HTML was created during the ’80s and even that was based on an older technology, SGML, which was itself based on a mark-up language created in the ’60s, GML. XML is also a descendant of GML and all we’re doing now is realiing the potential of these languages and their associated technologies. We’re reinventing the wheel.

Web 3.0 will take these re-inventions even further with an attempt to make the web self-indexing and self-linking through technologies similar to those in use on Wikipedia - this will be the Semantic Web. An author will never need to worry about finding content to link to any more, they’ll simply need to mark the content as linkable and hiden engines (possibly Yahoo!, Google, et al) will go and find the most relevant content to link to automatically.

The Semantic Web will be a real step forward in Internet use and will redefine how online authors and content providers contact an and interact with an audience, but even this is only one more step in how we provide and access data, not in how we act as a community (I’ve not found a way of demonstrating in Parliament Square from behind my keyboard yet!).

There are also issues over who decides how that content is defined as relelvant and selected for linking - this represents a whole new set of possibilities for marketeers and even malicious interception of this linking tecnology. Many people already invest their trust in the content of Wikipedia and yet there are those who set out to mislead the audience by perverting the content it holds.

Mind you, who says blog authors are ethical?

Web 2.0 may have a couple more years left in it, but with the growth of virtual environments and virtual economies such as Second Life there’s a possibility for the 2 dimensional data repositories that all websites are to take on new characteristics in virtual environments. Imagine accessing news archives: written articles could be represented as yellowing newspapers - the older a story is the more decayed the paper - or a video archive that adds more scratches and dust to the playback as the content ages. Who’ll need the real world?

Who knows, maybe the author William Gibson is a prophet and the world he describes in books like Mona Lisa Overdrive and Count Zero really are the future of the Internet …