Anne Truitt Zelenka

Agreed, the Web 2.0/3.0/whatever-dot-oh is totally overdone. I’m going to change the name of my blog, I’m so tired of it all. Leisa suggested “Anne 2.1.6.” I like that–completely precise and totally meaningless.

Speaking of meaning, I don’t think that what we get from semantic web technologies is shared meaning. What we want from the next generation of the web or even this generation of it is action. We need it to handle more of the tedious details of life. Sheila Lennon points out where this morning’s NY Times article got it wrong. It’s not about meaning. It’s about software agents who can do our bidding and remove some of the friction from managing our days. The semantic web provides the foundation of this because it allows automated agents to tell a dental office from a chiropractor from a new age guru and then read their appointment books. It relies on meaning in a limited sense only in order to complete defined tasks. As Shelley says, people aren’t looking for meaning, at least not from RDF.

If we could just get our computers and our cell phones and the web to make our dental appointments, satisfy our cravings for chicken cordon bleu, and route us around traffic jams on our way from Boulder to Denver, then we’d have more time for human to human interaction.

What does this have to do with existentialism? Existentialists don’t get themselves hung up on the objective truth or the ultimate meaning of life. What makes meaning is being in the world, taking action. If I were going to do something so annoying as defining Web 3.0, what I’d talk about is how semantic web technologies could more actively help us achieve our goals.