Musings & Meanderings

Semantics being about relationships and meaning, I’m attempting to apply the term in a personal, communal, and resultant way as I see tools being actively developed. By us, I mean the users, consumers, constituents, or any other term currently being applied to hundreds of millions of non-enterprise users.

From semantic search engines such as Powerset to ontological database tools such as Snap Logic, the next generation of functionality would seem to be approaching. I do take note of the w3.org site statement on the summary of OWL flavors… “It is unlikely that any reasoning software will be able to support complete reasoning for every feature of OWL Full.”, and also note that there is little reference to the full potential for individual and societal use of and benefit from the semantic web now under construction.

The machine quest for meaning still seems to be about extracting more useful information from and about us.

Would we all benefit from better search? Certainly. Powerset, Hakia, and others, aim to compete with Google.

Would our use of social networks, blogs, etc., be enhanced by better ways of organizing data? Undoubtedly. Snap Logic can play a role in social network integration at an enterprise level and Aperture could be an integral component of, say, a Facebook or its successor. (Both of these are, I believe, open source based.)

Where, though, are the plans to put semantic computing power, such as it will be, in our hands?

Tim O’Reilly, in his recent post on the topic, writes that the semantic web means…
“the design of applications that don’t require people to think at all about ontology or document structure”
and that…
“Rather than there being a single specification capturing all the information about relationships between people, there will be many overlapping (and gapping) applications, and an opportunity for someone to aggregate the available information into something more meaningful.”

Who is that someone? A Google, whose real customers are advertisers? A Microsoft, as unlikely as that may be, whose aim is to remain one of our dominant connections to the internet?

My abiding question is why those opportunities can’t belong to a lot of ’someones’, namely us.

The usual and obvious answer to that is that someone has to pay for all this development, and for the servers and data storage and bandwidth, and the someone paying is invariably a VC or 3 driven by the goal of capturing market share first, and monetizing second. There appear to be few business models in which we participate directly in the Semantic Web.

Why? The most successful web projects, in terms of real profitability (rather than stock valuations based on media industry multiples of eyeballs), are still eBay and Amazon, businesses based on consumer activities that far exceed the scope of many current start ups.

Reading Nova Spivack’s response to Tim O’Reilly’s post, I come to his term folktologies, which he illustrates using the example of Freebase.

His description of potential applications does seem to envision these tools in our hands, giving each of us the ability to ‘make each other smarter’, but Freebase is yet one more VC funded behemoth of a startup which makes no mention of an economic model.

I do prefer Nova’s view to Tim’s, if only because it envisions computer users capable of contributing to ontologies. The idea that non-techies can’t manage such an activity and wouldn’t want to anyway is hard to understand for anyone who watched eBay grow, who watched millions of non-tech users navigate hundreds of esoteric categories and figure out how to double and triple list items for the best exposure. Next time someone says that people can’t do classification, think of those millions of non-tech collectors and dealer in eBay’s glory days of Web 1.0.

Perhaps I am wrong, and the average users, the Us I refer to, are perfectly happy to accept whatever we are offered for free with no concern about responsibility for future access to the content we and others contribute, but I do not believe this. What I do believe is that we need far more entrepreneurial focus on economic models in which we can participate beyond putting ads on blogs.

Develop this proposition fully, and it can even, when built out, address the most basic issue of geographical access monopolies. We can make this place economically viable and much more so if we all participate.

Economic models which involve us, the participants who are, increasingly, the content providers, would distribute the control of this new world, control which is currently held in a very few hands. It would distribute risk and profit and the common good and a public trust, and it would truly enable free enterprise. It is a concept which can embrace the multitudinous goals and dreams of many for the benefit of ourselves and each other. It is a disruptive concept, and no doubt frightening to some and threatening to others, however it can be a basis for prosperity on every level. I also believe that it is our best hope of protecting our freedom.

