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.