Ghost in the Shell and Web 3.0+

Gary Hayes of Personalize Media has written an interesting piece on Web 3.0. He suggests that the web is becoming a more immersive environment in which real-time collaboration and communication is becoming more and more important.

We’re just starting to see that now with Web 2.0 — pushing the boundaries of information sharing from being physical, centralised and controlled by organisations, to decentralised, collaborative and controlled by consumers, and now more often in virtual-spaces.

For the evolution of the web, it means a move from an interactive platform to one that is immersive, semantic and intelligent:

• Web 1.0 - unidirectional and “push”. E.g. traditional brochureware-style websites
• Web 2.0 - interactive - “push” + “pull”. E.g. Social computing websites like MySpace, Wikipedia, and Facebook
• Web 3.0 - immersive. E.g. 3D Virtual Worlds and ubiquitous computing
• Web 4.0+ - semantic world with intelligent agents and adaptive information

The real benefits to users are just starting to emerge, with online spaces to work and share information, technology that truly supports information anytime and anyplace. Society is also witnessing the emergence of digital natives who are born ‘technology aware’ and expect to be able to use the same technology they take for granted in their social lives in the work environment. The resultant evolution of society and machine may be an online environment for Web 3.0+ not too dissimilar to that imagined by Masamune Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell — immersive, pervasive, virtual and ubiquitous.

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