Anne Zelenka has posted an interesting article on GigaOm, with the title “From the Information Age to the Connected Age.”

“Today’s version of the web, whatever you want to call it,” she writes, “is notable because people and hardware and information and software and conversation are all mixed together into a hyperconnected network. Maybe instead of getting tangled up in discussions of what’s web 1.0 vs. web 2.0 vs. web 3.0, we might look instead at another shift: how the web enables us to move from one era into another, from the Information Age to the Connected Age. You can see this shift both in the practices of individual workers and in the strategies of technology companies.”

Zelenka speculates that the old paradigm of the Information Age was one of the “knowledge worker,” and the new paradigm of the Connected Age is ruled by the “web worker,” yet another sort of Microsoft-Google comparison represented in this chart:

Zelenka acknowledges that most web workers will pursue a “hybrid” model, and that these categories are not meant to be descriptive but suggestive of new ways of thinking about trends.