future of ~the internet~

Memes and viral videos were cute a few years ago but I'm tired of them now. Memes like the phrase "haters gonna hate" or anything derivative of it makes me want to punch my monitor up to this point. I remember when fan fiction was actively made fun of by all members of Usenet, now all of a sudden it's socially acceptable and people like Cassandra Claire are getting published.

I guess I'm growing out of the internet, it's not the same thing I used back in 1997.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CnWs8jDbXo

Sadly that is how I order pizza, too.

all of the semantic stuff is pretty much brand new to me, but yeah, whenever we talk about it with people at work there's always an old grizzled IT pro who is basically like "people have been talking this up for a decade, and nothing ever gets done."

ha, that's me

but this is the second time today I have encountered this phrase so I guess it is getting revived for another go

can somebody explain semantic web to me like I'm a 5-year old - is it like skynet

basically you should be able to navigate the internet without the techy stuff like URLs and search terms, based more on human language

in a way this has been realized since I can type "how do you cook a meatloaf?" into google and get an answer, but I guess it would become the dominant paradigm for getting around on the internet

wondering if the watson shit also has people thinking about the possibilities diff now

also, if you feel like having fries, the internet instantly orders fries delivered to your door for you

I would like some fries right now

*waits patiently*

plz read thread title

I guess the other component of it is that machines on the internet will understand/synthesize the knowledge of other machines on the internet, allowing for automatic aggregation of content without human intervention

if you're feeling sleepy you can read more here obv

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

But isn't the other aspect of the semantic web that the producers of content have to add a lot of structured metadata to everything? Besides the sociological issues (convincing everyone to add metadata) my impression was that the big problem is designing formal languages that are expressive enough to capture a broad swathe of information types while still permitting the kind of computation that semantic web dudes dream about.

(I don't know a whole lot about the semantic web, to be fair)

That was an xp I guess.

my issue with the semantic web as a concept is it always seems to be explained in the most tortured language ever, can somebody explain this benefit:

The key element is that the application in context will try to determine the meaning of the text or other data and then create connections for the user. The evolution of Semantic Web will specifically make possible scenarios that were not otherwise, such as allowing customers to share and utilize computerized applications simultaneously in order to cross reference the time frame of activities with documentation and/or data. According to the original vision, the availability of machine-readable metadata would enable automated agents and other software to access the Web more intelligently. The agents would be able to perform tasks automatically and locate related information on behalf of the user.

The idea of a semantically-structured web doesn't necessarily have anything to do with searching or machine learning, although those are two areas that would strongly benefit.

Basically, it's the end-game of separating visual design and content to the point where the entire document -- using "document" as a definition of a full piece of content -- should be machine-parsable. HTML doesn't lend particularly well to this, although some of the newer proposed tags lend well to defining the beginning/end of blog posts, individual article titles within a page, etc.

Things like RDF, or even RSS, define specific tags for dates, author, etc.

It's not that you'll have to add tons of metadata to everything, it's more a matter that the metadata that we're already embedding is not properly structured. Tagging is ok, metatagging is dumb and irrelevant since it's best used internally in organizations (externally, it's historically just for SEO).

Edward, I think they're trying to say that I should be able to look up blog posts in a specific timeframe and see facebook posts/twitter posts by the same person easily, all using clearly-defined semantic data (standardized date tags).

see, that seems like a retro-fitted explanation to me, since this social network stuff wasn't really on the horizon in 2001 when the semantic web was conceptualized

it's like a theory that's so abstruse and generalized that you can look at anything and call it semantic web

like is this really semantic web? finding stuff to put in yr shopping cart quicker at bestbuy?

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9209118/The_semantic_Web_gets_down_to_business

one of the big aha moments I had recently was seeing how the droid handles contact management - aggregating your friends' facebook/gmail/twitter/flickr/whatever to a single identity so you can engage with them holistically

that seemed like a big breakthrough in communication/notification etc and something long the lines of the example mh gave, but that seems like an extension of social networking, the internet actor as discrete content aggregator, not some 2001 metatagging type stuff

I'm retrofitting it in that I'm mentioning current services, but it's really the general idea.

Things like grafting RDF tags on to HTML (like the example on the semantic web wikipedia entry) is useful for search engine crawling, but it blows compared to specialized feeds. Microformats are nice, but I don't even think Apple has detection in Safari, which is funny considering their mail client sniffs for events and contacts and the microformats for those pretty much say "this is a contact".

Much of the semantic web data is available, it's just in proprietary data feeds via API.

