Big buzz today on Techmeme today is Freebase, the first project by stealthy start-up Metaweb. It aims to be a centralized database that will automate the machine-to-machine mechanics of Web search. But the way it will do this is by tapping the collective wisdom of folks like you and me -- OK, maybe not you and me, but people far more industrious -- to not only help them build the database, but to provide the metatags that will help with the machine automation. Several things struck me about this story:
--Hype or no hype, this story has so many of the qualities that PR people lust for -- man versus machine (nay man working for machine), a celebrity founder (Danny Hillis), a barely subliminal countercultural reference ("freebase," as in the purified drug), a barely subliminal anti-Google reference ("freebase" as opposed to Google Base) -- that it's easy to see why it has been so irresistable to write about (though few people can pretend to truly understand it).
--Like many Web 2.0 ideas, Freebase assumes that people will actually contribute to the database. We'll see. In the meantime, David Weinberger guesses that it would only require that 2% of the population to tag 98% of the content (though he cheerfully admits that he "totally made up those numbers").
--Already we are talking about Web 3.0. John Markoff, the author of the New York Times piece that broke the Freebase story used that phrase in an earlier piece on the "semantic Web," and naturally the bloggers remembered. But if Web 2.0 was about "you," what, dare we ask, is Web 3.0 about? It might be the sorry realization that many people cannot be bothered with all the things that 2.0 companies are asking them to do. Web 3.0 may be about machines that understand implicit behavior as well as explicit behavior. And if that comes to pass, we've got another sexy story -- machine working for man.
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