Between Twitter messages about SXSW, video streams and online text chats about Freedom to Connect, Blogging the Libby Trial, and preparing for theNew England News Forum, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the Internet and I want to share some of these thoughts in terms of the financial services industry as well as a broader context.

Web 2.0 has already gone from the hot new thing to the Web 2.0 bubble and people are now talking about Web 3.0, the semantic web. I had been talking about my visions of Web 3.0, which are a bit different, and since the marketers have taken Web 3.0, I’ll take Web 3.1.

Yes, the tools that are predicted to make up the semantic web, which will mine and connect data sound very cool and I look forward to using them. As Lars noted the other day, Dow Jones is Introducing Elementized News Feeds for Quantitative Algorithms. The ability to take this information, mash it up with a market data feed, data about positions and trading strategies and any other information that can found is a good illustration of the sort of data mining and analysis that will make Web 3.0 very cool.

Yet there is more to this than simply mashing up data. More and more, the data is becoming real-time. The Twitter messages are coming in as instant messages or text messages, as well as updates to webpages and RSS feeds. Chats, like those that took place on the backchannel for the Freedom to Connect conference are content rich real time data, and many people wanted information coming out of the Federal Courthouse in Washington in as near real time as possible.