Web 3.0: Playing it safe with our data

Web 2.0 is well established, and sites like YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and Digg have turned the internet from a static source of information into a huge, interactive digital playground. So where to next? What will the next stage of web culture - what some people call web 3.0 - be like?

The overall message seems to be that there are profound changes on the way. If web 2.0 is about generating your own content and sharing it, web 3.0 will be about making information less free. Privacy fears, new forms of advertising, and restrictions imposed by media companies will mean more digital walls, leading to a web that's safer but without its freewheeling edge.

One reason for this is a new realism about personal information. Right now, most web users casually store scads of personal information on the web - email on webmail servers, photographs on Flickr, appointment calendars on Google Calendar, travel plans on Dopplr, and so on. This openness is one of the defining features of web 2.0, but software specialist Nat Torkington of high-tech publishing house O'Reilly Media predicts a backlash.

He argues that one major leak or theft of private data could change the climate overnight. "It could be a Three Mile Island of the net," he says, referring to the 1979 accident that turned the US public against nuclear power. If this happens, users will start to remove their personal details from web services, Torkington believes, or at least impose restrictions on it.

"We'll see a hybrid model," he says, with software that communicates with the web while storing private information on your own computer. So you might use Gmail to sort through your mail but download personal messages to a more private spot. Regions of the web now devoted to the unhindered exchange of information - YouTube, Facebook and the like - may evolve into gated communities where only select people have access to any given piece of data.
Regions of the web dedicated to free flow may evolve into gated communities

Another factor that will restrict web freedom is advertising. According to Brian Davison, a computer scientist at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, its influence will continue to grow. Desperate to be noticed by people whose attention spans are a mouse click long, advertisers will invent ever more devious strategies to suck you in.

A few tricks are around already. Say you are trying to reach Microsoft.com, but you accidentally type Macrosoft.com. You'll end up on a page for a company whose name has nothing to do with the word Macrosoft - they're just parked in that domain to get more exposure. You'll find something similar at Mycrosoft.com.

Web advertising is evolving quickly, though. The next generation will sneak into search results, Davison says. For example, a website that sells movie posters might worm its way into the results for a movie review. The link might look useful, but clicking through will bring up an advert. The danger is that such activity will gum up search results, stopping us finding what we need.

Web advertising is likely to balloon from another direction too. The next five years could see a dramatic change as "blogvertising" takes off.

Already, ads that once appeared in print are showing up on blogs. Bloggers stand to gain ever more of the advertising share for one simple reason: they can create custom content for advertisers. This is leading to a new style of blog that blurs the line between editorial and advertisement.

Federated Media, a company that specialises in bringing bloggers and advertisers together, has been a pioneer in this area. It helped Samsung advertise its HD TVs by creating a blog called Defining Moment. Sports bloggers contributed their posts about the best moments within sports games in exchange for ad money. All advertising on the site was by Samsung.

Neil Chase, a former editor at The New York Times and now with Federated Media, doesn't see this blurring of ads and content as a problem. He argues that readers are adept at figuring out the difference between ads and editorial. If anything the new model may be making good on the old web dream of free media sharing for all, he argues, because it makes it possible for bloggers to make their writing available for free, while still getting compensated for it. Music and video content could go the same way, incorporating adverts to support their creators.

But wall-to-wall ads are not the only way to support media on the web, says Michael Geist at the University of Ottawa. He argues that another system can work for music and video: a media-sharing tax that makes it legal to download anything you like. Canada already has a version of this in the shape of a levy on blank CDs and DVDs. It means Canadians are allowed to engage in music file-sharing without being sued for copyright infringement.