In the beginning I hopped onto the Net to connect to likeminded people, just like I had been doing for many years on Fidonet. Sure, Usenet was fun but building anything new required learning Unix commands and building Web pages… blind. But we all did it and shortly thereafter, had Web 1.0 and Netscape to browse it more easily. Then we got a new layer that made it super easy for anyone to participate, regardless of technical knowledge. That was web 2.0 with its myriad of Social Networks. And then we started putting virtual ‘post it’ notes on everything about us and our environment. Tagging is probably the simplest and best bridge to the future Web but it’s a disorganized and de-centralized way of categorizing content. In the past few years, we have seen an incredible amount of brilliant mashups that bring together tagged content in a very useful way. Web 3.0 is simply another step in the evolution of the Web where we still tag content but in an organized way. And it’s important because we have put so much information out there that we need to do this in order to be able to find it and access it in the future.

But it’s not about your personal data, it’s about being able to process raw data, find relevant research and news information.

In Web 3.0 Clay Shirky, New Media Writer and Professor at NYU, says: “If I was going to start a new business tomorrow, I would start a news business designed to produce not one bit of news but instead aggregate news for individuals in ways that matter to them.” It seems like we already have a lot of businesses that attempt to do that but the vast majority of their content is memes and viral videos.

PingCognito will bring a different way of aggregating news based on key opinion leaders, influencers and idea movements. When I started working on PingCognito in mid 2007, I had about 5 years of experience aggregating immense amounts of data from all over the Web but I knew that my idea would be even more complicated to build. Over the past 3 years, I have seen great leaps made towards a semantic web and this is why PingCognito is finally coming together!

Web 3.0, by Kate Ray, NYU journalism graduate

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.