Tim O’Reilly, famed for coining the ‘Web 2.0′ term among many other things, has poured cold water on the emerging ‘Web 3.0′ moniker. In a new post, O’Reilly makes the following declaration about Web 3.0:

“I find myself particularly irritated by definitions of “Web 3.0″ that are basically descriptions of Web 2.0 (i.e. new forms of collective intelligence applications) that justify themselves as breakthroughs only by pretending that Web 2.0.”

But, should someone who built a glass-house empire around the Web 2.0 designation throw stones at some one else’s glass house? Is O’Reilly afraid of competition, or trying to head off an end-run around his famously copyrighted Web 2.0 term?

O’Reilly points out that “Web 2.0 started out as the name of a conference” that was supposed to stoke up renewed interest in the Web following the dot-com bust.

Web 3.0 appears to an attempt at a more catchy name for the much-awaited and long-predicted “Semantic Web,” in which meaning is attached to content accessible across the Web. Semantic Web promises to put a lot more intelligence — artificial intelligence — out there in the network of networks, and is certainly a step in the right direction.

O’Reilly agrees that “there’s definitely something new brewing, but I bet we will call it something other than Web 3.0. And it’s increasingly likely that it will be far broader and more pervasive than the Web, as mobile technology, sensors, speech recognition, and many other new technologies make computing far more ambient than it is today.”

O’Reilly also says that the Web 3.0 arguments are “clear evidence that the proponents don’t understand Web 2.0 at all. Web 2.0 is not about front-end technologies. It’s precisely about back-end, and it’s about meaning and intelligence in the back end…. The real difference between Web 2.0 and the semantic Web is that the Semantic Web seems to think we need to add new kinds of markup to data in order to make it more meaningful to computers, while Web 2.0 seeks to identify areas where the meaning is already encoded, albeit in hidden ways.”

Gartner also recently took a swipe at Web 3.0, saying the “Semantic Web (Web 3.0’s alias) doesn’t cut it as a new trend — it still has a lot of Web 2.0 in it.

I agree with these sentiments, because the industry tends to go a little over the top with buzzwords and labels. Last year, for example, Oracle and Gartner attempted to start pushing the “SOA 2.0″ label, though most organizations are still trying to figure out what SOA is, and whether it can help their businesses in any way.

And, by the way, people are still trying to get their heads around what exactly Web 2.0 is about. Let’s help O’Reilly put the kibosh on this over-the-top naming scheme.