In the begining was the World Wide Web and it was kind of good. People (usually computer-geek type people like, erm, myself) built a few websites and it’s fame began to spread. Pretty soon big businesses cottoned onto the idea and corporate websites sprang up all over the place with everything from the chief executives biography to a list of their company’s widgets available to purchase. In those days to say you were a ‘website designer’ was to be treated with the reverance normally only reserved for Nobel Prize-winning rock stars, or even possibly the Pope. Untold riches were yours and beautiful women would fall at your feet (although, curiously, not in my particularly grimy neck of the woods at the time).

Anyway, I digress. Eventually people tired of merely seeing a company brochure transferred to the internet and so then came the advent of what those in the know wearing black polo necks like to describe as Web 2.0. The buzzword in this new world was ‘user generated content’, in other words, rather than businesses creating fancy websites to sell you things and otherwise tell you what you should be viewing, the onus was on website users to create their own content and this materialised in spades through the likes of Facebook, Bebo, Twitter, Blogger and other such sites. Unless today is your first day on the Internet (in which case welcome, you’ve come to a great first site!) you’re probably using one or even all of these yourself already. Whole communities were created, developed and grew without website owners ever needing to input content or, tediously, create new pages and endless possibilities were opened up to a new generation of photographers, writers and publishers previously restricted to this strange world of mysterious code and unfathomable software packages.

So where, I hear you cry, do we go from here? Well hypothese abound over the future direction of the web, nattily titled for the numerically challenged as Web 3.0. Some theorists suggest that the next step will be towards the ‘intelligent web’ whereby websites will gain some kind of artificial intelligence or will be able to learn from the data you give them and aid you in subsequent operations. Instead of multiple searches to find the information you’re after, your Web 3.0 browser will know what your interests are (and where you live) and will automatically present you with results tailored to your needs. Looking for a restaurant for Friday night? Your browser knows you live in Didsbury and are a sucker for a risotto so will suggest to you Italian establishments in South Manchester. On the lash in Wigan? Well there’s a kebab shop serving a donner just for you round the corner. While Web 2.0 uses the Internet to make connections between people, Web 3.0 will use the Internet to make connections with information and, more than likely from different sources at the same time, such as data from a search positioned on a Google Map interface. With Web 3.0 you’ll be able to sit back and let the Internet do all the hard work for you feeding you the information you want from relevant sources.

Others argue that it will not so much be what you view but where, and on what, you view it. Figures suggest 1 in 10 people have a GPS-enabled phone now and the smart money reckons in 2 years time that will be 1 in 3. As phones become more powerful and technology ever smaller, will it be a case that your phone becomes your everyday PC, always connected, always on, accessing data stored in the “cloud” and ready to plug into a screen/keyboard combination wherever you happen to be? Buses and trains with built in docking stations on every seat so people could work/socialise on the move or while commuting? Blimey. Beats Virgin Rail into a cocked hat.

So, all in all, it’s an exciting time. A glance at the companies we saw at the Technology for Marketing & Advertising exhibition only serves to underline that fact. Never mind the dotcom boom (and subsequent bust) of the nineties… THIS is the real boom time with the internet rapidly becoming available to everyone, fresh technologies emerging on an almost daily basis and a new raft of dynamic business owners pushing the boundaries.

The question is now, where do YOU go from here?