I'm not opposed to the Semantic Web, but nor am I a believer in it's salvation. I applaud the effort and believe that it inspires things I care about, like microformats, but it's an empty hope for the Web's future.

My experience of the progression of the web, and content in general, is that we're serving humans first for delivery. Everyone's experience of the progression of technology is the same, faster and better, more more more. Just follow these to their ends, and it's absolutely inevitable that technology will simply become capable of understanding the content on the Web that was meant for human consumption. If a person can grok what a page says, eventually so can software (considering that Google does just an O.K. job today).

Secondarily, when you have limited resources, which is better here: serving a wider audience (computers/software in addition to humans, by spending your resources adding semantic value to the content), or generating/serving more content? I'm going to side with more content is always better when you have to make a choice. Of course when there's no price to pay, when you can derive and bundle more markup with existing content for little to no cost, absolutely it's a good thing. But, when a choice has to be made between spending time making content better or adding more, more should win, hands down.

So what the Semantic Web is ultimately competing against here is both time and market forces, time for CPUs to get faster and Natural Language Processing software to get smarter, and market forces to utilize available resources optimizing for volume over (markup) quality for human audiences.

It's simply going to fill in the niches where there's the luxury of existing unformatted context to be encoded in content streams, and the idea itself will birth many useful trends drawing attention to structuring content more sensibly (microformats again).

So, it's hard to tell if I'm talking about 2005, or predicting 2006, but either way I feel positive about the events of the past and those to come in respect to Individuals.

It may not seem like much on the grand scale of things, but all of the fuss over web 2.0 is really just bringing more focus on the power of an individual to contribute something valuable to a group. This has been true forever online, IMDB, Amazon, and so many other examples, but now it's not only one of the ways you can use the network but also one of the things that defines the network, net-work.

This past year might just be the coming of age for Individuals demonstrating their contributory value to networked systems and content. I really hope and have a sense that it's just setting the stage for wide-scale global levels of adoption and growth. In my experience in technology circles this feels much like open source and free software, in some form having been around for 20 (or longer conceptually) years, but only very recently is it finally having wide adoption outside of specific vertical tasks.

So what can we look forward to? Well, we'll have to face a number of important challenges to ramp up, the most fundamental of which is of course Identity, and I'm concerned that immediately following is that of an even more loosely defined term that everyone has differing opinions on: Trust. These aren't new thoughts, smart people have been trying this message for years and it's still true, and it's still in need of help. How do you trust someone you only interact with digitally? What do you need to learn about them to understand who they are and form a relationship? When does the group decide versus an individual? Are there realizeable technology solutions here (standards and protocols)? Which social and behavioral patterns need to grow and adapt?

Really it's all part of the fundamental change the Net is having on the world, that we're becoming that Big Small Town. As a species we've learned how to function in small social units for many millennia, and now we're learning how to apply those same intuitive rules to dynamically formed groups over new mediums. It's perhaps not that different than if human teleportation were possible and you could jump between any community in the world in an instant, how many rules would have to adapt to accommodate the pace of relationships and retain the fabric of any community?

I'm rambling, but that's ok, tis the season! Here's to a great 2006!

This isn't new news, but I haven't seen anyone make it very clear yet, so I will:

Content hosted on Google Base is exclusive, and not available to any other search engines!

I am absolutely flummoxed that Google, the company who's entire foundation and success is built on other's content, would do something so contrary as to become a walled garden. Seriously, the insolence of this act simply astonishes me, and I hope others. This is the company that owns the phrase "Don't Be Evil" and has the trust of the masses.

Now with Base they boldly make the statement "Help the world find your content." It sounds wonderful, another web hosting service and who can do it better than Google, right? Wrong, when any web tool other than a browser (such as another search engine) tries to access the content hosted on Google Base, they encounter this bit of protocol will disallow all use of the content to anyone other than Google:

http://base.google.com/robots.txt:
User-agent: *
...
Disallow: /base

Your content that you've entrusted to them to "host and make searchable online" is sitting squarely inside of Google Fort, armed with locked doors for their competition by blocking the very thing that made them a success, the open web.

A plea to Google: play fair.

Microformats represent a concept to me that has deep merit, and not just that link of what exists now, but as a concept in general. It's a fundamental shift of technical standards development to a different economy of advancement. So in my not-insignificant experiences with standards development, I'd now separate it into three categories:

* Standards by Committee serve Commercial interests.
* Standards by Community serve Platform interests.
* Standards by Microcosms serve Edge interests.

Committee standards are a necessary evil, they provide a sense of stability and attempt to solve bureaucratic problems that larger established organizations face. I'd love to rant about my deep distaste for this process and the over-generalized inconsistently specific formats that result from it, but that's not benefitting anyone :)

Communities tend to develop standards in a much more organic way (duh), frequently making mistakes but not being overly concerned about breaking compatibility and focusing more on simplicity and utility. It's often the result of a few core focused individuals, with support from those benefitting from their works and encouraging growth through evolution and real use.

Microformats are all about lowering that bar, not even needing a large community or developing a whole new framework or platform to establish a standard. Reuse, mix, and publish. Not at the core either, at the edge, where content and diversity is becoming quite rich and these small and overtly simple (almost just a collection of best practices) standards can provide quite useful benefits.

What strikes me as most fascinating about this trend, is how it mimics nature. What we're really seeing is just these patterns growing in the fertile data soil on the web. No longer can larger or centralized models handle the amount of information flowing and the extreme environments it has to exist in, so nature is kicking in and doing what it does best, adapting and evolving.

Where there's a source of energy and nutrients you'll discover life flourishing. Where there's attention and content you'll encounter microformats growing.

The title is a probably misleading, and this post isn't very well thought out since I'm trying to look distantly into the future. What I'm really talking about is generally classified as web-based advertising. When I was at the Search SIG last week, John Battelle's talk made me realize something I hadn't seen or considered: google adwords is not advertising.

The first major wave of web advertising in the 90's was CPM, impressions, traditional old-media marketing and branding. The transaction was based primarily based on visibility, eyeballs. You could say that the content owner was sacrificing design, and you could say that the users were sacrificing some small bit of mental capacity or storage.

This second wave we're in, led by adwords, is based on click-throughs. John called it a sales channel which makes sense in how adwords is treated by companies using it. Because of it's textual nature and direct relationship to the page it's presented on, the content owners are now giving up context, they're allowing the placement to be blended closer to their topic which dilutes their value while boosting the ad. The users are now ultimately spending money for the most part, they're sacrificing their attention or greenbacks (when 'converted').

Looking at this trend, I can only predict that a third wave of something-that-isnt-advertising-anymore (probably some ways off yet) will have to do with production. The content providers will give up part of the content itself, either aggregating in, or being enhanced by this future model. The users will be asked to give up something even more valuable than money or attention, they'll be asked to create, to spend their activity and participate or produce. I can see a number of web-2.0-ish trends in this direction already.

While the basic economist in me can't see exactly how this third wave will relate to traditional retail/product/distribution, I have a gut feeling that it's not about that kind of old world model anymore. This third wave of Web Economics is about slowly replacing the traditional top down with a new bottom up from individuals. We can all produce very valuable things to our friends, families, social groups, and in our areas of specialties hobbies and interests. It's all about the world becoming a Big Small Town.