The Web in 2007

No, I believe it won’t be the year for Semantic Web nor Web 3.0. Come on, Web 2.0 has just been here. It’s almost saturated but it haven’t burst, yet. There’s still a long way to go to Semantic Web, regardless it’ll be the Web 3.0 or not. As underlined by Techcrunch, late November, there’s still chicken-egg problem to have Semantic Web implemented using bottom-up approach. The framework has already been there, eg: RDF, OWL. But there aren’t yet any Joe Six Packs tool to do data annotation to form meta data needed by Semantic Web. Even if you’re a die-hard RDF/OWL fan, you’ll still be pretty much exhausted to annotate all of your data, except you are dealing only with FOAF :p. What about your blog? And those company websites, those still web 1.0 tv listings, etc. Many more.

While bottom-up approach, which can be considered the most effective way to form semantic web (remember: user generated content, user annotated data ), is still need some love before it can really lift up, top-down approach ain’t to be merciful either. Clearforest has start this approach, recently release an extension (Gnosis) and web service API for it’s annotation service. Reviewed by Techcrunch, Clearforest’s Gnosis colorizes phrases on a web page and provide somekind of categorization (label/tag/annotation) in sidebar. Seemed to be a bit raw, but it’s quite impresive. And as suggested, added value can be obtained via creative mashup. Which apparently had been a contest (ProgrammableWeb, til Dec 11) but yet has no report on the result, ie: winner nor contestants and winner has been announced.

So, what would be cool in 2007? I have a hunch for Web 2.0 is looking pretty much saturated, which can be marked from the similar appearance each day but no where to be far some certain boundary, the platform will move to mobile. So it’d be Mobile 2.0. I’m betting all my money on the saturation of platform, though the lack of tools and framework for mobile 2.0 seems quite risking my huge (lack of expertise :p) bet :D.

Where are you betting?