There are many workable models of communal combined with private ownership in recent history that equate to both successful businesses and healthy communities. Examples include co-op high-rises in urban centers and successful franchises. These larger economic models are indicative of how elements such as small community business, home based businesses, home ownership, and the dynamics under which these co-exist integrate into the fabric of a healthy and free society. Such human scale enterprises are invariably connected to public resources and cultural riches to which we all contribute. They are supporting elements of those overlapping circles within community structures to which Tim O’Reilly refers.

Every type of human endeavor is already represented online, all striving in competition for traffic and a Google Page Rank. A true semantic web, in my definition, requires enabling and forging the natural connections and interactions of a healthy society. These are as central to human meaning as triplets are to ontological databases.

The internet should remain free. Free access to information and free speech are our greatest treasures, both individually and globally. The infrastructure, however, has to be built on an economic model. The ownership of that model goes hand in hand with control of it. I believe that, in order to fully develop a semantic web, we need to create more and better means of full human participation in it.

What say you?

Matt’s great post today, titled Showing the plug, not the cable illustrates for me once again how much we are all alike, tech and non-tech.

The central question, ‘Will it fit?’, is one that spans every culture and generation and knowledge gap that developers struggle with.

You could be a 40 something female (like me) shopping for clothing, an advanced user considering a social network, a developer integrating a hot web app, a collector or specialty geek looking for perfect components, a retired couple deciding on a holiday …the list of examples is endless. What we all have in common are the following questions.

1. What can it do?
2. How easy is it to get?
3. How much does it cost?
4. Who do I talk to if something goes wrong?
5. How is this any better than what I can get or already have elsewhere?

These are the basic questions in the head of every consumer of anything. The marketing approach of capturing people’s attention and making them think they can’t live without something can be effective, but it’s also transitory. What many marketers don’t do is directly address the basic ‘Will it fit?’ question. Sometimes that’s because they are isolated from other parts of the business or company. Sometimes it’s because the company couldn’t care less what happens to their customer base after they achieve a goal such as IPO. Fragmented attitudes like this have boosted the second, parallel list in most of our minds:

1. What won’t it do?
2. How hard can it be to get, install, etc.?
3. What are the real reasons I’m getting something cheap or free?
4. How much will I lose, in both time and money, if it’s a dud?
5. What’s the real cost and risk of dealing with anonymous strangers?

Anyone who wants to develop a product or service for Jonesers and Boomers needs to understand that the older we get, the stronger the negative questions are, based on negative experiences. Trying to tell us why your ‘thing’ is a hot must have isn’t enough even if, and sometimes especially if, it’s free. We want to know the downside in order to be prepared for it. Everything single thing we choose and do in life has costs and involves tradeoffs.

Use the clothing analogy and picture yourself buying a garment that you intend to wear regularly. Think of how many different aspects there are to your favorite garments. Elegant or sexy, cheap or free, are common sales propositions, and they have value, but they’re just the tip of the customer’s iceberg. It has to fit and every single body is different. It has to be flexible if it’s going to be worn more than once. It can’t fall apart if you wash or dry clean or wear it. It has to come with you when you move. This is just one shirt or jacket or pair of pants we’re talking about. We get just as attached to computer programs, browsers, and apps, and want similar things from them. The age factor falls fast with this analogy. Buy a garment in the latest synthetic microfiber and watch it fall apart or lose its shape the first time you do anything with it, and you won’t be so quick to buy another one, whether you’re a kid or an old timer, and also whether it cost one dollar or a thousand.

Matt’s post asked a great question about how cables are sold, which was …why don’t you show me all the details so I can stop wasting time and make an informed purchase? I’d be such a happy customer if you did that. The wiki video in his post is great also. I’ve had so so many of my contemporaries and older ask me what is the point of doing things online? After watching that video, I could picture many of them seeing a glimpse and thinking of trying, and also hear every single one of them asking their very first prospect question, “what about security?”.

