I Will Mesh U Up

Mathew Ingram, a technology writer for the Globe and Mail and has been on the tech beat for the last 17 years. Now he's sharing some of his knowledge as an organizer of MeshU, a web conference happening on May 20 where the brightest and shiniest tech brains will converge. Speakers include Daniel Burka, the designer behind Digg, and Leah Culver, a co-founder of Pownce. We spoke to Ingram about MeshU, how companies mess up in Web 2.0, and the future of the web.

What is MeshU?

MeshU is a one-day series of workshops aimed at Web developers, user-interface designers, programmers, and anyone else who has a hands-on role in making Web services or Web applications run properly.

Its purpose is to give anyone who works for a Web-based company a better sense of what kinds of technologies they should be using "under the hood," as it were, and to give them some practical advice on how to use those technologies better.

Most companies enter social media by throwing everything against the wall (Facebook! Blogs! YouTube!) and seeing what sticks, usually with poor results. What is the biggest obstacle companies have with Web 2.0?

I think the biggest obstacle—for companies or even individuals for that matter—is just fear of the unknown. When companies in particular look at the Web and Web 2.0 tools or social media such as blogs and wikis and so on, I'm sure many of them see something that is pretty unpredictable and at times chaotic, and they wonder how they are going to incorporate something like that into their business. But I think once they experiment with it a little, many come to realize that there's a lot of value there for them and their customers.

As the public gets the hang of social media and Web 2.0, it's probably time to look ahead. What do you think Web 3.0 will look like?

When it comes to Web 3.0, I think Tim Berners-Lee—who developed the Web in the first place—said it best when he said he sees Web 3.0 as the "semantic Web," meaning that the software underlying the Web is equipped to understand the terms and concepts that appear in websites and documents without people specifically having to add keywords or tags or whatever. That would make it easier for documents and services and websites to organize themselves in patterns according to their content, instead of people having to use tools and brute force to do so.

Photo by Mathew Ingram.