The orgy of present unwrapping at the end of last year feels a surprisingly long time ago, so it is with some enthusiasm that I await the arrival of my latest bundle from Amazon. Nestled alongside the new offerings from Seth Godin and Garr Reynolds, I look forward to lifting Nick Carr's latest much-trailed tome which the book's own website describes thus;

“The shift [to utility computing] is already remaking the computer industry, bringing new competitors like Google and Salesforce.com to the fore and threatening stalwarts like Microsoft and Dell. But the effects will reach much further. Cheap, utility-supplied computing will ultimately change society as profoundly as cheap electricity did. We can already see the early effects — in the shift of control over media from institutions to individuals, in debates over the value of privacy, in the export of the jobs of knowledge workers, even in the growing concentration of wealth. As information utilities expand, the changes will only broaden, and their pace will only accelerate.”

I obviously haven't read the book yet, but I understand that Carr sees this trend as a worrying one. Stephen Baker's review in BusinessWeek notes, for example, that;

“Carr warns this trend could herald a new, darker phase for the Internet—one where these mega-networks could eventually operate as a fearsome entity that will dominate our lives. He dubs it 'the World Wide Computer'.”

...

“[Carr] describes a world in which a handful of lucky and brilliant entrepreneurs uses the World Wide Computer to tap humanity's smarts and creativity for free, la YouTube and Wikipedia, while putting legions of information professionals out of work. If that's not dreary enough, he predicts that companies and governments will be able to harvest data from these networked computers to track our behavior and, ultimately, to control us.”

People probably said something similar as Ferranti, Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse et al championed the distribution of electricity from increasingly large and remote electricity generating facilities. Is the premise bad, or is it 'merely' a (potentially) painful transition that we face?

Writing in December's issue of the SemanticReport, I take a slightly different look at a related set of issues. In my article, 'Moving the Internet Inside with Semantic Technologies', I contend that;

“The vast majority of today’s enterprise applications owe their genesis to a period very different from today. Even the most apparently innovative share perhaps unnecessary heritage with their ancestors, preventing them from fully exploiting the potential of an ever-more connected world.

The increased ubiquity of high speed access to the Internet has changed the lives of millions. At the same time, plummeting costs for storage, computing and bandwidth have formed key aspects of the environmental shift that has enabled Web-based companies to entice users with significant free offerings, and to subsequently monetise these in a variety of ways from the ever-popular ‘pro’ account to the universal fall-back of advertising. The Web has become our water cooler, our photo album, our book shop, our encyclopaedia, our travel agent, our road atlas, and also fulfils a host of functions without commonplace offline forms.

Inside the enterprise, the Internet remains at a remove from the applications within which most employees spend their time. Valid concerns around security are certainly a factor here, as are the long lead times required to develop and implement new systems. More serious, though, is an apparent lack of vision. Rather than fundamentally re-engineering with what Tim O’Reilly refers to as ‘the Internet Inside,’ new applications continue to repeat the methods and mindset of the past. The capabilities of the network Cloud beyond the corporate firewall remain woefully underused, their potential unrealised.”

We have, of course, seen significant use of the network to connect the far-flung offices of an organisation, and to enable connectivity amongst collaborators. Banks move data amongst themselves all the time, and some of that traverses the Internet. Libraries around the world hurl Z39.50 queries and responses at one another all the time, and all sorts of other organisations leverage the network as a means to transfer information from one place to another. My point is not that businesses don't use the web. Rather, it's that they fail to embrace its potential. To consider the Internet as a means of point to point transmission is, surely, to miss the opportunity presented by a complex and multi-directional network of variously connected nodes. The Web isn't (just) a FedEx for bits and bytes. It also shouldn't be considered as merely a means of physically separating the components of our traditional monolithic applications, applications that whatever their geographic diffusion remain logically massive and discrete.

Technologies such as those being espoused for the Semantic Web enable us to take further steps, turning traditional application architectures on their heads and embracing the potential offered by a new generation of services that are conceived and constructed with the network at their heart.

