🕸️Web x.0: Web's evolution - Part 1

The Web 2.0 term was proposed by Tim O’Reilly in conference brainstorming session between O'Reilly and MediaLive International, in which he envisioned several competencies. With the new versioning the old fashioned Web, as we know it, became Web 1.0, while in the literature were mentioned other two versions - Web 3.0 for the Semantic Web and Web 4.0 for the Noosphere. There are many people who are not comfortable with the version addressing of the Web, on one side it doesn’t seem natural, while on the other side it’s the easiest manner to encompass the set of characteristics or philosophies in the smallest unit of meaning.

The transition between the different versions is occasionally marked with vague comparisons in which are reflected two or three characteristics, some of them are fixed, while other dependent on authors’ expectations. Into the below table I tried to put together some of the characteristics of what each Web version is about, there are still blank spaces, there are even wild guesses about what the future might bring. The table is not perfect, but it summarizes somehow my understanding about Web’s expectations.

 

Dimension	Web 1.0	Web 2.0	Web 3.0 (Semantic Web)	Web 4.0 (Noosphere)
User participation	read only	read-write	collaborate	human-machine collaboration
Intelligence	Individual Intelligence	Collective Intelligence	Swarm Intelligence	Artificial Intelligence*
Content creation	companies	communities	ecologies	human-machine ecologies
Content focus	owning	sharing	aggregating	reasoning
Indexing	directories/taxonomies	folksonomies	Knowledge Maps	Large Language Models*
User expression	home pages	blogs/webcasts	social networks	?
DIKW focus	data	information	knowledge	wisdom
Macro-focus	document centric	content centric	knowledge centric	wisdom centric
Content accessibility	Web forms	Web Services	meshups	semantic applications
Content presentation	web sites	portals	meshup aggregations	?
Content structuring	HTML	XML	XML programming-based aggregation	XML concept-based aggregation
Vector-based graphics	applets	RIA	RIA 2	semantic RIA
Ads	advertising	pay-per-click	?	?
Information access	searching	subscription (to services)	contextual filtering	prompt engineering*
Knowledge structure	taxonomies	ontologies	networks	Lego-like networks
Data mining emphasis	Web logs	behavior	concept-based	pragmatic

(*) Updared Dec-2025

Probably one major drawback of the above table is that it had no timeline associated with each stage, though it got right the importance of AI in term of collaboration, forming of ecologies, the importance of semantics, reasoning and "wisdom".