Malcom Gladwell: The next revolution is not going to come from a machine.

This week a bunch of bloggers started talking about the definition of Web 3.0, debating everything from the proposed definition, to announcing that it is non-sense to even be discussing the definition.

The definition of Web 3.0 doesn't matter much at all. What does matter are the results of continued innovation.

And we believe the result of continued innovation online means a new crop of human-powered and machine supported services designed to provide better information, improved quality, more relevancy...and ultimately a whole host of new opportunities for knowledge workers. 

Thanks to Web innovation, collaboration tools, and social media we are entering the age of Social Services.  And that is a good thing for us all.

That's because people + machines are more powerful than machines on their own. People know how to see things that machines can't and vice versa.  People know how to make judgments in a different way.  People know how to organize information using common sense, while machines have all sorts of other abilities like sorting through massive amounts of information quickly to find useful patterns.

One theme that we have been preaching since the inception of OrganizedWisdom is that much of the innovation that is happening today, and that will continue to happen, is not the result of new technologies alone, but rather the new service offerings that people start providing using these new technologies.  It's the People Powered Movement. 

Mechanical Turk is a great example.  And Wikipedia is perhaps one of the beset examples of this trend...a bunch of people working together with the power of the MediaWiki platform.  Seth Godin has written about the need for People Powered before, and most recently Jason Calacanis suggested the same in his definition of Web 3.0:

"Web 3.0 is defined as the creation of high-quality content and services produced by gifted individuals using Web 2.0 technology as an enabling platform."

Perhaps Malcom Gladwell summed up the thought best in a recent interview:

"Google in a sense is a symbol of the solution to an old problem. We don't need more Googles; what we need is a way to prioritize and analyze and make sense of the information we have at our fingertips. And maybe those kinds of solutions aren't technological at all. I'm quite prepared for the possibility that the next revolution is not going to come from a machine; it's going to come from creating a more thoughtful work force and giving people the opportunity to be thoughtful."

No matter the definition of Web 3.0, 3.1, 4.0 or whatever, the future of innovation is how we empower the power of people's wisdom with great technology.