By taking a fundamentally Web-based approach to the development of applications, we shift from bolting Web capabilities onto the silo toward a mode in which data and functionality are native to the Web: a mode in which the design decisions are more about modelling business requirements for limiting the ways in which data flows from one point to another rather than trying to anticipate the places in which it might be needed in order to design those pathways into software from the outset.

Data needn't reside within a single application, and as the trend toward 'widgets' and 'dashboards' has begun to illustrate, interaction with the application itself is no longer restricted to navigation within its own user interface.

How do we change the mindset of today's application developers, in order that they stop building 'old' applications in the new world?

In beginning to think about this post, my original premise was around 'embracing the cloud [computing]'. However, UK technology journalist Bill Thompson was quick to point out that

“if you embrace a cloud you fall to earth... maybe you need to be enveloped by it...”

Indeed.

SPARQL is definitely extremely important. Indeed, Tim Berners-Lee went so far as to suggest that;

“Trying to use the Semantic Web without SPARQL is like trying to use a relational database without SQL.”

However, it's one of those pieces of the puzzle that just gets on and does its job, behind the scenes, often unnoticed and unremarked. That is, of course, exactly as it should be. Technology (unless it's an iPhone) isn't there to be drooled over. It isn't there to rub your nose in its cleverness. It should just ensure, quietly, that your task is completed with less fuss, less intervention, and less hassle than before. If you're lucky, it might let you do something you couldn't do before.

Reduced to its simplest, the SPARQL Recommendations offer a simple and standard means of querying any store of RDF, regardless of the software used to run the store. The software has to support SPARQL, of course, and the Talis Platform is amongst those that do.

I reckon about 50% of Nodalities' readership (where this item was originally posted) knows all this, and lobs SPARQL queries about with gay abandon. That picture is probably quite different here on Web 2.0 Explorer, making the examples that follow even more important. Seeing is often an important step toward believing, and luckily I know just the man to help.

My colleague, Danny Ayers, has put together a simple demonstration to illustrate how SPARQL queries can be formed and submitted to one of several Talis Platform stores. As the Semantic Web grows, and reaches increasingly beyond the laboratory and the Intranet to embrace the open Web, the ability to consistently and reliably query disparate pools of data via SPARQL will become ever more important. Any resource becomes - potentially - both directly addressable and consistently queryable. A very different picture from that of today's web... where often all you can search for across the Web at large is the user interface of some proprietary database or other. You then need to visit that database, understand its interface, and then ask the question again; this time constrained to the pool of possible answers within that one source.

Take a look at Danny's examples (including one for the Twitter store he built for his article in this month's Talis Platform News) and you begin to understand some of what's possible. Now stretch a bit, and imagine this query capability transposed behind the shiny, curvy-cornered UI of some Web 2.0 application. Suddenly, this application breaks free of the limitations of its own 'database', and is able to reach out across the Web at large to interact with conformant and permissive agglomerations of data, wherever they may be.

See? Told you SPARQL was important.

Item slightly modified version of a post to the Nodalities blog.

Technorati Tags: Danny Ayers, Semantic Web, SPARQL, Talis, Talis Platform, W3C, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, web services

Amazon has come a long way since its days as a big book shop, and is increasingly making a name for itself as an exemplar of commodity computation.

First we had the Simple Storage Service, S3. Little more than a big disk in the Cloud, it offered an affordable means by which anyone could make large amounts of data available for download by large numbers of people. Second Life client downloads come from S3, as do Talis podcasts. Several of my colleagues use S3 for backing up their laptops (I use Mozy myself, but that's another story).

Then we got the Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2. This commoditised availability of virtual computers, making it relatively straightforward for those experiencing rapid growth - or needing short-term access to additional computing power for some other reason - to call upon additional computers as required, configure them as needed, use them for as long as necessary, and then throw them back into the pool when done.

Unsurprisingly, given Amazon's e-Commerce heritage, a payment service came next. This essentially opened Amazon's own e-Commerce capabilities to third party developers, and allowed them to build it into their own applications. Although we knew that this would come, I should admit here that the pundits at Talis (including myself) were sure that Amazon's third web service would be the one they actually only announced today. Given our interest in data and their interest in e-Commerce, it's perhaps not surprising that we prioritised them differently.

