An article was recently published at readwriteweb.com that brought to mind the changing face of the web and information. Currently, in our Web 2.0 world, we have interactive websites that are built on user content and social contribution, but as we move into Web 3.0, content will be driven by semantics algorithms that are built to filter through Yottabytes of information to create worthwhile content for readers.
In the age of Twitter, blogging, and other social media, the instant availability and breadth of information will not be a problem — the problem will be (and is already) that there is too available information and too much of it. How do you know what to read, how often to read it or what to do with it? The answer is, filters.
Take my previous article where I used the example of 9/11 and said that “Better and better filters will be producing news for our eyes . . .” In the event of another tragedy like 9/11, thousands of people all over the world will be talking about it as it’s occurring, but most of that ‘chatter’ will not be useful to those wondering what is going on. As an example, the most common chat/twitter/post might just repeat information that is already known, or may be asking questions “Do you know what’s going on with the twin towers?” So how do we get “news” from this mess of noise coming across the internet? Filters.
Web 3.0 will be the semantic web and we will rely on algorithms and software to make connections and inferences based on content as to what is related, what is important and what stories and information are connected based on language, geography and profile data on users. In the case of 9/11, semantic filters will be watching for geographically similar excited utterances sharing keywords within a period of time. Once ‘event clusters’ are identified, more advance filtering will take place to try and piece together a picture of what is going on and deliver that information to those who are interested or to other computer programs who are doing meta-filtering (filtering further information that has already been filtered).
A truly semantic web will be able to act as our journalist, filtering through amazing amounts of information, prioritizing, categorizing and grouping them into the kinds of stories and information we want to see, all before the first phone rings at the news station.
[...] 22, 2008 by Dan Graham When I posted about the semantic web (3.0) and corresponding filters I had yet to see a good example to point to that illustrated the point I was trying to make at the [...]