Tuesday, April 10, 2007

The semantic web is here...again

The O'Reilly Radar is at work again. Tim is focusing his attention on what I found to be the most compelling point in his web 2.0 manifesto...data.

There is a lot excitement on the web these days relative to the old topic of the semantic web. The term used is metatagging. It has been popularized by websites such as del.icio.us and flickr where you can ascribe your own meta data to information (bookmarks or images) that you are posting to an online database. Now the idea is being taken further by some folks at a company called MetaWeb (lead by AI guru Danny Hillis). Their project Freebase is a free database of information, a lot like the Wikipedia, where users can assign their own metadata to entries and also dynamically help create the ontology. Other companies have similar projects in the works, like Google Base, and Open Directory project.

Technology rarely wins

Someone had forwarded me this. I found it to be an interesting discussion on the state of "web 2.0". In particular, how quickly the marketing machine kicks in to capitalize on the promise of new technology (e.g. read discussion on Michael Arrington from Techcrunch, the anointed "Godfather of Web 2.0")

"...technology rarely wins. I'm a technological optimist who believes that great technology always wins, and if the planet is to continue spinning properly, great technology must win, less there is no justice. And, naturally, I'm constantly disappointed. Technology rarely does win, and when it does its normally the result of a lot of marketing that shouldn't be required. Because at the end of the day, in the real world, people don't care about technology but rather what it enables them to do."

Perhaps in the end the biggest impact of web 2.0 (ignoring all the hype) is that it actually enables people to do things they care about.