I recently returned from a Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco and thought I'd relay some of the emerging trends on the Web. First of all, everyone seems to have a different definition of Web 2.0, so I may as well throw my hat in the ring and describe how I see the web's first three generations.

We could say the internet, as we know it today, was first formed in 1983 when ARPANET, a National Science Foundation sponsored network switched over to TCP/IP protocol. The next ten years were the beta version of the Web, where the internet was largely in the hands of a few academics and hobbyists who were exploring the possibilities for the network. In 1994 Netscape introduced the first mass marketed web browser which put the web into the hands of the regular user and caught the attention of commercial enterprises. The next ten years or so, could be called Web 1.0: a time when existing business processes and content was migrated onto a new medium. Most businesses saw the web as platform for email and an extension of their existing sales channel - really nothing more than a way to post an electronic brochure and take orders. In the last couple of years we have seen an emergence of Web 2.0 applications. These take advantage of unique aspects of internet computing that didn't exist in the pre-web days. Things such as low distribution costs which have turned us into a society of producers, the use of democracy to vote on the value of content, and the power of the community to unite those with niche interests regardless of physical location. However, not all is well in this new playground. With this openness we are seeing some issues, specifically in regards to privacy, ownership, and boundaries of anonymity. The following describes three major positive attributes of Web 2.0, followed by three potential issues with Web 2.0. I'll end with a vision of what might be possible in the world of Web 3.0 as these trends converge.

The first attribute of Web 2.0 that I noticed is that we are moving from a world of consumers of entertainment into a world producers. Thanks to time-saving technologies that improve overall productivity, members of society have a better standard of living and increasing more amount of free time (although it may not seem like it). Traditionally, we spent our free time by reading a book, a newspaper, a magazine or perhaps watched TV or a movie. But in each of these cases, there were very few producers of these entertainment mediums, and most of us were content to be passive consumers of these products. The real barrier to entry was the cost of distribution (if I wrote a book, how would others read it unless someone paid a lot of money to print and distribute it?) We now find that people are becoming prolific producers of content - whether it be a contribution to Wikipedia (an online encyclopedia), an article for The Party of Common Sense, a MySpace page, or posting a video on YouTube - in each of these cases we are producing, not just consuming, and utilizing the web as a virtually free distribution mechanism.

The second attribute is the harnessing of democracy. With all this new content, how do we determine which content is good and which is bad? For example, on YouTube there is a rating system that allows you to see the "Most Viewed" and "Top Favorites", immediately allowing you to see what is most valued by the community. When a good video comes out, someone sees it and pass the URL to their friends, who watch it. If they think it's good, they pass it on to their friends, and so on. So the very act of viewing a video, you are creating a vote for the video. This is an extreme powerful tool, one that Google learned early on. They used the number of cross references to help determine the value of that site. So, for example, if the New York Times web site had more citations from other sites it was deemed a more creditable source and it’s article on Web 2.0 would be displayed before The Party of Common Sense’s article (side note: references aren’t the only criteria Google uses to determine search relevance). In another example, in one forum I belong to, the posts are sorted by the most recently posted (or replied to). When someone posts an easy question or something of dubious content, you might get a quick reply or two and then no one else replies and it quickly falls to the second page or beyond. However, when there is a hot topic that raises emotion, it will illicit many replies and can keep the message on the first page of posts for weeks or even months on end. In many of these cases, the net citizens are voting without even knowing it.

The third attribute I noticed is the power of the community. If you had told me that someone would create an on-line encyclopedia (like Wikipedia.org) that allowed anybody to add an entry or update an existing entry, I would have thought that you would end up with junk. However, there is a dedicated community that takes the Wikipedia mission seriously and quickly identifies and eradicates any cyber-vandals or individual biases. Studies have taken a number of topics at random from both Wikipedia and existing commercial encyclopedias and had them reviewed by experts and found approximately the same error rate. To me, I find it incredible that you can have so many volunteers get together and produce something of such quality. Furthermore, it is even more amazing that in anarchy of the web, a community can be formed and is able protect itself against others. There is nothing but the community policing itself to prevent cyber vandals from attempting to destroy Wikipedia, or for someone to hijack the product to reflect personal agendas. And it's not just limited to web projects such as Wikipedia. Open Source Software is created by volunteers - a process where anyone can contribute and yet the resulting product is, in many cases, of the same or higher quality and commercially available equivalents. For example, one could easily argue that the open source and free Linux operating system is more stable and less buggy than the privately created Microsoft Windows family of operating systems.

