Filed under: Media, Technology
It looks like the semantic web is about to gain traction with the Yahoo! Search open platform that was announced last month. In summary, Yahoo! is hoping to spread the use of semantic web standards by supporting microformats and RDF - promising enhanced search results for content adhering to such standards.
And with this promise of an enhanced search presence will come the marketing need for publishers to create content that capitalises on this. Just as SEO emerged as an industry all of its own, I expect Semantic Web Optimisation to emerge as an industry all of its own in the very near future.
[Before submitting this post, I quickly searched on the topic (yes - I appreciate the irony of having used Google!) and came across this article - essentially saying the same thing as me above. But please can we not fall into the trap of applying version numbers after “Web” for every evolution in web technology that occurs!]
Filed under: Media, Technology
Another graph. This time showing how the number of websites has grown since 1990. Actually, things only really started to grow about ten years ago in 1998, a year or two after I first played about on the Internet at university. It took six years (1990-1996) for the number to reach 100,000. In 2008, it is now 162 million! While the numbers have risen and risen, what is also interesting to note is the dip in numbers during 2002. Post dot-com bubble slump? Anything to do with 9/11? Or was it simply that a lot of domain names, bought during the dot-com boom years - with little more than a holding page to show, expired at this time? This little blip aside - it seems the upwards curve is un-stoppable. Will it ever reach saturation point?
Filed under: Media, Technology
Scary or exciting?
Filed under: Friends, Media, Technology, Random
I’ve just taken a quick look at friendfeed.com - it’s basically a lifestream service, where people can aggregate and publish their web-lives. It’s done rather nicely - enabling you to quickly create your own lifestream from various feeds (here’s mine) and not too different in look to the lifestream I quickly hacked together with pipes - but done way better and on a grand scale! You can also track friends’ feeds easily too, making it a much more two-way tool than others out there - say Tumblr, for example, which publishes your combined feeds. There’s definitely a need for this - with the whole micro-blogging/twitter/lifestream thing, it is useful to show this data in one place and provides an excellent way for potential stalkers to gather all their up-to-the-minute information on a particular target in one easily digestible feed 
Filed under: Media, Technology, Random
I’ll admit I’m quite a fan of Tom Hodgkinson’s work (being an avid reader of the Idler and having read both his recent books - “How To Be Free” and “How To Be Idle”), so I might be more inclined to understand where his rants and raves are coming from. But his latest outburst in the Guardian concerning Facebook certainly seems to have generated a bit of a maelstrom in the murky waters of the social media world (more than 500 del.icio.us bookmarks after one day and counting). While a little conspiratorial, there’s a certain weight to what he’s saying.
Lately there’s been a spate of negative blog entries and articles slating Facebook - and the furore surrounding Mr Scoble’s recent quarrel with Facebook pushed things even further. [Although some may argue that this simply served as an excellent PR pre-cursor to last week’s announcement that Facebook (along with Google) were to join the Data Portability initiative.]
Is this the beginning of Facebook fatigue? In 2008, will Facebook go the way that Second Life went in 2007? Or is this simply the natural media/ public reaction to “hype”, as described in Gartner’s Hype Cycle, and we’re now in the “Trough of Disillusionment“? I have to admit that the tedious slew of unanswered invites in my inbox from zombies, pirates and vampires has sent me sliding down my own trough of Facebook disillusionment. Although, rather lazily, I do find it handy to have friends’ details in one place on the web - I use Facebook to arrange meeting after work or even to message someone, for example, as it is easier than digging around for their contact details. Will I still be doing this in 12 months? I certainly wasn’t a year ago, so who knows? Maybe Gartner does.
Filed under: Media, Technology
The “social graph” is a global mapping of everybody and how they’re related. I had a play with a visualisation tool for Facebook relationships last night and it was great. Slightly scary but fun nonetheless. However, our weblives are not just about Facebook (although Facebook does provide a platform to bring them all together). Google’s OpenSocial is promising to provide another way to pull them together but, as Brad Fitzpatrick points out, a centralized “owner” of the social graph is a dangerous thing. Social networks need to be made open and portable. And they can be.
Tim Berners-Lee stated in a post yesterday that
…we have the technology — it is Semantic Web technology…
In other words, the connections and relationships made possible by the semantic web (or social graph - use interchangeably from hereon). He goes on:
Now, people are making another mental move. There is realization now, “It’s not the documents, it is the things they are about which are important”. Obvious, really.
and on opening up this data:
It is about getting excited about connections, rather than nervous.
So, yes - I am excited but how are we going to do this? Think data feeds, microformats and openID - things that would tend to be met with blank stares if I were to suggest them to clients. But show a client how you could remove barriers (such as log-in/ sign-up) to that all important “conversion” (with openID or microformats - here’s an excellent microformat implementation doing just that) and show how this person would be able to instantly tell all their friends about it (via their social graph) and then they’ll be interested.
