After digesting
Oblique Angle's post
titled:
World Wide Web of Junk, it was nice to be reassured that I am
not part of a shrinking minority of increasingly peturbed Web
users. The post excerptbelow is what compelled me to
contributesome of my thoughts about the current state of the
Web and a future "Semantic Web".
The value of the Internet as a repository of
useful information is very low.
Carl Shapiro in
“Information Rules”
suggests that the amount of actually useful information on the
Internet would fit within roughly 15,000 books, which is about half
the size of an average mall bookstore. To put this in perspective:
there are over 5 billion unique, static & publicly accessible
web pages on the www. Apparently Only 6% of web sites have
educational content (Maureen Henninger,
“Don’t
just surf the net: Effective research strategies”. UNSW Press).
Even of the educational content only a fraction is of significant
informational value.
Noise is taking over the Web at an
alarming rate (to be expected in a sense ), and even though
Tim Berners-Lee
(TBL) had the foresight to create the Web,many see nothing
butfutilityin hisvision for a "Semantic Web" (I
don't!). A recent exampleof such commentary comes from
Eric Nee's CIO article, titled:
Web
Future is Not Semantic, Or Overly Orderly. I take issue with
this article because, like most (who have been bitten at least
once), I don't like mono culture. This article inadvertently
promotes "Google Mono Culture". I haveexcerpted the
more frustrating parts of this article below:
..As Stanford students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin looked at
the same problem—how to impart meaning to all the content on the
Web—and decided to take a different approach. The two developed
sophisticated software that relied on other clues to discover the
meaning of content, such as which Web sites the information was
linked to. And in 1998 they launched Google..
You mean noise ranking. Now, I don't think Larry and
Sergey set out to do this, but Google page ranks are ultimately
based on the concept of "Google Juice" (aka links). The value
quotient of this algorithm is accelerating at internet speed
(ironically, but naturally). Human beings are smarter than
computers, we just processdata (not information!)much
slower that's all. Thus, we can conjure up numerous ways to bubble
up the google link ranking algorithms in no time (as is the case
today).
..What most differentiates Google's
approach from Berners-Lee's is that Google doesn't require people
to change the way they post content..
The Semantic Web doesn't require anyone
to change how they post content either! It just provides a roadmap
for intelligent content managment and consumption through
innovative products.
..As Sergey Brin told Infoworld's
2002 CTO Forum, "I'd rather make progress by having computers
under-stand what humans write, than by forcing -humans to write in
ways that computers can understand." In fact, Google has not
participated at all in the W3C's formulation of Semantic Web
standards, says Eric Miller..
Semantic Content generated by next
generation content managers will make more progress, and they
certainly won't require humans to write any differently. If
anything, humans will find the process quite refreshing as and when
participation is required e.g. clickingbookmarklets
associated with tagging services such as'del.icio.us', 'de.lirio.us', or Unalog and others. But this is only the
beginning, if I can click on a bookmarklet to post this blog post
to a tagging service, then why wouldn't I be able to incorporate
the "tag service post" into the same process that saves my blog
post (the post is content that ends up in a content management system aka
blog server)?
Yet Google's impact on the Web is so
dramatic that it probably makes more sense to call the next
generation of the Web the "Google Web" rather than the "Semantic
Web."
Ah! so you think wereally want the
noisy "Google Web" as opposed to a federation of distributed
Information- and Knowledgbases ala the "Semantic Web"? I don't
think so somehow!
Today we are generally excited about
"tagging" but fail to see its correlation with the "Semantic Web",
somehow? I have said this before, and I will say it again, the
"Semantic Web" is going to be self-annotated by humanswith
theaid ofintelligent and unobtrusive annotation
technology solutions. These solutions willprovide context and
purposeby using ourour social essence as currency. The
annotationeffort will be subliminal, therewon't be a
"Semantic Web Day" parade or anything of the like.It will
appear before us all, in all its glory, without any
fanfare.Funnily enough, wemight not even call it "The
Semantic Web", who cares? But it will have the distinct attributes
of being very "Quiet" and highly "Valuable"; withno burden
on"how wewrite", but constructiveburden on "why
wewrite" as part of the content contributionprocess
(less Google/Yahoo/etc juicechasingfor more
knowledgeassembly and exchange).
We are social creatures at our core. The
Internet and Web have collectively reduced the connectivity hurdles
thatonce made social network oriented solutions implausible.
The eradication ofthese hurdles ultimately feeds the very
impulses that trigger the critical self-annotation that is the
basis of my fundamental belief in the realization of TBL's Semantic
Web vision.