Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

NEW YORK — The Web isn’t about destinations anymore, one expert said at the Web 3.0 Conference here today.

“The business model of the web where [the goal] is to get people to come and view your site — we are moving away from that,” said Aza Raskin, head of user experience at Mozilla Labs. “It’s a little bit scary.”

But how to turn fear into a force that draws profit from a world where the emphasis is going to instead be on helping users map intentions to action? Raskin put the focus on the “verbs” of the web — like mashups.

“In Web 3.0 nouns will get very small, and we’ll need a lot of ‘verbs’ to do something with them,” he said. “It’s a huge shift in thinking, that as the ‘nouns’ get smaller, our interconnectedness, or verbs, has to go up.”

The business model, he says, is going to come in facilitating that interconnectedness, in delivering the services that turn content into nouns, nouns into verbs, and then map that all back to content again. How does semantics play a role in that future?

“The semantics base is one of the pieces that helps me connect what I’m looking at with what I want to do,” Raskin told the audience at the Web 3.0 Conference.

But there’s a lag — a chicken and egg problem, if you will. Very few people have yet embraced the use of technology — even at the microformats level — to mark up their information such that future services and mashups can leverage that content to take users where they want to go and let them do what they want to do.

The question is, which comes first — semantic meaningful data or the user experience? The fact is that both need each other, and that means there needs to be a way to align incentives to make people want to participate in this world.

“If you Web site authors put in the semantic data yourselves, we won’t have to guess. It’s in everyone’s interest to make sure their data is being used in the right way, to bootstrap the Web 3.0 problem,” he said.

Raskin noted Mozilla is thinking about experimenting with putting content extraction in the browser, either locally or via a third party — the choice would come down to what actually works best.

There’s a lot to be gained by making the browser the intermediary between services and data, he said, because the browser actually knows a lot about what the user does. “The browser becomes a personal agent in a privacy sensitive way,” he said.

Raskin also told the gathering that interface matters as they think about the semantic space — it hasn’t been considered enough in Web 3.0 as of yet.

“There’s a whole bunch of really interesting technology and not enough really good use of it,” he says, and not enough thought put into how this will make the average user’s life better.

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