Together, these attributes provide a tremendously useful resource that will continue to be utilized and harnessed in new and exciting ways in the foreseeable future. Information and knowledge will be encouraged to be shared at new levels, especially as those in the commercial sector see opportunity allowing information in their business to be used by those outside their organization. Why spend millions to consultants to analyze your business data when it can be done for free by volunteers? As these underutilized, but extensive commercial digital islands of data are opened and connected, exciting new things can be done. Why not let avid experts in your tap your product support database and share their knowledge to other users for free? Why not allow someone to find the correlation between placement and sale of diapers and beer for you? Why not let your consumers design your next product? Companies will soon see that trading exclusivity for the free assistance is a very cheap bargain.

However, it's not all smooth sailing. There are several disturbing factors that could upset the progress of Web 2.0. Three in particular: Privacy, ownership, and anonymity.

Privacy. In the Web 1.0 days, especially during the dot com boom, I would trade my name, address and email to a company for a T-Shirt. At the time I thought of it as trading 10 minutes of my time for a T-Shirt. Then the junk mail and spam began rolling in. Even if these companies went bust, as many did, my information continued to exist and once this information escaped from the original sites I gave it to - it takes on a life of its own and I lose complete control of who has that information and how it is being used. It wasn’t until later that I realized that I was really trading 10 minutes a day for the rest of my life sorting through spam and junk mail - hardly worth a T-Shirt. Today people are posting a surprising amount of personal information, much more than they realize. Take a student that creates a Facebook page. Even if our hypothetical student and Facebook user alertly doesn't leave their gender, age or location, we may still be able to determine that information. For example, a quick look at their "likes and dislikes" can provide a treasure trove of information: someone who's favorite movie is "Hannah Montana" is likely to be a very different age than someone who lists "Caddyshack". Likewise, those people our student "friends" provides clues as well. One's friends may not be as vigilant and list their age and location, and although one clue doesn’t make a case, if most your virtual friends are of a certain demographic, you likely are too. Likewise, nuances can provide information. Each generation invents their own lingo and parsing a users' post can help determine information. If someone posts "c u l8tr" (see you later) they are likely a member of today's texting teens, while if someone posts that something is "the bomb", "radical", "righteous" you're dealing with a different generation. Companies are just beginning to recognize the value of the data, which can be a marketer's dream or a parent's worst nightmare. It’s not just demographic information, but also the type of information. For example, that embarrassing picture of you at the Frat party might have been funny when posted in college, but now as a working professional it doesn’t help your job prospects. And deleting it doesn’t mean it's gone. It could be on a backup server, cached in a Google database, or even copied and posted elsewhere. As in the Web 1.0 days, the headaches of the Web 2.0 days are just beginning.

Which brings me to the next troubling issue: Ownership. Who owns all this content? At the conference, companies were trying to get developers to develop code and content for their site - making the case that they were the platform that Web 2.0 applications would exist. It makes perfect business sense. You spend your time building a widget, application, or providing content which keeps their site fresh and cool, while they get the advertising revenue. For most sites it's not a big deal. Let's say someone starts a site that fits perfectly with an area of expertise you have, and so you and thousands of other likeminded people contribute. The site becomes a must-see for your industry. Most people don't have a problem if the owner makes a little money off this site with advertising to keep the servers running, or even make a decent living. But what happens when the owner is offered hundreds of millions of dollars or more? What if Amazon (listed by Hitwise Ltd as the twentieth most visited site in the US) realizes that Wikipedia (listed by Hitwise Ltd as the thirteenth most popular web site in the US and received approximately 684 million visitors annually) as a tremendous marketing opportunity? When someone searches on "Teddy Roosevelt" or "Thailand" the Wikipedia entry might just whet the reader's appetite. By listing a series of books on the life and times of Teddy Roosevelt or Travel books to Thailand sold by Amazon it could unlock billions of dollars in additional sales. (Disclaimer, the prior example was completely hypothetical and Wikipedia is owned by the non-profit WikiMedia which has promised not to sell out). Amazon has a market cap of $32 billion, so you can see it would be easy to make a case that could value Wikipedia in the range of several billion dollars. Who would get that money? The volunteers that put an estimated 100 million hours of time into the project, or Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger (the founders of Wikipedia)? With these kind of figures, you'll start to lawyers getting involved.

