In our investor presentation, which I gave a version of a few weeks ago at the Canadian Financing Forum, I [almost] jokingly use the phase “Web 3.0″. Originally it was intended to inspire Marc Canter to rush the stage and force the organizers to call security, however the audience seemed nonplussed by such a bold pronouncement and I was almost disappointed that my presentation was allowed to proceed unheckled.

It was a nice way to tie a bow around a new kind of movement. And despite peoples’ resentment and guffaws, back-handed sneers, and general griping the phrase is starting to get thrown around more liberally. Whereas Web 1.0 was defined simply as “the Web” and whereas Web 2.0 was defined within the tight little circle surrounding Tim O’Reilly, what Web 3.0 means will be negotiated out in the open. For now, Web 3.0 seems to be all about context and personalization.

In any case, it is a nice way to frame the conversation, and I haven’t been booed yet. Perhaps because of this, the phrase is starting to get thrown around more liberally. Whereas Web 1.0 was defined simply as “the Web” and whereas Web 2.0 was defined within the tight little circle surrounding Tim O’Reilly, what Web 3.0 means will be negotiated out in the open. For now, Web 3.0 seems to be all about context and personalization.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see some very smart people aligning around what our vision is for the web and for the applications we build on top of our Relevance Engines. The quote I used in my presentation when hoping to be controversial was from Sramana Mitra on GigaOm, where he described Web 3.0 as the:

“summation of context, community, commerce, content, vertical search and personalization”

ReadWriteWeb toady penned an article called “Web 3.0: Is It About Personalization?” in which Josh Catone echoes similar comments from Sramana, and adds one from one of his readers, Robert O’Brien:

“Web 1.0: Centralized Them. Web 2.0: Distributed Us. Web 3.0: Decentralized Me”

But how do we get there from here? Some smart companies, like ours (if I don’t say so myself) will be bridging the gap and lighting the way for a new generation of Recommendation Services, like the ones I talked about last week. For Web 3.0 to really mean something we need to move forward in dramatic fashion. The protocols were all put in place by the Web 2.0 movement, and there’s only a little bit more work left to do on the technology side.

But in the longer term, what all of this depends upon is the structuring of data, AKA the Semantic Web. What we all need in order to move forward on a grand scale are for publishers, merchants, and individuals to provide machine-readable data that is nicely organized for context and (as a bonus) based on relationships.

We’ve seen blogging software like Drupal, WordPress and Movable Type lead the way in structuring blog content, which is a great thing: but we need everything to be organized, tagged, and structured — and also to be “pushed” via RSS-Ping or Atom Feeds over XMPP, in order to have a web that truly works in realtime. This will be a fairly big technology forklift for companies who made the investment in “going onto the web” only a few years ago, and so will take quite some time to come broadly to fruition.

For this reason, anybody that’s in the news and information business is going to want to have a rather robust, highly personalized recommendation engine powering their medium. If you’d like to talk to us about that, we’re all ears.

As for whether Web 3.0 as a movement (whatever it ends up being called) will succeed or not, it is rather more a human problem than a technical one.