The older and more life experienced or jaded we are, the stronger our orientation (usually) to the second parallel list above. A really powerful proposition will often bring the second list down to par with the first in our minds. Tipping the scale rarely happens by focusing only on making the answers to the first list stronger, especially once you pass a point of diminishing returns. Address both lists, and that means really answer the questions in depth rather than just brushing them off, and the result can be more than just a sale or subscriber, it can be a loyal relationship for a lifetime.

The value of free is in access to knowledge.

Knowledge is gained by learning. Learning is something we actively choose to do and is distinct from education. Sometimes we’re lucky enough to have a great teacher or two along the way, and this can be a family member or mentor as often as a teacher in a scholastic setting.

The most important components of the freedom we enjoy in the modern western world are free access to information, the freedom to share it, and the freedom to use it. Freedom of information isn’t a property right. Property right is a right to one’s own tangible or intangible human product or creation, not to information.

Should all information be free to everyone? Of course not. Freedom includes a right to privacy, and we should (imo) value our personal information more highly than we generally do. The collection, and also analysis, of highly specialized information by experts is performed as a paid service for whatever their market will bear, and is a human work product. Artistic and creative works are the same kind of product. Each of us also has the right to give our time and our work product to others, including to the society as a whole, where ownership vests in the public trust. If an artist creates a work for the public trust, then no individual has the right to charge for and thereby deny access to it. Anyone, however, is free to study it, learn from it, take inspiration from it, and, together with all the other information they have collected and used as a basis for their knowledge, create something new which they are then free to either donate to the public trust or to own. We, individuals and businesses alike, usually benefit most by doing both.

On the important issue of net neutrality, which most people have never even heard of, we would do well to promote a better understanding of rights.

Free press advocates and free enterprise advocates often have a way of settling on opposite ends of a political spectrum. In my experience, this is usually a construct based on agendas and motivations which most commonly serve to limit freedom. The agendas are usually about control of information (censorship), and the motivations about power or money (or both). Free is a powerful word.

Even if we could take in all the free information available, we would not necessarily become knowledgeable. The value of free information resides not in the information itself, but in what we do with it.

Value is created in the propositions we develop and make to ourselves and to one another, human to human. Every one of us initiating interaction with others is making propositions all the time, often without even seeing them as such. Every time we respond (or don’t) to one another, we are choosing from a wider spectrum of responses than we usually realize. Rarely do we stop and take time to consider that full spectrum, but if we did, we’d be amazed at how many opportunities to create, innovate, and build things are at our disposal all the time.

Free in computers and on the internet can be viewed in as many ways as there are individual perspectives: as a valuable gift or a shared treasure, as a windfall, as getting lucky or getting away with something, as a marketing tool, as stupidity, as a lure, as a trap.

All this free noise sometimes distracts us from what makes freedom valuable. It isn’t the raw information that has value in itself. It’s what we learn from it and what we do with it, the conclusions we draw, the theories we develop and prove, and the propositions we develop and make, that enable us to create value for ourselves and others.

Mostly we are used to thinking of the internet as a means of exchanging, sharing, finding, and now as a repository of, information. It is a way to extend communication in relationships much more than it is a source of relationships. This holds true even for some of the core tech group building full time for the rest of us. In this post, when I say we, I am, as always, talking about all of us.

Our desires go far beyond information. We also need stories and fantasies, conversation and relationships. We will develop ways to fulfill these needs and desires wherever we reside. The length of time we spend anywhere outside of work is largely determined by the depth of our satisfaction.

So we began to develop ‘places’ on the internet, and we traveled between them.

If the internet became about places, and web 1.0 about spaces, then web 2.0 is about sound.

Places were for both work and play. Two way communication was multiplied for groups and enhanced by chat. We made web pages to put our stuff on, for ourselves, or to share or show off or sell our goods or services. Games became multi-player. Instead of just travelling around, we wanted destinations, places to hang out with others for a while, ways to hear more than one voice at a time.

Spaces developed as our way of both gathering together and being able to do more than just hang out. The marketplaces such as eBay and worlds such as MySpace offered both the reach of earlier travel and the satisfaction of congregation.

