Ultimate Nerds

G4TV, on their indie-game feed, had a video about a game called Google Image Labeler.  You can see it here:  http://www.g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/681305/Indie_Game_Google_Image_Labeler.html?utm_source=g4tv&utm_medium=rssfeeds&utm_campaign=TheFeed.

In the game, a picture comes up and you try to enter words to describe it.  If you and your random partner get the same words, you get points.  The upshot of this is, those descriptors then become tags on the images.  It’s a functional game, where you have fun, but you’re creating something as a by-product of the game.  Now, that’s an interesting topic on it’s own, but I’m more interested right now in how this interacts with the Internet.  It’s been something I’ve wanted to talk about for a while now and now I am:

Web 3.0

I read an article in a magazine in a waiting room a while back.  It was about the possibilities of Web 3.0.  I have been interested in the concept ever since.

Here’s the basis I’m going on.  Web 2.0 introduced a lot of new stuff to the Internet.  Now, content isn’t controlled by the webmasters, but rather user-submitted and user-rated.  We are now flooded by user-submitted material and, lets be honest, a good deal of it is crap and spam.  Even amongst the good stuff online, it’s hard to find what you’re looking for.  The search words and tag systems are outdated at this point because of the influx of stuff on the Internet.  It will only get worse as more things get added.  As more people distribute their own music on the web for free, as there are more and more webcomics, web 2.0 comics, and a youTube for audio files (I’m telling you, it will bring back the radio drama!  COME ON!!! RADIO DRAMA!!! WHY DON’T WE HAVE A YOUTUBE FOR RADIO DRAMA?  It’s how Orson Welles and Douglas Adams got their starts). 

The problem then becomes how to find what you’re looking for.  This falls into two categories:  Meta-games and advanced search.

1)  Advanced search:  This involves things like search engines that, instead of using tags or keywords, analyzes the elements of the items.  There are already programs that start to do this, such as Pandora, which is an online radio system that takes a song or artist that you enter, breaks them down into elements, and then plays music that has those elements.  As anyone who’s used Pandora can attest, it is far from being perfected, however it does exist.  It’s hard so discover new things you like when there is so much bad stuff on the Internet, so something that can actually find things similar to things you already like would be useful.

2)  Meta-games:  In this case, I’m referring to games that use the Internet as their data.  These could take the form of 3d environments replacing websites.  For example, a flash game site could, instead of being a list of flash games, be a room with a series of virtual arcade machines.  You can walk around, see demos of the games being played, possibly even interact with other people in the room at the time, set up multi-player games, all through this virtual room.  In order to accomplish this, we’d need to get to the point where a development kit for 3d websites could be as simple as current tools for making 2d websites.  3d models would of course be from a web 2.0 type database with web 3.0 searching capabilities and would be made with a basic, easy to use, striped down 3d modeler.  Other meta games include things like the Google Image Labeler that I mentioned earlier which helps tag images.

So what do you think will be involved in Web 3.0?  Either leave comments here, or you can discuss it in the forums (we need to get some people in those forums). 

-Malec2b(Alec)

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Tags: Alec's Blog, future, Internet

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at 3:20 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.