Edward, I know they're hammering out issues, but did you notice any duplication of contacts or weird guesses in the Droid aggregation? You're going to run into that issue anywhere that there isn't a unique identifier (like email address or phone number) that is shared between services, but the point of a semantic web with standards is that you could just point to your page of contacts on any of those services and they'd either be in the same format or at least tagged with standard tags that your device would recognize. As it is, someone at Google just programmed a different adapter for each service.

Note that I'm using "tags" in the XML sense, not in the metatagging sense.

Note that I'm just describing semantic web ideals, here. I don't think we'll ever see anything near universal support because lock-in and in-house "innovation" are always going to stomp on the benefits of having an open format.

slightly glib observation but seems relevant:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/05/the-web-browser-address-bar-is-the-new-command-line.html

the big problem is designing formal languages that are expressive enough to capture a broad swathe of information types while still permitting the kind of computation that semantic web dudes dream about

that's always been my assumption too. something could happen where domain-specific taxonomies get traction, and then some of those get interoperability and we have some centers of gravity ... but i don't see what would drive that, especially with everyone trying to lock up their users.

micro sofft thinks the future is clouds lol

people get espn and the weather on their phone and suddenly they forget that you can get that stuff on regular computers or even the television

― El Tomboto, Tuesday, February 22, 2011 2:50 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

fyi currently US smartphone percentage is something like 30% to say nothing of the rest of the earth which tends to be considerably behind the first world

i'm just sayin

*smartphone PENETRATION percentage

probably higher in east Asia which is where the 21st century is

just sayin

ya'll making out like Twitter and Facebook are here for good, but you just know in five years time everyone will have moved on, and what they'll have moved on to will start off as an underground, non-app supported thing, launched from a straight-up browser. It's always the way of these things.

xp, also higher in europe where mobile phones happened before like 2006 or whenever they first arrived in the U.S.

"It's always the way of these things."

Yeah totes remember when this happened in the 70s.

30% smartphone "penetration" is pretty staggering considering the first smartphone that wasn't a piece of shit was introduced in 2007

Thing starts underground, becomes popular, monitised, adopted by the mainstream, taste-makers move on. This is hardly a new phenomenon. xp

Yes but some things become so ubiquitus that they just don't move on. Something will have to be pretty fucking special to provide what an alternative to not only us but our parents in what Facebook currently does.

Twitter isn't yet part of everyone in the worlds daily lives, so yeah I can see something taking it over.

Something will have to be pretty fucking special to provide what an alternative to not only us but our parents in what Facebook currently does.

Will it really though? Facebook is just Twitter + Flickr + email. At least that's how most people use it.

"Yes but some things become so ubiquitus that they just don't move on"

you sound like francis fukuyama. facebook will have plenty of users but negligible cultural/econmic impact in 5-10 years. twitter will be nothing, and is already kind of a joke which no one who matters takes seriously afaict.

the importance of facebook as mentioned by somebody in the fb thread is that they got everybody to use their government names xp

an interesting question for me in a post URL world is how will content get passed around. URL shorteners Are heinous. ideally you'd be able to get some kind of preview before you click on it - but so far implementations on blogspot or w/e have been beyond bad.

I got it though - PiP browsing - window inset into your browser gives you a preview when you hover- where's my 10 million dollars VCs

twitter will be nothing, and is already kind of a joke which no one who matters takes seriously afaict.

!!

Why wouldn't the next thing start as an app? Instagram was app-only at first.

I think the global future is going to be pretty interesting considering smartphones -- and I wonder how long we'll keep using that word, as it smells like mothballs -- are more widely used than computers in some areas and are the primary way some people are using the internet. For anyone who's not in an office in front of a computer, I'd guess that they use the internet a lot more from their phone than they ever do on a desktop or laptop.

We're starting to see more situations like Instagram where it's a matter of determining how the primary mobile use can be extended or enhanced by a full web browser or desktop application.

twitter will be nothing, and is already kind of a joke which no one who matters takes seriously afaict.

plz expand on this

i mean this is its future: http://twitter.com/bbccomingofage. not that it is going to be overtaken by [self-]promotion but that it is no longer "cool"

i thought the twitter narrative was pointles>gimmicky>useful for certain things>twitter feeds being referred to in news items

referred to in news items = death i think

i mean does anyone seriously think it's going to be around in, say, 10 years? i'm just saying it's going to be quicker than that, i guess.

what's gonna replace it?

i don't know

if i did i would be drinking mountain dew to a soundtrack by trent reznor, not talking to you assholes

when you have a credible* replacement for public communications call me and we'll get some angel funding

*not blogs, tumblr, facebook, etc

not buying the implicit assumption in that that there is a real need or desire for "public communications" of 160 chars that is of interest to any more than a tiny tiny fraction of the population, once the initial craze has died down ca. 2012.

there i said it.