Google ‘Rich Snippets’ launch signals surge for Web 3.0

Almost lost in May’s whirl­wind launches of Wolfram|Alpha and Microsoft’s Bling, and the unveil­ing of Google Wave, was a qui­eter announce­ment that may bring a seis­mic shift toward the real­iza­tion of Web 3.0: Google’s Rich Snippets.

While some aspects of the next gen­er­a­tion of the Web are tak­ing place, there are major phys­i­cal and cul­tural chal­lenges to bring it about. The tools for imple­ment­ing the “Seman­tic Web” - Tim Berner-Lee’s long­time goal of a global data­base that links data to and from cur­rently siloed col­lec­tions — have are ready to use.

But the idea of retro­fitting the Web’s cur­rent one tril­lion pages — or even get­ting web devel­op­ers to learn and tag data seman­ti­cally — is daunt­ing. For most web devel­op­ers, there is a huge “Why should I care?” fac­tor. Google’s launch of Rich Snip­pets may well be a water­shed moment in resolv­ing these problems. 

My lat­est arti­cle on Dig­i­tal Media Buzz explores Web 3.0, and why Google’s launch of Rich Snip­pets will have web devel­op­ers scram­bling to learn the lingo and take the time to dive into the Seman­tic Web.

Full arti­cle:  Google’s Rich Snip­pets Starts the Seman­tic Web Snowball

Tagged as: Semantic Web, Web 3.0