42 | NewScientist | 15 March 2008 www.newscientist.com

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Web 3.0What will the next era of web culture bring?Annalee Newitz has some predictions

Cover story | Home entertainment

picture,” Tan says. Using slight variations of

this approach NeuroSky and its competitors

claim to have cracked it.

But even if the technology works as

advertised, there’s no guarantee of success

in a competitive games market. How do these

companies intend to succeed where others

failed? One answer is by following Nintendo’s

example with Wii. MindLink and Bio Tetris

failed in part because they didn’t make the

most of their novel interface. The games were

really no different from what was already out

there. “With the Wii, Nintendo did something

right in designing a suite of tailored games,”

Tan says. Wii games offer features that are not

possible with a regular joystick, such as

swinging the controller like a tennis racquet

or brandishing it like a sword.

The mind-game companies intend to

emulate this, though without abandoning the

traditional controller altogether. Their games

will still be largely controlled by hand, with

biofeedback offering additional features. For

example, Emotiv has adapted a game based on

the Harry Potter books so that players can lift

boulders and throw thunderbolts just by

concentrating on making it happen.

Whatever form biofeedback games take,

the world is ready for them, says Kiel Gilleade

a computer games researcher at Lancaster

University in the UK . The current market is

less interested in finding new game genres

than in looking for new hardware to enhance

the gaming experience, he says.

Not everyone is convinced. Michael Zyda,

director of the University of Southern

California’s GamePipe Laboratory in Marina

del Rey, says biofeedback seems to work as an

evaluation tool but he believes not enough

research has been done to confirm its

reliability in the real world. Hans Lee, head of

technology at EmSense, agrees that more work

is needed. One outstanding problem, he says,

is that the hardware and software don’t work

for everyone. Reading emotional and

cognitive states reliably is difficult because of

each individual’s variation in brain activity.

Even so, at least one company believes the

technology is ready. Emotiv says its headsets

will be on the shelves later this year, alongside

a suite of biofeedback games developed by its

partners. Biofeedback has been talked about in

video gaming for years, but the real quest for

hearts and minds begins here. ●

Duncan Graham-Rowe is a writer based in Brighton, UK

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www.newscientist.com 15 March 2008 | NewScientist | 43

●WEB 2.0 is well established, and sites

like YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and

Digg have turned the internet from a

static source of information into a huge,

interactive digital playground. So where to

next? What will the next stage of web culture –

what some people call web 3.0 – be like?

The overall message seems to be that there

are profound changes on the way. If web 2.0 is

about generating your own content and

sharing it, web 3.0 will be about making

information less free. Privacy fears, new forms

of advertising, and restrictions imposed by

media companies will mean more digital

walls, leading to a web that’s safer but without

its freewheeling edge.

One reason for this is a new realism

about personal information. Right now, most

web users casually store scads of personal

information on the web – email on webmail

servers, photographs on Flickr, appointment

calendars on Google Calendar, travel plans

on Dopplr, and so on. This openness is one

of the defining features of web 2.0, but

software specialist Nat Torkington of

high-tech publishing house O’Reilly Media

predicts a backlash.

He argues that one major leak or theft of

private data could change the climate

overnight. “It could be a Three Mile Island of

the net,” he says, referring to the 1979 accident

that turned the US public against nuclear

power. If this happens, users will start to

remove their personal details from web

services, Torkington believes, or at least

impose restrictions on it.

“We’ll see a hybrid model,” he says, with

software that communicates with the web

while storing private information on your

own computer. So you might use Gmail to sort

through your mail but download personal

messages to a more private spot. Regions

of the web now devoted to the unhindered

exchange of information – YouTube,

Facebook and the like – may evolve into gated

communities where only select people

have access to any given piece of data.

Another factor that will restrict web

freedom is advertising. According to Brian

Davison, a computer scientist at Lehigh

University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, its

influence will continue to grow. Desperate to

be noticed by people whose attention spans

are a mouse click long, advertisers will invent

ever more devious strategies to suck you in.

A few tricks are around already. Say you

are trying to reach Microsoft.com, but you

accidentally type Macrosoft.com. You’ll end

up on a page for a company whose name

has nothing to do with the word Macrosoft –

they’re just parked in that domain to get more

exposure. You’ll find something similar at

Mycrosoft.com.

Web advertising is evolving quickly,

though. The next generation will sneak into

search results, Davison says. For example, a

website that sells movie posters might worm

its way into the results for a movie review. The

link might look useful, but clicking through

will bring up an advert. The danger is that such

activity will gum up search results, stopping

us finding what we need.

Web advertising is likely to balloon from

another direction too. The next five years

could see a dramatic change as “blogvertising”

takes off.

Already, ads that once appeared in print

are showing up on blogs. Bloggers stand to

gain ever more of the advertising share for one

simple reason: they can create custom

content for advertisers. This is leading to a

new style of blog that blurs the line between

editorial and advertisement.

Federated Media, a company that

specialises in bringing bloggers and

advertisers together, has been a pioneer in this

area. It helped Samsung advertise its HD TVs

by creating a blog called Defining Moment .

Sports bloggers contributed their posts about

the best moments within sports games in

exchange for ad money. All advertising on the

site was by Samsung.

Neil Chase, a former editor at The New York Times and now with Federated Media, doesn’t

see this blurring of ads and content as a

problem. He argues that readers are adept at

figuring out the difference between ads and

editorial. If anything the new model may be

making good on the old web dream of free

media sharing for all, he argues, because it

makes it possible for bloggers to make their

writing available for free, while still getting

compensated for it. Music and video

content could go the same way, incorporating

adverts to support their creators.

But wall-to-wall ads are not the only

way to support media on the web, says

Michael Geist at the University of Ottawa.

He argues that another system can work for

music and video: a media-sharing tax that

makes it legal to download anything you like.

Canada already has a version of this in the

shape of a levy on blank CDs and DVDs . It

means Canadians are allowed to engage in

music file-sharing without being sued for

copyright infringement.

“The developments we’re seeing [with

media sharing] aren’t going away,” says Geist.

“As more companies succeed with open

business models that could be stifled by

copyright laws they’ll seek to have their voices

heard.” When people raised on file-sharing

become politicians, Geist believes, we’ll see

legislation that encourages open models of

media sharing online.

For now, though, the name of the

game is restricting access. Technological

improvements mean that more and more

content can be delivered on the web, but with

greater and greater control exerted by the

entertainment companies.

One way this is happening is through

services such as Watch Now , from DVD-rental

company Netflix. It allows subscribers to

watch movies online without having to wait

for them to download, but the movies can

only be viewed on Windows Media Player,

strongly limiting where and how you can

watch the movies.

The Netflix model represents the next step

in media restriction – part of a new, closed era

when more content than ever is available on

the net, but only in limited ways. Enjoy web

2.0 while it lasts. ●

Annalee Newitz writes about science, technology and culture in San Francisco. Her syndicated weekly column can be found at techsploitation.com

“ Wall-to-wall advertsare not the only way to support media on the web”

“ Regions of the webdedicated to free flow may evolve into gatedcommunities ”

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