Filed under: Media, Random
Two complete strangers agreed to look at each other for an hour in complete silence. A lot can happen in an hour.
[Read more…]
Filed under: Media, Technology
Some of you will have already heard about Joost (formerly known as The Venice Project) - an IPTV thingy from the folks who brought us Kazaa and Skype. There has been much speculation about its implications for the media, advertising and marketing industries - bringing together the wonders of the internet and TV in one glorious multimedia dream (well - that’s what the hype will have us believe anyway). Find out more over at Wired and MIT.
Anyway - I’ve have been having a bit of a play and it looks rather nice indeed. Not that I’ll be watching TV all day - it’s all purely in the name of research, of course!
I’ve also got a bunch of beta invites for anyone who wants to check it out for themselves - just let me know your email that you want to use for your Joost account…
Filed under: Media, Technology
I stumbled across this rather slick video this morning, introducing how internet technology is evolving. I quite like it…
[Read more…]
Filed under: Media, Technology
Amongst all this Second Life hype, I’d like to add a little prediction - on the back of trends in buzzwords in the media - that 2007 will see the rise of “web3.d” applications. Where the 3d web (i.e. apps like second life) and web2.0 (i.e. social apps like myspace and del.icio.us) collide in a mash-uptastic frenzy. Oh yes.
If anyone has any “web3.d” ideas, you can catch me down the Red Lion this afternoon to discuss further. That’s the Red Lion in Second Life, of course.
Filed under: Media, Technology
I’ve just spotted Adobe as a “user” on del.icio.us. It’s interesting to see that organisations like this are using del.icio.us as an online marketing channel to increase brand awareness, page rank and general online visibility.
I’m sure we’ll see many other organisations doing the same thing in the near future as people turn to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us as their first port of call for search - where “page rank” is effectively determined by the users themselves and you can be guaranteed better results. I can even see a niche emerging for optimisation services for these sites, just like SEO became a niche industry around Google page ranks.
Filed under: Media, Technology
I feel the need to air some thoughts after recent goings on in the “convergence” realm. It’s a term that has been bashed about for years now - with every new development being heralded as the harbinger of a new dawn of convergence in digital media and the like. And this last year has been no different. We have the other weekend’s Homechoice (aka Video Networks) and Tiscali merger. There’s that BSkyB and Easynet deal last October. There’s a peer to peer IPTV service about to surface. And finally, there’s something a sales guy said to me this afternoon. In fact, something that got me thinking about all this in the first place. Something about “convergence”, “entertainment hubs” and how we’ll all “obviously be browsing the internet on our TVs in the next couple of years”. Well, sorry, but I beg to differ. Will digital media delivery really converge on a single device as many people seem to think? Surely, as more electronic media devices become IP enabled, media delivery will start to diverge not converge? Okay - so I’m getting bogged down with semantics - I guess that the term “convergence” really refers to overlapping realms of different media with new technologies. But I’m not sure that this single device view is the right direction for IPTV. Particularly whe you consider the most successful interactive TV programmes I have worked on have been those that encourage interaction using a completely different device and media - such as mobile and SMS - rather than relying on a remote control or a keyboard.
The advent of broadband has made delivery of video and other digital media possible via the internet but viewing via your desktop or laptop computer screen is not always practical. Equally, browsing and searching the web from your sofa via the TV is not exactly an easy or sociable thing to do. Surely the best solution is one where you would search on your PC then sit back and view on your TV? I know this is exactly what many people are already doing but it often means situating the PC near the TV so that you can run a cable from the PC’s AV output into the TV. What I want to do, and I’m sure a solution must exist (please tell me if it does - otherwise I hereby patent this idea!), is utilise my Wi-Fi network to stream content to the TV. Maybe via a SCART device that doubles as a Wi-Fi antennae, receiving data streams via the local network? Surely such a simple single device must exist? It’s all I need - not some “media hub” or “home entertainment centre”. It seems to completely bridge that gap between the different tasks of searching/ interacting (i.e. “lean forward” tasks) and watching (i.e. “sit back” tasks). Please - somebody help!
Filed under: Media, Technology
As BT prepares to step up onto the IPTV stage - to take on the likes of Homechoice, NTL and sky - it is starting to gather together content providers like Warner Music, Paramount, the Beeb and National Geographic. All the sort of content providers that are likely to produce decent TV that people will sign up to “BT TV” to watch but please tell me that there’ll be more than Big Brother re-runs coming from Endemol.
On a similar note, I wonder what BT will use to deliver their video streams? It would be quite fitting if they used BitTorrent (BT - geddit?) really. Although, it looks like NTL are one step ahead on that one.
Filed under: Photos, Media, Technology
The Future of Web Apps Summit.
why buck a trend at a geek fest?
everyone else is blogging here, so here’s my quick notes to self:
0 Comments