Identifying upgrades and additions to your web site is a critical part of 2010 planning. Perhaps you are considering a complete re-design, or you’ve been told you need a “Web 2.0” version of your web site. If you’ve already added engagement and sharing elements to your b2b site and are participating in social media, you may be wondering what the rumblings about Web 3.0 (a highly debated term) mean to b2b marketers.

I don’t believe in web site “versioning,” but if you are uncertain as to which tools, technologies, and buzzwords fall under each label, here’s a brief overview of a huge topic with a range of opinions and theories.

Web 1.0 - One way information flow
Web 1.0 was the Web as an information portal. Content was owned. Everyone had their own little personal corner in cyberspace. Publishing was static with no interaction.

Web 2.0 – From publishing to participation
Web 2.0 (coined in '99, made popular in '04) revolves around information sharing and collaboration. It's about user-generated content where people consume and contribute, and the power of the community to create and validate information.

Typical examples include sites, apps, or technologies that facilitates information sharing: blogs, forums, communities, social networking, video & image sharing, wikis, mashups, tagging, and content syndication. (e.g. Flickr, LinkedIn, Digg, TripAdvisor, YouTube.) However, a more technical interpretation might define Web 2.0  in terms of the Internet as a platform, software as a service, a different way of building applications, cloud computing, AJAX apps, etc.

Web 2.0 has become an accepted term. (So can we please stop using it?) Web 3.0 has a great deal of debate surrounding it. (Watch the Web 2.0 vs. Web 3.0 video of Eric Schmidt.)

Web 3.0 – Marketing buzzword or unrealized vision?
Web 3.0 (made popular in '06) is a large work in progress, and it crosses into several different areas: semantic web, personalization, intelligent search, and mobility. You could say that Web 3.0 is an intelligent Web 2.0. The vision is that the Web understands how to personalize your experience and recommend what you are looking for--and lets you take it with you.

The semantic web is a big issue in itself. (Hear Tim Berners Lee’s take on the Semantic Web.) It's essentially about turning the web into one big database of language that can be read and categorized by a system rather than people. Aggregating data and turning it into collective intelligence applied to data. Another piece of it is natural language queries and extracting meaning from the way people interact with the web. Many think the semantic web will never happen.

The best version for b2b websites
What version do you need for your b2b web site? The one that isn't a version at all--just the best solution for your site visitors. Whether it’s 1.5 or 3.0, it has to be right for your audience.