Long before Jason Calacanis’s prank, Web 3.0 was supposed to be “the semantic web.” So when I received an invite to this talk, I had to forward it on to Dave, especially in light of this post. The inside joke is, Dave or I have been doing vertical search professionally since 2000. And if there is one thing we’ve learned:

“[The semantic web] may list Brittney Spears ringtones in the description, but the page offers viagra.”
—David Kellogg, “Semantic web, please go away”

(The only exception I take with the above is that what isn’t attributable to malice can be attributable to incompetence.)

Dave loved the invite, and then started to nail the world wide history of the once and future web in order to improve the discussion at the Stanford/MIT VLAB panel:

[Web 1.0 through Web 7.0. after the jump.]

Web Version History

Web 1.0. Portals

Web 2.0. The Open Social (Because clearly I’m wrong.)

Web 3.0. The Semantic Web (What else?)

Web 4.0. Potato Farming Dave writes:

The semantic web will relay all human knowledge between computers, leaving you and me and all of California with nothing to do but eat at McDonald’s. The resulting need for ginormous fries will lead the best and brightest into Potato Farming.

I will tell the panel this, then shout, “Don’t tase me, bro!”

I said, “So basically, ‘Skynet goes live.’”

Web 5.0. The Singularity. Dave says: “After The Singularity, there can
be no Web 6.0, because the Machine is Us.

Dave thinks we’re done here. He and I departed ways. I pointed out given our experiences about building crawlers and the Semantic Web…

Web 6.0. ?????. The whole of humanity, having been downloaded to the computer, gets caught in a honeypot.

Web 7.0. Profit!

Postscript

In researching this blog entry, I ran across this comic strip.

It is surprising how great minds think alike.