'peeps creative

Just as Web 2.0 is a way to describe the proliferation of user-interactive applications and motion, Web 3.0 is all about community, recommendations, free services, intelligent (semantic) searches, and information that's no longer random data, but tailored, peer-reviewed, highly intuitive, totally integrated and delivered in real-time.

We've identified some broad trends along with some applications, devices and websites that are representative of the new crop of tools that are powering Web 3.0

Mobile applications have long been aimed at giving subscribers information specific to their whereabouts, but now we're seeing even more intelligent ideas. Loopt.com is a new one this year that blends our love of social networking with location-based services. It's has been described as a 'social compass' as it detects not only where you are on the map, but also pinpoints your mobile friends in the vicinity. Loopt.com is US-centric at present, but the company says it working on looping up Europe.

Maps: Google street map hit the news early this year with its controversial drive-by views of people's front doors and people themselves. But, Google doesn't have a monopoly on innovative mapping. Openstreetmap.org is about people mapping everything from great hiking routes to off-piste ski runs or and wine tours, and it's mapping the world. It's a kind of wiki of special interest maps. And once you get where you're going with your map you could use a little:

Life Enhancement: A more-friendly, more-accurate way of saying Augmented Reality , Life Enhancement is really gaining speed as a way to make humans more Borg-like without all the mind-numbness and evil. For instance, we're really digging on the Wikitude World Browser. This mobile app (available on a number of platforms including iPhone, Android and MyTouch) presents the user with data about their surroundings, nearby landmarks, and other points of interest by overlaying information on the real-time camera view of compass-enabled smart-phones.

Personal Organisers: There's no shortage of web services aimed at helping us organize our lives. But however digital our way of living, a lot of us still print out paper when we travel, particularly on business. Tripit.com solves your travel paper trail by being your 'personal, full-service travel assistant'. It compiles your itinerary, from transport modes to dinner dates, and adds in weather reports, suggested local attractions and more. It's worth a glance if you travel and have a busy agenda; useful too for family holiday plans.

Transparency: Our personal favorite among the transparency / community tools that made a debut recently is Google's Sidewiki. This is a google-enabled social media app that sits in the left margin of nearly every website on earth and it's visible to anyone who has Google toolbar enabled. Before the launch of Sidewiki (and other apps like it) a marketer who chose not to engage in a social media strategy was essentially choosing to ignore a parade of picketers in front of their brick-and-mortar store. When Google released Sidewiki, the picketers walked into the showroom. Even if Sidewiki doesn't stick, how long will it be until something exactly like it does?

Integration: Consider Posterous. Here's a blogging application that allows the user to write a blog post, upload pictures and video via a number of methods – the most enticing of which is via a simple email – and then the magic really begins. Posterous allows the user to link more than a dozen social media and content delivery applications to their blog, so if the user writes and email with a subject line, body text, a video and several pictures, the subject line becomes a tweet posted to twitter (along with a trimmed URL to the main post), the video I uploaded to the user's YouTube account, the pictures are parsed into their flickr account AND set up in a slide-show viewer on Posterous and the whole thing is all linked up with a thumbnail image to the user's facebook. A user gets an hour's worth of social networking done in the time it takes them to write and email. Genius!

Collaboration: Slideshare.net is a useful resource for anyone in business seeking latest thinking on an area of interest and reading it in succinct, generally well-put-together PowerPoint slideshows that are rated and commented on by users. 280slides.com operates in the same field, but is a 'Cloud' computing application at its best. It lets you create, collaborate on, share and store a slidedeck on the Cloud (their remote server), so you can access it anywhere in the world. You'll never be caught short again on a business trip without your slidedeck to hand.

Audio: We love audio-visual on the web, so it's little wonder that this area is seeing new applications each day. Two that seem to fill a market gap are Songkick.com and Blip.fm. Songkick tells you where your favourite group's next gig is based on your music library. It's called the world's biggest concert database, and let you 'never miss a gig again'. Meanwhile, Blip.fm is billed as a kind of 'twitter for music' as it lets you create a social network based on your music choices and recommendations.

Video: As video and audio capabilities via handheld mobile devices becomes ubiquitous, so does the option to shoot, edit, title and upload video to the web immediately and without cost. Devices like the iPhone 3GS and the OWLE bubo A/V rig paired with apps like Reel Director and services like YouTube (not to mention that Apple Execs have been really vocal about the future of video and how that integrates with their company's long-term vision including their plans for the long-promised Apple Tablet) make the future of user-generated video content seem very bright indeed.

Social Media Intermediaries: There's now an ever-growing range of tools to help us make sense of, filter and manage our Twitter world. We focus on Tweetag.com, which is billed as a search engine for 'tweets'. With millions of people adding content each day, the Twittersphere is a morass of information and comment, some useful and some useless. Tweetag helps you search tweets for trends. It also edges towards Web 3.0 semantic search by offering up a tweetag cloud and organising search results according to whether other Twitterers have 're-tweeted' - in a sense seconded - an idea.