Yesterday's New York Times included an, um, interesting article by John Markoff about the next generation of the web. He says that computer scientists and start-ups want to "add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide--and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion." He says their effort is "referred to as Web 3.0." That's nice, John, but why does your article have everyone who actually knows what they're talking about scratching their heads? Everyone who's been paying attention will identify that new "layer of meaning" as what people have been happy calling the semantic web for a few years now, but nobody but Markoff, and maybe a few overenthusiastic marketers, are calling it Web 3.0, and that bit about reasoning "in a human fashion"? Well, AI isn't new to computer science, and Hollywood got over it five years ago. I'm not sure what Markoff's excuse is.

Predictably, the blogosphere is all over the Web 3.0 meme, with notable responses from Nick Bradbury who says "The Semantic Web may happen, but if it does, it's going to be a helluva lot messier than the architects would like," and ex-Microsoftie Robert Scoble who proposes "Web 2007" as a much more hypeworthy name, Tim O'Reilly ("I was surprised to see Markoff referring to this as "Web 3.0", when that very fact is the heart of what we've been calling Web 2.0."), and, of course, Dave Winer.

Nick Bradbury is a good guy. You can get an idea of this by searching on his name in Technorati, and seeing what other bloggers have to say about him. The reason I bring this up is that I was blown away by the way in which Nick tackled the recent revelation that there is a security vulnerability in almost all current RSS aggregators that could allow a nefarious publisher to get a script to run on the reader's computer. Nick is the developer behind the absolutely excellent FeedDemon feed reader, which NewsGator purchased about a year ago. In Nick's case, due to the manner in which he uses Internet Explorer's rendering engine in "Internet Zone" mode, the exploit doesn't work on FeedDemon. That fact notwithstanding, Nick dove into the problem and came up with a fix to eliminate the vulnerability altogether. The new version of FeedDemon, 2.0.0.25, is available as of today, and includes a substantial performance enhancement.

All that is well and good, and for those of us that own a copy of FeedDemon the new version is a very worthwhile upgrade. But that's not what this story is about.

After figuring out the problem and a solution for it, Nick decided to share his knowledge with the RSS community, and is offering to help any other feed aggregator developers (in other words, his competition) to ensure that their applications are not vulnerable either. That's pretty cool.