
Yahoo Embraces The Semantic Web - Expect The Internet To Organize Itself In A Hurry - kmckeaigg
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/13/yahoo-embraces-the-semantic-web-expect-the-web-to-organize-itself-in-a-hurry/
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pg
I thought the second half of this title was meant as a joke, but apparently
he's serious.

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jraines
Well, 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.

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rms
I wonder how long until we start seeing the $49.99 ebook.

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henning
Oh 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.

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sanj
The 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.

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euccastro
That's the whole point of the article, isn't it? SEO will be the motivation.

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sah
Great, so the semantic web is going to work as well as <meta name="keywords">?

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Readmore
Yahoo 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.

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wheels
Here'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.

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Hexstream
Now, 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?

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wheels
Well, 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.

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dskhatri
W3C's Semantic Web FAQ: <http://www.w3.org/RDF/FAQ>

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wallflower
The Semantic Web isn't complete until it's machine readable by an AI

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pius
It _is_ machine-readable by an AI. The question is, where's the AI? ;)

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wallflower
What do you think of Cyc?

<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.

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Kaizyn
They'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.

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pius
I hear you, but I'd be hard pressed to say that making all common sense
knowledge machine readable is not a worthwhile direction.

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henning
I'd be happy to make such a claim, and many people much smarter than I am
would as well.

Common sense reasoning is a dead end IMO.

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pius
This is great news for the Web. Very bad news for Twine though.

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sabat
I 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.

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derefr
Until 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.

