The Semantic Web Going Mainstream

Jamie found a story about a new web tool that is trying to break ground into the semantic web. It's called twine, and it supposedly will intelligently aggregate your data, be it youtube videos, emails, or whatever you accumulate in your travels. Not the first, not the last, but here's hoping something comes out of the ideas someday.

Relevant

[Gothmolly]

I know we're all supposed to be lubed up over "Web 2.0" and "blogging" and "social networking", but for the Internet users out there who ARENT 15 year old emo kids, how is "the semantic web" relevant?

/yes, there's a whiff of irony about posting this to Slashdot
//Slashdot = old Usenet
///rn FTW

Flashback

[houstonbofh]

While reading TFA I had a flashback to reading a 90's era ASP press release. "Ohhh... Shiny and pointless!"

Hype alert

[jandersen]

This article is crap - however, the idea is not entirely hot air, even though it is being touted as 'the next, big thing', which I very much doubt it will be. I think the 'semantic web' is trying to solve a non-existent problem; we're not suffering from 'information overload' - the net has just been filled up with useless rubbish, like adverts, SPAM, entertainment and adverts. And did I mention adverts? Fortunately it is not necessary to 'manage' any of that - all you need is to be able to avoid it, which existing SPAM filters and ad-blockers already do reasonably well.

Apart from that, I think using a tool like the one proposed (however vapidly) in the article presents it's own dangers. Letting a machine manage and 'understand' information that is important to you is not wise. Think of the spellchecker deathtrap: You misspell words in such a way that they become correctly spelled words with another meaning - like 'them' vs 'then', or 'than', or 'there' vs 'their'. Sometimes you stumble over texts where the author has clearly relied on the spellchecker without proofreading it afterwards, and the meaning has become garbled, or even worse, it has changed to something the author didn't intend, but which seems plausible enough. Just imagine if you were an amateur ornithologist who collects some articles mentioning 'cock pheasants' and 'blue tits' - and suddenly your collection of articles is tagged 'pornography'. Perhaps not the most catastrophic of scenarios, but certainly an example of the kind of surprises you can expect from the 'semantic web'.