Next in the path, a Service Level Agreement. Essential, if Amazon are to move beyond the early adopters and actually see mass market numbers of mainstream enterprises rely upon their web services.

Which brings us to today, and the unveiling of Amazon SimpleDB. It had to come, and now it has, offering;

“a web service for running queries on structured data in real time. This service works in close conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), collectively providing the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud.”

It's great to see, and in some ways the conceptual use of Cloud-based 'content' and 'metadata' is similar to our own ideas around the Talis Platform... although with very different emphasis and realisation.

And yes, I know I missed SQS and Mechanical Turk, and various other Amazon web services from my story...

Story originally posted on the Nodalities blog

Technorati Tags: Amazon Web Services, AWS, EC2, Jeff Barr, web services, S3, SimpleDB, Talis, Talis Platform

My initial thoughts: none.

No, not one initial thought. Hulu doesn't work in the UK. They don't tell you: "Hey, if you live in the UK, you will be able to access and begin your Hulu experience, but when you choose a show to stream, you'll be disappointed. Have a nice day." You have to jump through all the Beta hoops to get there first.

Now, I know I should have known better, being a generally web-savvy chap. But after a few pre-reviews of the Hulu service, I decided not to read any more blogs about it until after I'd tried it out myself. I knew not to expect too much, after reading the last review over at Between the Lines , but I wanted my own experience.

Since then, I've found dozens of blogs about how bad it is that Hulu doesn't work in Europe . Aside from whingeing about the lack of support, I can't really think of anything more to write about Hulu (apart from its ridiculous, trying-too-hard-for-the-Web-2.0-market name).

But, doesn't this kind of go against point of the web? The idea that we can make connections, share content, stream and connect?

The principle of the internet is broken by this experiment, and I don't think a platform intended to be a YouTube killer should ever have been trialled in a geographically-limited network. Sure, I understand private Betas, but why limit this to the States? I don't think News Corp really gets the Web 2.0 thing. In fact, I wonder if they really get the internet?

It reminds me of LaunchCast (now Yahoo Music). When I first launched the player, all the content was free, and there was absolutely loads of it. I was thrilled! Over months, however, content became harder to find due to advertisement interruptions and restrictions on skipping tracks. Suddenly, Launch re-directed to Yahoo, and I could no longer skip any content without upgrading to a premium service which hadn't existed before. Then, when I moved to Britain, all the content was unavailable apart from a limited selection which I can only presume was intended for a British audience. (Don't think my mates here would have agreed in a focus group!)

I haven't used a yahoo service since. No, seriously, I haven't used Yahoo. As soon as Konfabulator was purchased by Yahoo, I uninstalled it. I was all set to set up a Flickr account, when I found out it was Yahoo. (I might go back on that one, once I get a decent digital camera.)

This wasn't really a boycott so much as a pre-emptive decision. I know that as soon as Yahoo gets a hold of a service, its user-friendliness will dissolve into advertisements and 'premium services' (a contradiction in terms!) This is what Hulu reminds me of. An attempt at grabbing a market instead of a well-thought-out startup trying to sell a genuinely good service and make a profit on its quality.

What is Web 2.0? Hulu doesn't know, and it makes me think that News Corp hasn't really got its head round it at all. I shudder to think what's going to happen with LinkedIn.

-Zach (http://www.zachbeauvais.com)

Dan Farber was one of the first to cover the Giant Global Graph, here on ZDNet. A few days on, though, there's value in taking a look at how these ideas are being discussed across the blogosphere.

