This is the O’Reilly and  Battelle  vision for the next iteration of the web.



[D external link to Slide Share: Web Suqred: web 2.0 meets the real world]

As Battelle & O’Reilly say in their recent post on the Web 2.0 Summit conference’ s website.

the network as platform means far more than just just offering applications via the network (software as a service”); it means building applications that literally get better the more people use them, harnessing network effects not only to acquire users, but also to learn from them and build on their contributions.

Where we now understand the concept of harnessing collective intelligence as ‘’, a more up to date definition of intelligence characterizes it as allowing the collaborative group to learn from and respond to its environment

Imagine the Web (broadly defined as the network of all connected devices and applications, not just the PC-based application formally known as the World Wide Web) as a newborn baby. She sees, but at first she can’t focus. She can feel, but she has no idea of size till she puts something in her mouth. She hears the words of her smiling parents, but she can’t understand them. She is awash in sensations, few of which she understands. She has little or no control over her environment.

Gradually, the world begins to make sense. The baby coordinates the input from multiple senses, filters signal from noise, learns new skills, and once-difficult tasks become automatic.

The question before us is this: Is the Web getting smarter as it grows up?

The Net is getting smarter faster than you might think. Consider geotagging of photos. Initially, users taught their computers the association between photos and locations by tagging them. When cameras know where they are, every photo will be geotagged, with far greater precision than the humans are likely to provide.<> This merging of the web with the physical world is manifesting itself in many other ways – Adobe’s incredible Infinite Images can create an imaginary three dimensional world from a set of still photographs.

The Internet of Things for example:

…A song has information shadows on iTunes, on Amazon, on Rhapsody, on MySpace, or Facebook. A person has information shadows in a host of emails, instant messages, phone calls, tweets, blog postings, photographs, videos, and government documents. A product on the supermarket shelf, a car on a dealer’s lot, a pallet of newly mined boron sitting on a loading dock, a storefront on a small town’s main street — all have information shadows now.

In many cases, these information shadows are linked with their real world analogues by unique identifiers: an ISBN or ASIN, a part number, or getting more individual, a social security number, a vehicle identification number, or a serial number. Other identifiers are looser, but identity can be triangulated: a name plus an address or phone number, a name plus a photograph, a phone call from a particular location undermining what once would have been a rock-solid alibi…

What the Web 2.0 sensibility tells us is that we’ll get to the Internet of Things via a hodgepodge of sensor data contributing, bottom-up, to machine-learning applications that gradually make more and more sense of the data that is handed to them. A bottle of wine on your supermarket shelf (or any other object) needn’t have an RFID tag to join the “Internet of Things,” it simply needs you to take a picture of its label.

Data analysis, Visualization and  semantic web technologies are going to be increasingly valuable skillsets for employees in the future.. On the subjective of the collaborative real time collective mind, Tim and John say

There’s a new information layer being built around Twitter that could grow up to rival the services that have become so central to the Web: search, analytics, and social networks. Twitter also provides an object lesson to mobile providers about what can happen when you provide APIs. Lessons from the Twitter application ecosystem could show opportunities for SMS and other mobile services, or it could grow up to replace them.

It’s time for the Web to engage the real world.
Web meets World—that’s Web Squared.

via ZDNet