09 Aug How the Semantic Web Will Change Social Media Part 1: Comparing Search Results to a Missing Red Sock
Web 3.0, the next big thing, the new wave, call it what you will. It’s all semantics :). But I think it’s coming.
As my fellow engagement team members and I organize our blogger contacts, and as the tag cloud grows on my personal WordPress blog, I realize how much of a semantic web is already integrated into our social media experiences. We readily tag photos, check-in our location, register with our favorite e-commerce sites, and connect our Linked-In profiles with our Twitter feeds with our Facebook pages, all on our Tumblr blogs.
The semantic web, as defined by the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, Tim Berners-Lee (who coined the phrase), is a web in which computers will have “become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers.” He also considers this development as an intregal part of Web 3.0. You can check out this video from Technology Review for a more detailed explanation from the man himself. Berners-Lee also recently received a large grant to pursue this transition within the UK government.
Can I have an example?
The vision for the Berners-Lee/W3C-esque semantic web entails an internet that is completely navigable by a computer. Imagine you’re a small business owner in Raleigh, NC, looking for some help with your social media marketing strategy. Maybe you don’t know anyone in the biz, so you’re not even sure if you want to hire an individual consultant or an agency. You go to google, search for “social media,” and you get these results.
Hmmm…okay, a pure definition of social media may not have been what you were looking for, so you revise your search to “social media marketer” and end up with this. Still not quite right, so you refine your search even further, maybe looking for someone who lives in the area, maybe looking for someone who specializes in small businesses such as yours. (I now imagine that you own a bakery – the cookies are probably burning as you continue to fine-tune your searches.)
After a dozen or so queries (and maybe even a phone call or two : /), you’ll likely find what (or whom) you were looking for, as long as the burning cookies didn’t set your kitchen on fire and burn your new small business to the ground.
The Missing Red Sock
Now imagine a web that turns up the social media consultant of your dreams after your first “search.” It can tell where you’re from and what you’re looking for based on your location, job, age, and purchasing preferences, and it can find what you’re looking for by filing through millions of rows and columns of data until it finds a result uniquely tailored to you. Filed away in in the largest (and most multi-faceted) database you’ve ever seen, it’s a web made of computers that “know,” so to speak, what you’re looking for and where to find it and can even point you to a few helpful blog posts along the way.
I see a semantic web as a “self-aware” web. Every entity within the web (every word, page, picture, etc.) would be like a single entry in a giant database, cross-referenced with dozens, if not hundreds, if not thousands of other, related, entities. It’s like if your bedroom could locate a specific red sock – the one with the white stripe across the toes, the one that your grandmother gave you for Christmas three years ago, but not the one with the giant hole in the heel – within the biggest, most jam-packed drawer of red socks you’ve ever seen.
And not only that, but it with the click of a button, you could also find out which of your 258 outfit combinations work best with the red sock or geo-locate the factory from whence this red sock came or even find out which of your friends have “liked” this brand of sock – bascially any and all information that is somehow pertinent to the red sock would be available to you. A semantic web would be able to read, comprehend, organize, and locate every piece of content that it holds, because every piece of content would be defined through a complex tagging structure. And now you not only know of the location of this red sock , but you would know why this article of clothing matters in the greater sense of the world wide web, and you would know that it’s associated with a specific subset of other pieces of content, including red, sock, clothing and more.
As we delve deeper into the possible implications of a “self-aware” web, so many questions arise. How would this transition occur? When will it occur? Will “it” be a “he” or a “she”? But as a social media marketer, many of my questions immediately turn to the future of my field. My next three blog posts are going to address these questions and relay my (very humble) opinion on what a semantic web will do to:
Social Networks – and why “they” keep saying that Facebook could be the next Google
Marketing Campaigns and Crowdsourcing
The Idea of Consumer Privacy
As Lisa recently addressed, changes are already beginning to unfold. And if one my favorite films of all time can tell us anything about our ability to predict what’s next, there’s no way any of us can imagine it all (see any flying cars, Doc? hooverboards? where are the self-drying jackets?), so I’d love to hear your input on where you think these platforms are headed with the semantic web, and I’ll definitely take them into consideration when I’m writing these upcoming posts. (In an ironic twist of fate, it seems that I’m crowdsourcing an article on crowdsourcing!). Until then, please don’t give up on your missing red sock, and when you find it again, consider tagging it this time.
