Semantic Web (Web 3.0) Will be new kid on block soon.
I've always thought of Web 1.0/2.0/3.0 in parallel to Tim Berners-Lee's notion of the read-write web, which is often used as an alternative way of describing Web 2.0.
First, we had Web 1.0 - the read-only web. Then came Web 2.0 - the read-write web - all of these services that make it easy for us to contribute content and interact with others. If you keep up the programming analogy, the next phase would be Web 3.0 - the Read-Write-Execute Web.
Most often, I hear people describing web 3.0 as Web 2.0+ - ie, more of what we have now, but faster and more ubiquitous. It's the same old stuff with lots of superlatives added. A Web 3.0 than plays on the idea of read-write-execute would be having a web that gives people the tools to craft their own tools, their own software, etc, rather than just uploading stuff to other people's software. Why go to YouTube when you can set up your own MyTube, if you will, with the same functionality but tailored to the specific purposes of your blog/community website/etc. People will be able to create their own complex online social media tools with a few clicks, but remain linked to other tools and other people through tagging, rss and all that good stuff.
1) Easier, cheaper, and more pervasive. Only a fraction of humanity has anything to do with Web 2.0. Others stay to the sidelines because they find the technology too confusing or expensive, or they don't see the relevance. Bring another billion or so people into Web 2.0, and Metcalfe's Law alone will make it a radically different phenomenon.
2) Always on, everywhere. We've heard (and written) this one for a while, but it's true: As Web 2.0 follows us every step of our lives--in some cases whether we want it to or not--and the dynamics change.
3) Controlling our data. In the next gen, we'll have developed all kinds of systems to wrap our personal data with various types of protection. Some will be shared widely, some narrowly, some not at all. And new systems of reputation and ranking should help us figure out which data sources to take seriously and which to shun.
4) In Web 3.0, the web will be programmable. Programmable for everybody! Here programmable does not mean mash-up, does not mean personalization through configuration. Hope to be able to show it by the end of the year.
The Military Balance 2007 estimates world military expenditure in 2005 to have been approximately $1.2 trillion. A plausible estimate for current world spending is $1.35 trillion. By contrast, the SIPRI yearbook estimates 2006 world expenditure to have been around $1.2 trillion. The estimates differ largely because The Military Balance relies more heavily on Purchasing Power Parity when comparing nations’ expenditures, while the SIPRI volume uses exchange rates.
If we go by SIPRI figures, the global military spending amounts to about 2.5 percent of the world GDP. This is, however, still less than the peak Cold War numbers, which reached a peak in the late 1980s, when spending (adjusted for inflation) went past $1.6 trillion a year. After the Cold War ended in 1991, worldwide spending fell by nearly half, to about $900 billion a year.
Whereas the United States accounted for 28 percent of world defense expenditures in 1986 and 34 percent in 1994, it today accounts for approximately 50 percent. The $647.3 billion US defence budget (excluding around $215 billion for homeland security, veterans’ affairs and outstanding 2007 war costs) represents a 75 percent real increase over the post-Cold War low-point in US defense spending, which occurred in 1996. Today’s US defence expenditures are higher in inflation-adjusted terms than peak spending during the Vietnam and Korean wars — as well as higher than during the Reagan buildup.
In comparison, all of Europe has an annual defence expenditure of over $200 billion; all of Asia, about the same; the Middle East, over $100 billion; while Africa and the rest of the Americas account for another $30 billion or so. [The Indian defence budget for the year 2007-08 is approximately $23 billion.]
During the Cold War, there were over a hundred million people under arms; there are fewer than 40 million people under arms now. Then, factories turned out thousands of tanks, hundreds of warplanes and dozens of warships each year. Now, tank production rarely exceeds a few hundred a year, with annual warplane production of less than a hundred a year, and only a handful of warships being produced every year. It should mean that a major portion of global defence spending is not on buying weapons, but on payroll, benefits and materials. But the legacy of cold war ensures that it is not so; piles of surplus tanks, warplanes, warships and weapon platforms left after the cold war continue to be transacted in the global arms market even today.
There is little solace, if any, in the words of Dwight D. Eisenhower
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.