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 excerpt below is what
compelled me to contribute some 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
but futility in his vision for a "Semantic Web" (I
don't!). A recent example of 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
have excerpted 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 process data (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. clicking bookmarklets
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 we really 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 humans with the aid of intelligent and
unobtrusive annotation technology solutions. These solutions
will provide context and purpose by using our our social
essence as currency. The annotation effort will be subliminal,
there won'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, we might not even call it "The
Semantic Web", who cares? But it will have the distinct attributes of
being very "Quiet" and highly "Valuable"; with no burden
on "how we write", but constructive burden on "why
we write" as part of the content contribution process (less
Google/Yahoo/etc juice chasing for more
knowledge assembly and exchange).
We
are social creatures at our core. The Internet and Web have
collectively reduced the connectivity hurdles that once made
social network oriented solutions implausible. The eradication
of these 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.