The GGG, or Giant Global Graph. It sounds like something with which you might terrify a child at bed time, but this is no Gruffalo, no Jabberwock, no Smaug. Rather it's father-of-the-web Tim Berners-Lee's label for his latest attempt to express the power of the Semantic Web's core technologies in ways that will resonate beyond the established SemWeb literati. In the post he writes;

“So, if only we could express these relationships, such as my social graph, in a way that is above the level of documents, then we would get re-use. That's just what the graph does for us. We have the technology -- it is Semantic Web technology, starting with RDF OWL and SPARQL. Not magic bullets, but the tools which allow us to break free of the document layer. If a social network site uses a common format for expressing that I know Dan Brickley, then any other site or program (when access is allowed) can use that information to give me a better service. Un-manacled to specific documents”

As we might expect when someone like Berners-Lee posts, his thoughts sparked the usual flurry of interest, picked up by The Guardian, Read/Write Web, ZD Net, Nova Spivack, GigaOM, Nick Carr, and a host of other bloggers. The compulsory Wikipedia stub is already in place, and anticipating (at the time of writing) that

“it may become a common expression.”

So what is this Giant Global Graph, how's it related to the Semantic Web, and what does it all mean?

In his post, Tim clarifies the distinction between the Net(work of computers) and the (World Wide) Web offered up over that network;

“So the Net and the Web may both be shaped as something mathematicians call a Graph, but they are at different levels. The Net links computers, the Web links documents.

Now, people are making another mental move. There is realization now, 'It's not the documents, it is the things they are about which are important'. Obvious, really.”

He then goes to the next level, to connect the statements in that web of documents to form a graph;

“We are all interested in friends, family, colleagues, and acquaintances. There is a lot of blogging about the strain, and total frustration that, while you have a set of friends, the Web is providing you with separate documents about your friends. One in facebook, one on linkedin, one in livejournal, one on advogato, and so on. The frustration that, when you join a photo site or a movie site or a travel site, you name it, you have to tell it who your friends are all over again. The separate Web sites, separate documents, are in fact about the same thing -- but the system doesn't know it.

There are cries from the heart (e.g The Open Social Web Bill of Rights) for my friendship, that relationship to another person, to transcend documents and sites. There is a ”Social Network Portability“ community. Its not the Social Network Sites that are interesting -- it is the Social Network itself. The Social Graph. The way I am connected, not the way my Web pages are connected.

We can use the word Graph, now, to distinguish from Web.

I called this graph the Semantic Web, but maybe it should have been Giant Global Graph!”

Tim concludes;

“In the long term vision, thinking in terms of the graph rather than the web is critical to us making best use of the mobile web, the zoo of wildy differing devices which will give us access to the system. Then, when I book a flight it is the flight that interests me. Not the flight page on the travel site, or the flight page on the airline site, but the URI (issued by the airlines) of the flight itself. That's what I will bookmark. And whichever device I use to look up the bookmark, phone or office wall, it will access a situation-appropriate view of an integration of everything I know about that flight from different sources. The task of booking and taking the flight will involve many interactions. And all throughout them, that task and the flight will be primary things in my awareness, the websites involved will be secondary things, and the network and the devices tertiary.

I'll be thinking in the graph. My flights. My friends. Things in my life. My breakfast. What was that? Oh, yogourt, granola, nuts, and fresh fruit, since you ask.”

So not, then, anything radically new. This is the long-held promise of the Semantic Web, but it is valuable to see that promise rearticulated in something akin to the language of the social network. Those involved in the Semantic Web probably 'knew' all of this at some level, but had perhaps become too caught up in the mechanics and the model, too distant from the point. This is why the Semantic Web matters; the graphing of relationships between resources on the open Web. Not ontology wars. Not RDF-is-better-than-microformats. Not demonstrations of concept in the laboratory and behind the firewall. Not the creation of a shadow web. This. So thank you, Tim, for reminding us. That said, might Nova's 'semantic graph' not be a better label for this important restating of the point than the rather obtuse GGG? 'Giant' and 'Global' set too many alarm bells ringing for me, and hint way too much about all-encompassing-ness and top-down-ness... even if that's (probably) not what Berners-Lee intends. We got waylaid by misconceptions of ontologies as all-encompassing and all-pervasive. Rubbing everyone's noses in 'Giant' and 'Global' just sets us up for yet another round of that particular debate, and I for one have better things to do...

Let's turn to look at some of the commentary that Berners-Lee's post received.

