So we're only half a decade at most into the Web 2.0 era, and we still don't really know what "Web 2.0" is. Yet for some reason, over the past couple of years there has been an even more confusing meme that seems to keep cropping up: "Web 3.0." It already feels like we've been talking about Web 3.0 for ages, even though we don't know yet know exactly what Web 2.0 is. What are the various ways that Web 3.0 has been defined over the past three years, and why is it helpful to talk about what the next web will look like?

Google blog search shows a single post mentioning Web 3.0 in October 2004 (which is notably before CMP applied for the service mark on "Web 2.0"). But by the term's peak usage in October of last year, there were over 1000 posts talking about the next version of the web. But what were they referring to? That's a good question.

Last April, we held a contest asking readers to define Web 3.0 and had nearly 50 different responses -- clearly, this is something people have a lot of ideas about. The winning entry talked about Web 3.0 as a "decentra