The final troubling issue is the boundaries of anarchy and anonymity provided by the Web. The Web has provided a playground where individuals can freely express themselves, secure behind the anonymous web screen and a fake persona. However, there is a dark side to it. In October 2006, Lori Drew, the mother of a friend of 13 year old Megan Meier pretended to be a 16 year old boy, "Josh Evans" and established an on-line relationship with Megan, and then cruelly broke it off. Within 24 hours Megan committed suicide by hanging herself. There have been numerous arrests (and one has to wonder how many missed trysts) between pedophiles and underage kids. A new site, JuicyCampus.com provides the electronic equivalent of the bathroom wall and promotes anonymous gossip and slander. Online gambling, pornography, and hateful propaganda are readily available to anyone wishing to partake (including underage kids). Spam is overwhelming email boxes everywhere. This begs the question: can the internet community govern itself? For example, if no one responds to the spam email, eventually the spammers will go away - or will there always be someone somewhere that decides that spam offer is irresistible? Because of the decentralized nature of the web that crosses international borders, is it even possible legislate or govern the web? Is this anarchy and anonymity necessarily a bad thing that requires governance, or just greater awareness? Are the majority of people responsible enough to ignore the bad, focus on the good, and recognize that this is only an electronic frontier that should be carefully shielded between your real life and your online life? It should be interesting to see whether the Wild West attitude toward the web is tamed, or just accepted for what it is.

Finally, I'd like to examine where I think we might go from here, and into Web 3.0. First Web 2.0 will need to burn itself out. There will be a plethora of 'me-too' sites. As a part of the power of democracy, expect to see sites fail. How many video and picture posting sites do you need? How many places to create blogs, mash-ups or web pages? Much as we saw in the Web 1.0 days with auction networks, there was consolidation. But the good news is that expect new Web 2.0 sites to continually be born, often with fresh ideas and new twists. Finally, I believe, we’ll start to see truly new and fresh Web 3.0 applications emerge. Those that expand well beyond the traditional web platform and into other devices. Already exciting work is being done with mobile phones. For example, by anonymously monitoring mobile phones that transmit GPS location and tracking the movements of those GPS locations across many users, they been able to track traffic flows and monitor congestion in real time. This is just one simple example, and the sky is the limit for coming up with new and imaginative applications. Last year Nokia spent $8.1 billion to buy Navteq, a maker of mapping software, because although all the ideas haven’t been conjured up and the applications built, they realize the value of the building blocks in matching phones, GPS devices, maps, and the web. Although long prognosticated, it is very possible that we will be constantly connected and the web hook into your car, appliances, and other devices. Now let's example a sample of how these trends may turn into a Web 3.0 application.

One the questions that keeps arising is: What will happen to so-called old media (newspapers, magazines, tv, etc.)? Despite their attempts to cross into the Web, they've continued to witness falling viewership and readership. But without paid journalists, who is going to be there to collect the news? Can we count on amateurs? Take the case of a sporting event sometime in the near future. Phones are now coming with increasingly sophisticated video capabilities. Would it be possible to create a free equivalent to network coverage of network event entirely through volunteers? Here's how it might work. Fans in the stands would provide real-time video feeds via cameras and video phones to a specific site. There, producers would view all the feeds and choose those to show and be able to rewind, switch and otherwise produce a combined video feed. They would then publish their edited feed in real time where other volunteers would provide commentary and analysis (who hasn't wanted to try their hand as a sportscast announcer, or at least thought they could do a better job than some of the talking heads that are on today?). There would likely be a lot of these feeds and viewers would tune into those that they feel have the best production suited towards their needs. At each layer, the amateurs would provide this service as a hobby, free of charge, with the goal of being the "best" with the most viewers. Inevitably, the hacks wouldn't get watched and would die, and those that are serious about it would. From a viewers perspective, this would provide a much wider range of viewing options. Since there are many feeds available to viewers, different feeds would cater to different target audiences. There may be feeds that cater to each team's fan base, to expert audiences, to newbies to the sport, and so on... The big question is will the quality be there? Ten years ago, I would have said that an online encyclopedia, or software created by volunteers would never be as good as slickly produced commercial products - but I was wrong. In ten years, perhaps the quality will be as good, if not better, and provide more viewing options. Until then, we'll just have to watch and wait.