A little more than two years ago, Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc., attempted to clarify the origins of Web 2.0, what the term meant and how it differed from the antiquated Web 1.0 in this article.

For those of you who like the short version, here it is:
Web 1.0 → Web 2.0
DoubleClick → Google AdSense
Ofoto → Flickr
Akamai → BitTorrent
mp3.com → Napster
Britannica Online → Wikipedia
personal websites → blogging
evite → upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation → search engine optimization
page views → cost per click
screen scraping → web services
publishing → participation
content management systems → wikis
directories (taxonomy) → tagging (”folksonomy”)
stickiness → syndication

“Web 2.0 came to describe almost any site, service or technology that promoted sharing and collaboration,” PC Magazine’s Cade Metz wrote in an article published earlier this year.

Though some have been able to explain Web 2.0, others are still skeptical of the term. The deviation between Web 1.0 and 2.0 technology is hard to define considering some of the components of 2.0 have been used since the early days of the World Wide Web.

But before we’ve clearly defined Web 2.0, we’ve already jumped the gun and have begun speculating about Web 3.0.

Metz has found that many believe “Web 3.0 is something called the Semantic Web, a term coined by Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the (first) World Wide Web.”

“In essence, the Semantic Web is a place where machines can read Web pages much as we humans read them, a place where search engines and software agents can better troll the Net and find what we’re looking for.”

Essentially turning the Web into one big database.

Other evolutionary traits associated with Web 3.0 include artificial intelligence leverage, 3D capabilities or a masked marketing ploy hyping minute changes to Web 2.0.

Are Netheads jumping the gun or am I just being complacent? If you have a better understanding of Web 3.0 and feel it needs to be discussed on a broader scale, please feel free to share.