web 2.0 & web 3.0

I spent a little time this weekend looking at aspects of web 2.0 and 3.0 and how these can be relevant to the business world. Of course in NG we are using such ideas as wiki. Its amazing how helpful the wikipedia site has become to me. Anyway, sites such as myspace are interesting if nothing else than just to note that this site is now the 6th most popularly accessed site in the entire WORLD. We really do all need to be at least cognizant of the ways the younger generation (such as my son) is using the web in the context of social engineering. How might we use these ideas ourselves? Perhaps not to find a date….but perhaps to make an important IT or business connection? (or even to find a date for myself…LOL) Okay…so young folks are using the web in drastically revolutionary ways and it seems that us *older* folks are always behind. Anyway, I have picked up some books on things such as ajax and am looking forward to getting caught up a little with some of the newer technologies. Of course ajax is already mainstream. I read a book this week that provides some *excellent* ideas on thought leadership. You might not know it looking at the book cover and title, which is "My Job Went to India and all I got was this Lousy Book". The book cover shows a rather forlorn looking guy on the street holding a sign saying "Will Code for Food". I picked up the book because I found the cover amusing. But inside I found gems of wisdom. Probably the most important book I have read in ten years. Now I just need to go about putting into action some of the author's suggestions. :-) Anyway, its interesting to type in some words on the Google Trends page. You can type in a word such as J2EE and see that top most requested searches for that word are almost all coming from India. But if you look at the Google Trends for something such as Ruby for Rails you see that those searches mostly come from Silicon Valley and the area around MIT. This is just one small way to kind of monitor what the top IT gurus are up to. The idea is that J2EE is already well commoditized and is being off-shored. If someone starts today to learn J2EE they are already *far* behind the curve. I think an important area to watch is the Semantic Web. I think this is one area that is going to absolutely explode. How might the SOA, BPM, and the Semantic Web converge? What might become possible with the convergence of these 3 ideas? How might we use that convergence to help our customers? Anyway, just things to think about…

By the way, if anyone is ever bored (which I know we never are…), you might go to http://99-bottles-of-beer.net and peruse through the syntax of a simple algorithm in some 1,069 languages. This is just an amusing thing to do…. A little more exciting than programming "Hello World"...