Stop
whatever you are doing ...: "
.. and go and read
Tom Coates' explanation of his last project with the BBC. After
21 years working in broadcasting Ireckon this is one of the coolest
things to happen for a very, very long time.
The ramifications of this will go very deep indeed."
(Spotted Via The
Obvious?.)
Yes, the ramifications are deep! Tom Coates' screencast
demonstrates an internal variation of an activity that is taking
place on many fronts (concurrently) across the NET. I tend to refer
to this effort as "Self
Annotation"; the very process that will ultimately take us
straight to "Semantic
Web". It is going to happen much quicker than anticipated
because technology is taking the pain out of metadata annotation
(e.g. what you do when you tag everything that is ultimately URI
accessible). Technology is basically delivering what Jon Udell calls: "reducing the
activation threshold".
Using my comments above for context placement, I suggest you
take a look at, or re-read Jon
Udell's post titled: Many Meanings of Metadata.
Once again, the Web 2.0 brouhaha (in every sense of the word) is
a reaction to a critical inflection that ultimately transitions the
"Semantic Web" from "Mirage" to "Nirvana". Put differently (with
humor in mind solely!), Web 2.0 is what I tend to call a "John the
Baptist" paradigm, and we all know what happened to him :-)
Web 2.0 is a conduit to a far more important destination. The
tendency to treat Web 2.0 as a destination rather than a conduit
has contributed to the recent spate of Bozo bit flipping posts
all over the blogosphere (is this an attempt to behead John,
metaphorically speaking?). Humor aside, a really important thing
about the Web 2.0 situation is that when we make the quantum
evolutionary
leap (internet time, mind you) to the "Semantic Web" (or
whatever groovy name we dig up for it in due course) we will
certainly have a plethora of reference points (I mean
Web 2.0 URIs) ensuring that we do not revisit the "Missing
Link" evolutionary paradox :-)
BTW - You can see some example of my contribution to the ongoing
annotation process by looking at: