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Yahoo Embraces The Semantic Web - Expect The Internet To Organize Itself In A Hurry
- Readmore 19y agoYahoo has really been impressing me in the last couple weeks. First the Open Search Platform and now this. I guess all it takes is the threat of a hostile takeover to get your productivity going. I really hope they can stave off Microsoft, because I don't see the big M$ attempting to innovate like this if they took control.
- gruseom 19y agoI don't see the big M$ attempting to innovate like this Yahoo's recent openness binge is so strategically opposite to Microsoft that I wonder if they aren't doing this in part to impede the takeover, or as a sort of post-takeover insurance.
- neilk 19y agoYou're anthropomorphizing. Giant corporations don't react at the human time scale. Anything you see coming out of the corp today has been under development for months, if not years. A soon-to-be-ex-colleague wrote a good piece on this recently. http://getluky.net/2008/03/04/is-the-ie8-standards-mode-a-result-of-politics/ http://getluky.net/2008/03/04/is-the-ie8-standards-mode-a-re...
- wheels 19y agoHere's my theory: Standardization and openness do not benefit the dominant player (or players, in close competition) in a market. Standardization and openness tend to benefit all players that are not dominant in a market, by comoditizing the market and forcing value based competition. If the majority of a market is locked up by the dominant player(s), standardization tends to not happen. If the majority of the market is not locked up by the dominant player(s), things tends towards standardization. As it pertains to Yahoo they're still an internet powerhouse, but their markets are eroding at a pace that they are probably falling out of the dominant category into the leader-of-the-non-dominant-pack category. Yahoo does some stuff very well, and I suspect commoditization of parts of web-space would be in their favor. The question is if they'll be able to push hard enough fast enough to make some of this stuff catch on while people still care.
- davidw 19y agoSomeone's been reading Varian and Shapiro?
- wheels 19y agoNope, just being typically over-analytical. But I suspected that there are people that had written more well reasonsed versions of such. Noted for my list of people to look up. :-) I started reading my first business books since freshman accounting about a month ago.
- Hexstream 19y agoNow, if the dominant player in a market was "foolish" enough to joyfully embrace standards even if their competitors weren't adopting standards very quickly, would they necessarily lose their "edge" over competitors, considerations of benefitting the market as a whole aside?
- wheels 19y agoWell, one classic example: IBM and the PC market (where standardization helped) vs. Apple and the Mac clones (where standardization almost wiped Apple out). Here's some more theorizing: I think it would depend on how saturated the market was. If standardization would cause the market to grow such that a smaller percentage of a bigger market was larger than a large percentage of a small market, the company could still benefit from standardization, but they'd also have to diversify in that time so that when saturation approached that they wouldn't get stuck in a commodity market while their competitors could catch up.
- pg 19y agoI thought the second half of this title was meant as a joke, but apparently he's serious.
- jraines 19y agoWell, there is a pretty big incentive. Who wouldn't want their SERP real estate to have more attractive, more valuable information? Seems like a new kind of SEO opportunity for companies and freelance developers.
- dood 19y agoI think there is a fair chance that much of the semantic web dream (i.e. "the internet organizing itself") will arrive pretty suddenly, with exponential-like growth. There has been a very long period of ramping up, experimentation and hype, but it may only take a few good tools, some well written blog posts and some serious incentives (e.g. Yahoo's embrace) to tip it from dream to reality. This announcement may not actually reflect the tipping point, but its a certainly a good sign, and a major step in the right direction.
- DaniFong 19y ago'I think there is a fair chance that much of the semantic web dream (i.e. "the internet organizing itself") will arrive pretty suddenly, with exponential-like growth.' I'm skeptical. It seems like you'd have to either solve some pretty tricky AI problems, or get people writing for the internet to do all this extra work. It might still to feature in some larger, professionally developed sites, but I'd be surprised if it took off.
- henning 19y agoOh boy, people will be producing shitty microformat-riddled markup instead of plain old markup. Like remember how after web standards became a hot topic, no one produced websites that only worked in Internet Explorer anymore? That was awesome.
- dskhatri 19y agoW3C's Semantic Web FAQ: http://www.w3.org/RDF/FAQ http://www.w3.org/RDF/FAQ
- sanj 19y agoThe semantic web is going to require a heap of structured data where there isn't any right now. That level of effort needs to be grassroots, but I don't see how it is going to be motivated.
- euccastro 19y agoThat's the whole point of the article, isn't it? SEO will be the motivation.
- sah 19y agoGreat, so the semantic web is going to work as well as <meta name="keywords">?
- derefr 19y agoStructured data exists in data silos more commonly known as relational databases. This ramp-up will really only occur once SQL servers start speaking SPARQL.
- sabat 19y agoI often wonder whether the semantic web is really Web 3.0. Shouldn't it be more like Web 2.5? (Or maybe we should drop the revision numbers altogether?) Seriously, I wonder if we shouldn't be thinking bigger. Adding "meaning" to web pages is important, but it seems like a smaller goal on the way to, I dunno, maybe the realization of The Metaverse (ala Stephenson). Or something big like that.
- derefr 19y agoUntil all the AJAX-y stuff got labelled, "Web 2.0" was the Semantic Web. I can recall much of that usage around 2003/4 or so.
- pius 19y agoThis is great news for the Web. Very bad news for Twine though.
- wallflower 19y agoThe Semantic Web isn't complete until it's machine readable by an AI
- pius 19y agoIt is machine-readable by an AI. The question is, where's the AI? ;)
- wallflower 19y agoWhat do you think of Cyc? http://www.cyc.com/ http://www.cyc.com/ Argh. 8week cut me off. Bad grammar today. Meant to say 'isn't complete until an AI reads the semantic web' Time to go back to testing.
- pius 19y agoThe only part of Cyc I've looked at is OpenCyc and that was a few years ago when I was heavy into AI in college. I think it's a great effort!
- Kaizyn 19y agoThey've been working on Cyc for about 20 years or more. If it were a worthwhile direction to take AI in, it would have yielded results by now.