TechCrunch wrote about 2 in the last couple of days, Google’s working on it and everyday someone asks me for an invite to one of the beta applications I’m testing. Yes, we’re all talking about the Semantic Web – emphatically NOT Web 3.0, but a descriptive name we can all get behind.
And yet, what is the Semantic Web and what does that mean to the everyday web user? The best definition that I’ve read came from this ReadWriteWeb post (about a new technology in beta right now) that talks about how Semantic apps are all about assigning meaning. Personal meaning.
To quote the post : “Meaning that only you, and not a computer or an algorithm, could know. In doing so, the technology is not focused on a semantic web per se, but a semantic database of your own, made up of not only web links, but also files, contacts, emails, keywords, and more, and knowing how they all are associated with each other.”
The more information your piece of the Semantic Web receives, the more personal your experience becomes. Very much like the recommendations that Amazon gives you when you log on, except it’s a catalog of your life instead of your books. Imagine logging into your computer to an interface that aggregates all of your content (photos, videos, blog posts), messages, etc (ready for tagging), but also recommendations of people you should meet, restaurants you should try and movies you should see – all based on connections you already share with other people.
It’s an exciting changing of the guard of web-decades – the Dot-bomb of 1.0, the User-generated/Web application-ified 2.0 to the Semantic Web. What 1.0/2.0 brought was innovation and adoption. The semantic web is all about the richness of relationships. And yes – it’s personal.
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