Good post over at Genuine VC yesterday covering the History of the Web:
…a transition among three distinct phases of consumers’ primary activity online from receiving, to hunting, and now doing…
Receiving, Hunting, Doing is a good indication of what we’ve seen so far- and I think we’re going full circle to "Receiving" again- only this time from intelligent sources.
Two examples are Kwiry or Tripit. With Tripit, you email them your travel itneratry and they scour the web in the background and send you a nice package of maps, directions, thoughtful suggestions, etc.
I’ve posted many times about "intelligence inside" which lives in the same neighborhood as the Semantic Web:
…I also think there’s a huge opportunity to get to data sooner via the sensor revolution. When phones report location, when phones listen to ambient sound, when credit cards report spending patterns, when cars report their miles traveled, when we’re increasingly turning every device into a sensor for the global brain, there will be more and more sources of data to be mined…
All of which means the process is reversing: doing by machines, hunting by spiders and receiving by users- remix and repeat.