What is Web 3.0?

Wednesday, May 23, 2007 by Dave Winer.

First, I think of Web 2.0 as the Two-Way Web, the Read-Write Web, the Web of User-Generated Content. It's Flickr and blogs and wikis. It's everybody creating the medium for everyone else. 

Imho, the next step after that, I hope, is the professional media fully embracing the new media, no longer see it as a threat to their continued employment. Seeing amateur public writing, the former audience who is no longer silent, as sources who can get attention for their ideas without going through an intermediary.  

I think MSM will continue to shrink until they accept bloggers and podcasters as legitimate sources of news and perspective, without interpretation by professional reporters. 

I totally disagree with my friend Robert Scoble who says that newspapers are dead. There's always been too much made of death in the tech world, in fact newspapers are still published, you can pick one up at any airport or train station. Many people have them delivered at home. We often go to newspaper websites for the news. Sure, there are problems, and the world is changing, but imho, we'll all do better if something called the San Francisco Chronicle continues to be published, even though the form of the newspaper will certainly change in the future. It would be a waste of a tradition, of a good coral reef, if newspapers really died. They need to change, and imho, when that change happens, we will safely be in the era of Web 3.0.  

If you have questions about this vision, please post a comment here.