Hinchcliffe: 'Web 2.0 happened while we were waiting for the Semantic Web'

Dion Hinchcliffe, whose Enterprise Web 2.0 blog appears here at ZDNet, has weighed in on the whole "Web 3.0"  brouhaha that erupted last week, started by Joh Markoff's front-page article in The New York Times.

Markoff identified Web 3.0 as another name for the Semantic Web, which has been anticipated for some time now. Writing in Web 2.0 Journal, Dion says we are entering an era when communities of end users not only build content, but also can quickly and easily assemble their own applications to leverage the content in new and innovative ways:

"Markoff's description of Web 3.0 was ostensibly prompted by something I'm seeing as well, well beyond pure play Web mashups we're beginning to witness a number of companies building end-user solutions that can automatically navigate the Internet, weave together tapestries of online information to generate new, useful results. They can even take it a step beyond: dynamically generated situational Web applications that fully interact with the Web ecosystem."

While Web 2.0 has been all about "user generated software," Dion observes the next phase we're entering is "applications developed and tasks completed intelligently by software itself."