• PR-guru Steve Rubel outcries over Google's new experimental search service SearchWiki, which allows people to comment, vote and reorder search results, provided they are logged in with their Google account. The reordering should only be privately visible, but voting and comments are public to others. Rubel calls this a "PR nightmare", as there is no community moderation of the comments like in Wikipedia for example, and he continues:
  

  of course people are going to run amok on the world's biggest online stage! That's like turning a kid with a massive sweet tooth loose in a giant candy store. It's going to be a haven for spam.

  Tags: Google, PR

• In another piece a couple of weeks ago Steve Rubel foresaw the end of tangible media by 2014, by tangible meaning all physical media like newspapers, magazines, books, DVDs, boxed software and video games. Like Rubel, I'm already almost free of tangible media, keeping only a subscription to Dr Dobb's Journal, which I'll probably quit next year. I'm also buying a handful of books each year, but once there's a Kindle-like device available in this country, at a reasonable price, I'll probably go completely digital.
  Tags: media, trends
• Google's virtual world experiment Lively, which I wrote about at launch in July, will be discontinued at the end of the year. Apparently, the experiment never took off, though Google states that the reason is to focus more on their core search, ads and apps business.
  Tags: virtual worlds
• Adobe labs has announced Alchemy, a research project that aims to bring the wealth of existing C and C++ code to Flash. The C/C++ code is compiled to ActionScript 3.0 bytecode that runs on Flash Player 10 or AIR 1.5. Alchemy is ideally suited for computation-intensive tasks and can be considerably faster than ActionScript 3.0, though still 2-10 times slower than native C/C++ code.
  Tags: Flash, programming
• Josh Catone writes that Yahoo has officially launched their browser extension BrowserPlus, which back in July was suggested as part of a Web 3.0 trend. BrowserPlus offers web developers a number of services, such as drag-and-drop, file browsing, image processing and persistent storage, just to name a few.
  Tags: browser extensions
• A final note on two social media apps: SocialToo, a service that allows you to automatically follow and unfollow people on Twitter, now has a polling feature.
  Tarpipe lets you automate your social media publishing via a Yahoo Pipes-like user interface. Tarpipe supports a number of social services, comes with an API, and supports OpenID, OAuth and Microformats, writes ReadWriteWeb.
  Tags: social applications

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• Adobe CTO calls for JavaScript coordination

• This week saw the return of Web 3.0 definitions on the table. Marc Benioff, CEO of salesforce.com, in a guest post at TechChrunchIT, proposed that Web 3.0 is about cloud computing and platforms as a service. As he writes:
  

  The new rallying cry of Web 3.0 is that anyone can innovate, anywhere. Code is written, collaborated on, debugged, tested, deployed, and run in the cloud. [...]
  For developers, Web 3.0 means that all they need to create their dream app is an idea, a browser, some Red Bull, and a few Hot Pockets.

  Naturally, as Marc mentions in passing, salesforce is a provider of platform as a service via their force.com offering. Nonetheless, I think that Mark has point in that infrastructure as a service, as provided by Amazon AWS, Google App Engine and others, is truly disruptive in that it makes it possible to launch an online business with very limited resources.
  Now, where does this new definition of Web 3.0 fit into my categorization of the Web 3.0 landscape? In part it belongs to the APIs and Web Services definition, or the Distributed Web as I proposed to call it, but it could well make up an own category among the "Other definitions".
  Tags: cloud computing, Web 3.0

• Another suggestion for the meaning of Web 3.0 was put forward by Mattt Thompson of the Yahoo Developer Network, as suitably recognized by Josh Catone. Mattt means that Web 3.0 will be characterized by browser extentions, like Google Gears and Yahoo BrowserPlus, that enhance the user experience of Web applications by providing features such as offline access. This view of Web 3.0 is focused more on the client side user experience of the Web, as opposed to the back-end infrastructure view as represented by Marc Benioff above. Not to say that the user experience is unimportant, but in my humble view, the changes that APIs, web services and cloud computing bring to the Web are more disruptive than some user interface enhancements.
  Tags: Gears, Web 3.0
• Chris Shipley of the Demo conference suggests that the Web 2.0 cycle has come to a close, and will be succeeded by the Distributed Web:
  

  This next phase is not about aggregating content or visitors to a single Web site; it's about disseminating information and applications to the users where ever they may be - another Web site, a mobile device, a consumer electronics gadget.

  In my Web 3.0 post, I proposed that the Distributed Web is characterized by APIs and web services, "signifying that a web site's content is consumed at multiple destinations through its API." Thus, while my definition is more focused on the underlying mechanisms of distribution, APIs and web services, Chris focus is more on the result of the distribution: the user's ability to consume web content and services wherever she might be.
  Richard MacManus, who first noticed Chris article, agrees to the significance of the notion of the Distributed Web, but disagrees that the "free" model of web services has ended, which also was one of Chris' assertions.
  Tags: Distributed Web, Web 3.0