I'm Married 1.0, have Kids 2.0, and on a good day really good friends 3.0. Do the numbers matter? No, but the relationships do. That's the case that Anne Zelenka at GigaOM makes as she takes a critical look at Jason Calacanis' Web 3.0 definition posted earlier this week.

Anne doesn't take the "definition" bait or quibble over the numbers, but she does make a case for the shift in emphasis of technology and and how we use that technology in the ways we work, differentiating between the Information Age and the Connected Age. She notes:

The Information Age is the age of the knowledge worker. The Connected Age is the age of the web worker. Knowledge workers create and manage information, massaging it into intangible knowledge goods. Web workers create and manage relationships across knowledge goods, hardware, and people.

She also extends the analogy of Information Age vs. Connected Age to Microsoft vs. Google. And although Google isn't the perfect example of a connected corporation, Anne says,

Google uses openly available knowledge, human, software, and hardware resources (with a good dose of its own such resources) and harvests value from those resources by finding and creating relationships.

I think there are two important points here: (1) how we apply our relationships can bring value to how we apply our technology; (2) while we don't need technology to make a connection, it's technology that gives us the possibility of scale. Technology, in this sense, if we choose it, expands our neighbourhood - not in the sense of a having a bigger city to live in, but instead in the sense of having a larger network of relationships and connections, a social network that's more than just next door, down the street, or across the city. This network can take you anywhere. And it doesn't need a "number.0″ to get you there either.