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Yet Another Meme: The Web 3.0 Label
Highlights Self-Organizing Content |
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14 November 2006 |
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Already tired from a year's worth of Web 2.0 buzz John
Markoff of The New York Times is spinning out Yet Another
Meme - a "yam" known as Web 3.0. In Markoff's eyes the new
game in content is to push out concierge-like services that
analyze Web content to discern much deeper patterns of
meaning and more intuitive results for answer-seekers. It's
all pretty true stuff, but it's also stuff that's been
under development for a long, long time - and is not likely
to provide quick payoffs any time soon. In the meantime
publishing-empowered users are organizing content
themselves and coming up with some pretty compelling
insights of their own. |
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A
yam is a sweet tuber,
a tasty treat that goes down easy and fills you up nicely, but
it doesn't take long for them to lose their appeal at a
Thanksgiving dinner or other feasts. They're quickly scraped
into the trash bin and forgotten. From time to time pundits
will coin buzzwords - "memes"
to some - that get people excited about ideas in a packageable
way like yams, easy to prepare goodies that are greedily
consumed for a brief while but quickly dumped when they fail to
satisfy.
John Markoff's
recent article for The New York Times seems to have given
broad life to the term "Web 3.0," a supposedly new trend
towards sophisticated content analytics. It's a candidate to
become Yet Another Meme - a yam - that is likely to stick to
our ribs for a while but fade away quickly. Just as the "Web
2.0" meme was very fuzzy and disintegrated into a recognition
that social publishing was more about the degree to which
existing read/write publishing technologies were being applied
rather than a truly new phenomenon, the Web 3.0 concept
threatens to excite us at the very time that it is getting
ready to be pushed aside.
Markoff points out some very important trends in content
derived from work on text and data mining technologies that are
creating value-add services in many venues. But Web analytics
via text and data mining have been an active component on the
Web for years. From Amazon's
automated book recommendations to
Factiva's early forays
into reputation management analysis to
BuzzLogic's emerging
tools that divine the real influencers of opinion in social
media outlets content providers have been recognizing the value
of online content analysis services since the beginning of
electronic publishing.
The big change in analytics is that they are succeeding with
content packaged in more raw forms. Instead of waiting for Tim
Berners-Lee's
Semantic Web to get perfectly formed Web content
established for divining broad content patterns, text and data
mining technologies are repackaging less-than-perfect sources
to see what can be made of them. The results are not always
great but with a broad enough base of information to digest
they can be compelling. Yet the real important part of this
trend towards sophisticated content analytics is not the
machines but the people whose authoring is fueling their
analysis.
Social media is adding a new level of impromptu organization
and insight to Web-based content that is accelerating the
ability of analysis tools to figure out what's important and
worthwhile in content sources. Services like
LinkedIn,
Digg and even humble
hyperlinks in weblogs are creating a network of tagged and
joined content that is a system of analysis unto itself.
Instead of the Semantic Web we're experiencing the
Self-Organizing Web, content that's structured through millions
of individual contributors and editors to form a rapidly
shifting picture of what's relevant.
Automated analytics mining the human intelligence that's
organized the world's content will continue to provide
significant value-add opportunities, but the core of real
change in publishing will continue to rest on the development
of individual publishers being empowered as subject matter
experts and content analysts. The machines will make a
difference, but the human mind will make more of a difference -
for now. Here are a few things to think about in relation to
Web 3.0 and the Self-Organizing Web:
- Move to the ends of the barbell economy. Automated
content analytics and services are forming one end of a
barbell-shaped content economy, with the other end formed
from users empowered by publishing and analytic tools to
create even more valuable insights that can drive profits. In
the middle are the raw materials of publishing, the
infrastructure and editorial materials that need either
automated or human-provided context to give them a high-value
audience. Be it with the machines or with your audience, the
value in publishing needs to move towards empowering analysis
and value-add functions and away from mere distribution.
- Move to the ends of the network. Some of the Web
3.0 appeal comes from its emphasis on powerful central
computing creating insights from raw materials - the old
"information factory" model in a new form. It's still a valid
model, but in the meantime a world of networked individuals
is creating its own set of conclusions at the far end of
those network connections - with our without those factories.
The real potential for Web analytics is to be able to have
multiple points of analysis coalescing in a networked fashion
to create distributed insights - worldwide "aha"s that may be
somewhat different for each person in the Self-Organizing
Web.
- Be patient. It's still very early. If you're
thinking that there is going to be a Web 3.0 stampede the way
that the Web 2.0 yam took off, think again. The semantic
processing technologies that underlie many of these emerging
tools are still very young, requiring huge amounts of content
in many instances to come to any sort of intelligent
conclusion about anything. There are smart people working on
content analytics, but so far the machines cranking them out
are still pretty dumb compared to the people using them.
Expect some amazing breakthrough services in the years ahead,
but they will only be as good as the content being fed into
them. They won't be thinking for themselves for a long time.
It's great that analysis tools are getting recognized by the
mainstream media as an important factor in electronic
publishing, but don't mistake the foothills of their
development for soaring peaks. The payoffs for analytics
require very long-term missions and patient investors - not the
quick "crank out a portal and flip it" game plan that many have
in mind with Web content. Many efforts to develop
intelligent analytics will fall to the sidelines because they
were conceived of as a technology product rather than as a
well-conceived content product. In the meantime
Content Nation is cranking out lots of great analysis on
its own, waiting to be mined by "Web 3.0" tools. Happy
Thanksgiving - enjoy the yams!
-
John Blossom
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