With the wide adoption of syndication, another threshold of group size was crossed.

Web 2.0 seemed, initially, to be about social activities and tools. The word widget, which used to be used mostly as a euphemism for case studies in business school, has become, if not quite a household, then at least a home computer room word.

As another bubble grew, and there were more start up than any single person could keep track of, so grew the number of posts protesting the resulting noise, especially after Twitter appeared. Cacophony. Overload. Someone regularly posting somewhere about burnout.

Shortly after Twitter’s early growth surge, I posted wondering whether Twitter was about stories, about starting to create more immediate connections to one another as part of living out community stories, but I now believe that this was off the mark. We’re not there yet, to the point where real community grows and create its stories everywhere, although there are certainly real, strong communities here and there.

Where we are, though, is very much about sound, and if you ‘listen’ this way, music emerges from the cacophony.

Digg may not be my thing, but it is musical. Technorati, although getting a bit discordant of late, was utterly melodic. Google’s whoosh is more like rushing rapids, fast and powerful, and possibly dangerous. Microsoft doesn’t make music, but could build sophisticated stages and amphitheaters and more. Mac users relate to their machines as to music. Twitter is the musical mix of voices at a party, and some of the best blogging networks could be compared to impromptu a cappella. The best individual voices are musical too. Library thing is a melodic widget. Even the best thoughtful and intellectual conversation has the rhythm and flow of music.

There are growing sites that don’t have much of this musical quality. It seems to me that those which exhibit the most vigor are the ones using the lure of cash registers clanging. Will they overtake the music? My answer is that it depends on how much great music we can make, and also on whether we can learn how to make music without abandoning economic reality.

This music isn’t directly formed by design or functionality, it emerges from the interaction of the participants. Of course we’ll go to sites that are more attractive and easier to use, and of course we need them, but what draws us together and orchestrates the music is a lot more than that. It’s more than entrepreneurial start up enthusiasm, too. It’s an expression of our needs and desires, just as it always has been. Next time you check out the latest offering…

Listen for the music.

Try out some of the prototypes on the Metadata Research Program page. I arrived there via David Weinberger’s Everything Is Miscellaneous Blog. Over the years I’ve searched Library of Congress records for non-internet related stuff, so have some experience in how bad their search can be unless you are a pro at it.

The “DARPA Unfamiliar Metadata Project …builds directly on several years research …on improved searching techniques. The Classification Clustering technique developed by Professor Ray Larson for the CHESHIRE I system will be used with probabilistic document retrieval algorithms developed by Dr Gey with support from the National Science Foundation.”

If only we could access or apply a Classification Clustering technique through personal modules/portals. Talk about user created relevance.

Reading reports found in the research areas, though, gives me the impression that the natural desire to achieve a universal and manageable standardization predominates. Why? I wonder if, like most such projects, the construction of this one can be completed in my lifetime, and I wonder further if there isn’t an earlier point than is usually considered at which adoption and use could become part of the development process. What used to be man against nature here becomes man against machine.

Machines want standardization, but man wants individualization.

Yes, I understand about stability issues. Stability can also be viewed, in science and technology, from the standpoint of flexibility combined with durability.

Here’s a goal, as I see it, for all of us. Let’s build a way to ‘compile’ the data of which man is composed. That has to translate into an evolutionary process, since we pesky humans refuse to freeze and get ‘captured’, as well as a collaborative one requiring our consent and participation. Until we do that man will always be able to break the machines, and the machines will never be able to catch us.

I’ve read that programmers did not believe that tagging would be widely adopted. Since I started this blog, my tag selection has gradually changed, but what would I garner by spending the time to review and improve 130 posts worth of tags? Wouldn’t such processes be much further ahead if their use wasn’t presented as an optional afterthought …if learning to navigate them delivered immediate and constantly increasing benefits within one’s own ‘portal’ and all those which naturally connected and overlapped?