Archives for October 2008

I have to admit, I’m a bit of a trend nut.  Like conspiracy nuts, trend nuts love to postulate wild theories for the sheer elation of occasionally (very occasionally) being right.  For instance, I was the first person I knew who spotted the correlation that the number of bacon strips on my local diner’s breakfast plate special can be directly tied to naked short sales in last week’s commodity pork barrel market (maybe not).

My RSS feeds today had the following stories listed back to back, Web 3.0 Manifesto Published, Semantic Web: Making Advertising more Relevant to Consumers, and Yahoo SearchMonkey gets Sagat, CitySearch.

I talked earlier about my personal excitement over the business potential for semantic web.  I think it will be a huge reboot for the market players who get in on the ground floor.  A quick review of these articles is only strengthening my resolve on that matter.

The Web 3.0 Manifesto, put out by Project10x, is a market research piece about where the opportunities are in this space.  Market research by itself does not a market make.  Though for 3K, one would expect the customers that buy this report are serious enough about the potential that they see the investment worthwhile.  RWW says that the report actually lists out niches where industries can stake claims on this new space.  I really want to get a look at the full report, but for now I will just have the listen to 3rd parties ‘discuss’ it.

The next article discusses Web 3.0 Conference and Expo where they looked at the Semantic Advertising possibilities, Semantic Advertising in my mind is a dressed up way of saying Contextual Advertising like those found tied to search results in google.  We have a limited form of this already, but semantic web will make this easier to do correctly.  Im skeptical about discussions about advertising models that will ‘improve’ on current models in light of studies suggesting that we have developed Banner Blindness unless the results are really highly targeted to our interests.  I’m in a wait and see mode on this one.

Lastly, Yahoo’s SearchMonkey is practical examples of semantic web in search results.  When your content is properly tagged for search bots to read it, you can get rich context results in your search engines like Yahoo.  We talked about it earlier.  While earlier reports suggested Yahoo had dropped to third on the search list behind YouTube for number of search results delivered, it may be enough for them to have highly targeted results that can be easier to monetize.  SearchMonkey is a great place to start playing around with semantic web concepts to see real world results.  Another good place to start is microformats.

Now, did I tell you about my theory involving stop light frequency charts and the price of gas?

Photo attributed to Gunjan Karun on Flickr CC