Since I’m not having the greatest luck in the Web 2.0 era of the Internet, I decided to skip ahead a generation by attending the Web 3.0 Conference this week. Web 3.0 is a term often applied to my time at Hakia with the driving concept being the Semantic Web or Linked Data. I say “or” because I am not an expert on the subject, so when I am around those that are (or make my eyes gloss over with claims to be), I hear many prospectives on how these terms are used. My perspective is broad, not hands-on, so I tend to group these ideas together as they play themselves out.

The conference program went beyond this broad view of Web 3.0. It included panels on cloud computing and social media from both technical and business angles. Overall I thought the programming offered options for everyone. I focused on topics around monetization and marketing applications, along with a panel on semantic search technology — as you would guess.

One consistent result of these panels is that I get all antsy and want to start building things. So tonight I’m taking my “just good enough to be dangerous” programming skills to the NY Semantic Web Meetup to get a demo of some hands-on tools. Let’s see what I can learn there. Maybe I will be able to post my own little semantic web application here in the next couple weeks — or else, I’ll come back next week and delete this paragraph.