It must be the rise in the stock market, and/or the trusty old adage that there is a sucker born every minute. This article on Web 3.0 is dense and wordy, so you may not want to spend much time actually reading it, but consider yourself warned that the "next big thing" (tongue firmly in cheek here) is Web 3.0.
Web 2.0 is generally regarded as, well, nobody really knows....it is a bunch of technologies like AJAX (a set of programming tools) and half-baked ideas like "social networking" that are all slopped together into a stew of Web applications that hardly anyone wants. A few companies are actually doing interesting and useful stuff (e.g. Google, Amazon), but 98% of Web 2.0 is hype.
That, apparently, is not enough, so someone has already decided we need Web 3.0. According the article, it will be a delicious concoction of the Web, artificial intelligence, intelligent agents, and semantic webs. Oh, frabjous day! I actually read the entire article, and it does not make a bit of sense to me. Artificial intelligence as a trend seems to pop up every nine or ten years, with the AI folks each time promising that it will be "this time for sure." Except AI has rarely delivered, ever. The Japanese spent billions in the eighties and promised they were going to solve all the world's problems with their Fifth Generation hardware and software. Don't hear much about that, do you?
The chronic disease of IT types is a naive belief that with enough code, they can do anything, including replacing our brains with artificially intelligent code, since "the brain is just a big computer." Uh huh. So as you begin to hear more about Web 3.0, my advice is to grip your wallet just a bit tighter; I see another dot-com bubble starting to form.