — including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner — want to be Internet gatekeepers, deciding which Web sites go fast or slow and which won't load at all. They want to tax content providers to guarantee speedy delivery of their data. They want to discriminate in favor of their own search
engines, Internet phone services, and streaming video — while slowing down or blocking their competitors.

Their concern is that the open playing field of the current Internet, where everyone gets equal; bandwidth consideration, will be lost in favor of a Web 3.0 where private enterprise offers a faster, but more exclusive Net for those who can afford it.

EXAMPLE 2: SECURITY AND USABILITY

Personal InfoCloud, by Thomas Vander Wal of InfoCloud Solutions, talks about about how users have a kind of preferred way of accessing information online, what he calls the "Local InfoCloud":

As the my understanding began to lean toward familiarity as a core component of the definition of Local InfoCloud, the term began to embrace the social and community aspects (I am working on shying away from the term community as it is a broadly used term and I am trying to be a little more precise). Interactions with people, services, networks, applications, etc. that are familiar are means of bringing information closer to us as people with data, information, and media needs. The Local InfoCloud eases access. It eases the ability to find and refind information. It is information that is closer to us, not necessarily in physical proximity, but in the ability to access, in which familiarity is bread. I spent much time considering changing the label from local to community or social, but there were elements that did not perfectly fit
that either.

Location-based services may be created by a service, but understanding the mindset, terminology, dialect, and cognitive frameworks that are germane to that physical location the information can be structured to resemble or mirror the social elements of understanding in that place. I will get to a better understanding of this when I talk about the Location aspect of the Local InfoCloud. As well, thinking in the Model of Attraction framework the Local InfoCloud is that which is attracted closer to us than the Global InfoCloud.

What I extrapolated from Vander Wal's blog is that the Internet, or the "Global InfoCloud", could become much less appealing for users than their own private network where they could control how they find and refind information, and how they interact with more familiar people, services, networks, applications.

EXAMPLE 3: PROPRIETARY CONTENT AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

Back in the late '90s when I wrote a weekly Internet column for our local newspaper, one of the things I predicted was that the Internet would become more proprietary, just like how online subscription services such as AOL, Compuserve and so on used to operate a few years earlier. That's not to say that you won't be able to access any content on the Net, but any content worth accessing would be fee-based.

In a recent New York Times book review, the issue of digital publishing is given another spin. When all books are digital, it makes it easier to combine and recombine information like never before:

Liberating books from their physical contexts could make it easier for them to blend into one another, a concept heralded by Kevin Kelly in an article in The New York Times Magazine last month. "Once text is digital, books seep out of their bindings and weave themselves together," wrote Mr. Kelly in an article that was derided by Mr. Updike in his BookExpo polemic. "The collective intelligence of a library allows us to see things we can't see in a single, isolated book."

Of course, that should alarm the entire publishing industry, especially authors. Up till now, a book with its two sacred covers was a complete work, a product, a publishing unit of sale, a reference and an ISBN number. But if your book simply becomes a part of the swirling maelstrom of data on the Web, integrated into other databases and chopped into fine bits like the old K-Tel food processor infomercials we used to see on TV, who makes money on it? And who gets the credit if your content is simply hashed up into other dynamically generated pages of material?

Again, that's where a network of private intranets would appeal to those who want to preserve the integrity of their intellectual properties. You control who can access it, who can buy it, and what they can do with it. I can think of many other reasons why Web 3.0 may happen sooner than we think, but I'd really like to hear from others on this subject. Post your responses here, or email me: Garth@Contentology.com and I'll share your thoughts in this blog.