Aaron Worsham

The title is borrowed from a presentation given by Nova Spivack, CEO of Radar Networks He would like us to remember that computers are suppose to do the dumb things for us, leaving time to do the smart things that only humans can do.  I am going to hijack this phrase for a sec, I hope he doesn’t mind too much.

What he is really talking about is Semantic Web, a subject which he speaks passionately on in this Next Web Conference presentation.

Nova Spivack at The Next Web Conference 2008 Note: The first third of this 45min video is explaination, middle third is examples and the latter third is questions. Pick your poison.

My concern with explaining anything about the next big thing on the web is that so many people are having trouble finding room for the now big things on the web.  Social graphs, community and transparency may not be the hit we were all hoping for with the business world because it assumes too much change in the way some businesses think about the relationship between themselves and their customers.  For the businesses that do embrace social, much will be won.  But all companies should be able to understand web 3.0 because it is talking about something they understand, data.  Here we should be on firmer ground because, hey, businesses have been working for years to make their industry’s data readable by computers.  I promise you that for your industry you have an association or a market research group pooling data on what your company is doing.  That data could be financial or it could be manufacturing or it could be sales or it could be more abstract.  But somewhere out there today someone is already giving your data meaning (semantics).

Now the real hurdles to understanding the ideas behind ‘web 3.0’ are the distractions.  An example: As anyone who remembers the early days of the internet can tell you, things back then were tough to navigate.  Fortunately, as Nova suggests, we are good at forcing computers to make difficult things easier.  The tedium of using telnet, Bulletin Boards and Gopher gave way to browsers which got easier over time to where now even things as complex as secure online financial transactions are possible by most people.  Web 3.0 will be the same way, where concepts that seem difficult to understand in his presentation today will make sense as easier to use tools are created.  The programming term for things like this is ‘Abstractions’ and we use them to eliminate Distractions.

So what do you get if you take the problem of computer readable data and remove the distractions?  You get a simple idea that says computers need to be able to read data on the web in context so that they can do important tasks for you without you explaining those tasks to the computer.  This is such a hugely important step in the value of the internet as a business platform that I’m still a little shocked it took a backseat to social networking for web 2.0.  Companies that are foot-forward in doing this kind of work will, in my opinion, gain tremendous ground over their competitors in terms of market credibility, which lets face it, is an enormous competitive advantage.  You want the market looking to you online for answers in your industry.  The semantic web will make someone in your industry an information leader someday.  I believe that strongly.

For anyone interested in learning more, I should point out that researching this subject can be a bit heady.  Currently approachable articles on the topic spend 4/5 of their copy describing semantic web and then hint briefly at the players invloved, skipping real world examples altogether.  I would start my search at the w3c.org site with terms like rdf and semantic.  The W3C is the standards body for many of the ideas out there so people turn to them when they are looking for information.  Also, you can look at Radar Network’s application called Twine for more concrete examples.