Web 3.0 and the role of the Semantic Web
The MIT/Stanford Venture Lab (VLAB) hosted a forum yesterday evening titled, “Web 3.0 and New Opportunities on the Semantic Web.” First of all, the moderator, Paul Saffo, was outstanding and entertaining. He kept things lively and humorous. The panelists (Paul Kedrosky, Alex Iskold, Nova Spivak, and Robert Cook) were also fantastic and represented some excellent startup companies. My takeaway from the event is that a good foundation has been laid for moving the semantic web forward to the next stage. Paul pointed out Flickr as the best early consumer app example of how people are using collective intelligence to make searching and finding the right content better. Alex’s company, Adaptive Blue, and Robert’s company, MetaWeb’s freebase, are prime examples of companies making strides with the semantic web. Alex has a written several great posts on the topic. Here is one in particular that I think is very insightful as to the direction that websites are headed with respect to ‘web 3.0.’ (View Post)
Nova’s startup company, Radar Networks, is certainly one to watch but evidently some of what they are doing is still under wraps. Nova did an exceptional speed-prezo in about 2 minutes and shared this most excellent slide with the audience that lays out where we currently are on the path to arriving at the semantic web. Here is a link to some of his posts on the subject as well. (View Post)
The semantic web is indeed on the cutting edge of transforming search, advertising, content distribution and commerce. Some of the companies that panelists mentioned that are doing interesting things and helping to push the semantic web forward included Powerset, Hakia, and MapLight. What is exciting about the semantic web is how down the road (okay we’re talking 2030 or so) literally all of the information and disparate databases on the web will interconnect and the computers will be far more intelligent in how thyey read, process and deliver information to people. At the end of the forum, Nova pointed out that no one in the audience or on the panel mentioned where there is likely an untapped opportunity with the semantic web, and it is the one that really drove people to the web — the sex industry. I certainly hope and expect that there will be far greater and more useful arenas that will propel the semantic web faster to it materializing.
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I wrote a network blogger column on Twine: http://doiop.com/Twine .
The feed for Nova’s blog is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/typepad/MindingThePlanet .
See also Jim Hendler’s blog: http://www.mindswap.org/blog and it’s feed, http://www.mindswap.org/blog/feed .
And see the “Data Mining” and “Meaningful Data” blogs, too.
I’m in Twine’s private beta. The potential is way beyond the sex industry (although online dating could be a great niche app). I view Twine as a means to painless social networking, better than Facebook, better than LinkedIn. To paraphrase the Colonel, “Social networking done right.”
Comment by David Scott Lewis — November 27, 2007 @ 10:42 pm
SEMANTIC THINKING LEVELS
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I look at the diagram of information connection and social connection and I interpret the diagonal line as levels of thinking. There are people who have the intelligence to make the semantic web a physical and virtual reality, but I am more concerned with the inter-relationship between how I think and my personal ability to use these technologies.
As a thinking tool, I would presently place my level of thinking between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 and I recognize that those who are able to create Web 2.0 technology may not themselves have the capability to create Web 3.0 technology - but I am not in the platform creation business, my relationship as a human being to the semantic web is
1. how I can think about it
2. how I can apply it
3. how it changes what I think when I apply it
4. how does that application make a real difference
So I look at the development straight-line extrapolation and the value of it to me is how I shift my thinking to an area between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. My personal and daily interaction with this media should enable me to do this.
To me a statement such as
What is exciting about the semantic web is how down the road (okay we’re talking 2030 or so) literally all of the information and disparate databases on the web will interconnect and the computers will be far more intelligent in how thyey read, process and deliver information to people.
First of all talking about 2030 is like thinking about 1984, (not in a George Orwell context) but that is 23 years in the past, which isn’t a whole lot of time. The chief difference moving 23 years into the future rather than 23 years into the past is that the development speed is itself going to be exponential - even though personally I don’t feel like 1984 was that long ago, the future we face is technologically warp speed, while our human bodies are not fitted into the equation of like-minded personal experience.
So what is exciting to me is to think about how I can equip myself now for this emerging kind of world. If I thought like this in 1984 maybe the development curve would make a marginal difference in 2007, but I recognize that if I don’t think like this now, it is going to make a boat load of difference in 2030.
Finally stop talking about how technology is going to help people. The adage “if you don’t lose it, you lose it” applies more so to the future than it ever did in the past. Though a corporation can be legally defined as a “person” a computer or artificial intelligence is not a person and if it should be or that is the actual future, then I might as well as give up now thinking about these things, because not only machines will be smarter than us, but WE “the people” will have even less to think about and personally I don’t want to live in a machine culture - not having seen what the industrial age did to human beings with all its upfront promises.
Yet, I cannot be consumed about the great philosophical or McLuhanist interpretation, right now I just want to engage some practical wisdom and that means (without the aid of chips planted in my head) how best my brain, my existence, my way of life can benefit from growing in relationship to the technological progress, rather than running after it and being swallowed in a world of information greater than my individual processing capability or life goal orientated process capacity. Again, I am simply thinking these things out aloud for my own edification, the real benefit of which compounds, aggregates and emerges with multiple reflection and over the long-term (in this case 2007 to 2030).
M.
Comment by Syven — November 28, 2007 @ 9:13 am