At UpTake, we consider ourselves a Web 3.0 company. In fact, I will be presenting at the Web 3.0 conference in Santa Clara on Oct 16th-17th. But, to paraphrase Sarah Palin, “Gosh, just what in the heck is this doggone Web 3.0?”

Web 2.0 let everyone publish their thoughts on the internet. Millions of blogs, millions of product reviews and billions of tweets later, has the internet become a more informative place? Or are we just drowning in a sea of unorganized opinions?

The problem is that most of the knowledge from Web 2.0 is locked away in this black-box called “text”. Whether it is the text of a user review, a blog post, a newspaper article or a tweet, opinions expressed in text can only be had by asking people to read the full output of every Web 2.0 user who expounded on a subject.

Attempts to date to summarize that information are rather crude. The state-of-the-art seems to be statements like this: “4.0 star average rating from 124 users.” Have you ever noticed that the avg user rating is almost always between 3.5 and 4.5 stars? And what are we to make of the fact that Scooby Doo and A Streetcar Named Desire have the same 4.5 star rating at Amazon? (If you are a serious Saturday morning cartoon buff, that rating for Streetcar is ridiculous.)

Web 3.0, sometimes called the “semantic web”, is about trying to make sense of all that Web 2.0 content. And that means all that text content. Web 3.0 is about opening that black box called “text” and understanding what it says so that you can make better decisions, faster.

A Web 3.0 search engine would filter and rank information based on the collective intelligence of opinions scrawled all over the web. It means getting beyond the “avg user rating” and understanding why people like something, what parts about it are good, what parts are not. It means directing you quickly to the meat of what people say about something that matters to you.

Like Scooby Doo and A Streetcar Named Desire, what’s “good” and what’s “bad” is highly personal.  Only by understanding what people say about something can we understand for whom to recommend it and why. When the web is able to do that, we will have arrived at Web 3.0.

(Read more opinions on what Web 3.0 means at the Web3Beat)