Stephen Johnston has contributed an article to Vodafone’s Receiver mag (see link below). Cool (way to go, Stephen).
He pegs the current discussion around ‘what’s next’ on the Web, progressing from the start of the Web – info – through the current push – people – to where it might be going – semantics.
He rightfully points out that, once more, folks are thinking tech rather than user. Just the other day I was bemoaning that RDFSs or OWLs and what not that ‘librarians’ need to attach to everything manually by processing everything is NOT the future, but some dream of MIT-types (we have a few semWeb folks at Nokia, too).
For some time now, I’ve been characterizing the waves of Web as ‘them web’, publishers moving into the digital world, pushing top-down info to the vast public; ‘me web’, people becoming the publishers themselves, yet still pushing ‘content’ to the public; and ‘my web’, the connection between me and mine, ring-fenced world of content pools.
This semWeb talk has me thinking that there is a need for all the stuff that has been created to be made more useful. For example, how can all the info in BioMed Central, PLoS, or Wikipedia (1st wave publishing), user comments and notes (2nd wave publishing), relationships between readers, commentors, and creators (3rd wave?) mesh together in a self-making semantic web of content, interactions, and meaning WITHOUT some braniac librarians annotating the world for us?
I want it to grow, much the same way the Web had been growing, by people going about their business, bottom up, rather than pushed at us and based on some W3C working group multi-year RFP structure, top down.
It’s up to us to create the tools and services that folks use that helps them attach meaning to the Web, much like paths across a campus quad arise by the daily choices of the users. And, as Stephen points out (of course, we work for the same company, too), the mobile phone has a big role to play as some hyper-nifty sensor (and lots of us bring in the concept of ‘context’).
Indeed, all this semWeb stuff has returned to the forefront of my thinking due to a chance encounter with the folks at BioMed Central, an open access publisher of scientific papers, results, and studies. I’ve known about semWeb for a long while. But now, I see semWeb popping up all over the place. I hope there’s something to it.
Link: Vodafone Receiver » #19 | Thoughts on 3.0 – this time with added You-nicorn:
What I’m looking for in 3.0 is the truly breakthrough user experiences that hit you in the stomach, the way that using Google (and Google Earth) did the first time you used it, or the way that Mocha’s little legs (see above video) wiggle in a furry flurry of happiness.