Journalist and author Nick Carr, for example, remarks;

“Sir Tim suggests that the Semantic Web (recently dubbed 'Web 3.0') was really the Social Graph all along, and that the graph represents the third great conceptual leap for the network - from net to web to graph”

and concludes;

“But while it's true that technologists and theoreticians desire to abstract the graph from the sites - and see only the benefits of doing so - it's not yet clear that that's what ordinary users want or even care about. That'll be the real test to whether the graph makes the leap from mathematician to mainstream - and it will also tell us whether a social network like Facebook has a chance to become a true platform or is fated to remain a mere site.”

Nick's concluding point is certainly well made, but probably in the early mobile phone camp (who knew they wanted one?) rather than presenting any insurmountable unwillingness to adopt and adapt. The onus is clearly on us to move beyond the talk, and to demonstrate compelling and desirable benefits to being in (on?) the Graph. Tim O'Reilly's damning criticism of Open Social offers a lesson that we would do well to learn;

“If all OpenSocial does is allow developers to port their applications more easily from one social network to another, that's a big win for the developer, as they get to shop their application to users of every participating social network. But it provides little incremental value to the user, the real target. We don't want to have the same application on multiple social networks. We want applications that can use data from multiple social networks.”

“Set the data free! Allow social data mashups. That's what will be the trump card in building the winning social networking platform.”

Surely we can all agree with those sentiments?

The scepticism is in evidence elsewhere, perhaps most noticeably when Pete Cashmore writes;

“Much like 'Web 2.0', 'ajax', 'crowdsourcing', the 'wisdom of crowds', 'UGC' (user generated content) and other catchy terms before them, the social graph looks set to become a bullet point on every web startup’s VC pitch in 2008. The blessings this week from Tim Berners-Lee make that inevitable.

Let’s leave aside the fact that the 'graph' isn’t a graph in the sense that most people think of it (most would describe it as a 'network') or that the phrase 'social network' could already serve this purpose: there’s a sense that we need a new word for the concept now that these networks are becoming portable, and the term can ride a wave of Facebook hype to become the de facto nomenclature for this latest piece of the portable identity puzzle. Beyond that, the Webfather’s latest blog post gives us a meandering introduction to the social graph’s role in the development of the web.

For the record, I’m not bothered by the phrase: it’s nice to have new labels for specific parts of the solution. I am, however, adopting a new lexicon for my day-to-day life in keeping with the trend: making a landline phone call will now be 'unSkyping', Post-It notes will henceforth be called 'retro-Twitters', going outside will now be 'outdoorsing', a paperback book will be known as a 'Kindle Alpha' and Wednesdays will be Day 3.0. No need to remember any of these, of course: I’ll rename them all next month.”

Recent podcast subject Yihong Ding offers a thoughtful consideration of Tim's post, opening with;

“Sir Tim Berners-Lee blogged again. This time he invented another new term---Giant Global Graph. Sir Tim uses GGG to describe [the] Internet in a new abstraction layer that is different from either the Net layer abstraction or the Web layer abstraction. Quite a few technique blogs immediately reported this news in this Thanksgiving weekend. I am afraid, however, that few of them really told readers the deeper meaning of this new GGG. To me, this is a signal from the father of World Wide Web: the Web (or the information on [the] Internet) has started to be reorganized from the traditional publisher-oriented structure to the new viewer-oriented structure”

and continuing,

“Both Brad Fitzpatrick and Alex Iskold presented the same observation: every individual web user expects to have an organized social graph of web information in which they are interested. Independently, I had another presentation but about the same meaning. The term I had used was web space. Due to current status of web evolution, web users are going to look for integrating their explored web information of interest into a personal cyberspace---web space. Inside each web space, information is organized as a social graph based on the perspective of the owner of the web space. This is thus the connection between the web spaces under my interpretation and the social graphs under the interpretation of Brad and Alex. Note that this web-space interpretation reveals another implicit but important aspect: the major role of an web-space owner is a web viewer instead of a web publisher”

before concluding that;

“The emergence of this new Graph abstraction of Internet tells that the Web (or information on Internet) is now evolving from a publisher-oriented structure to a viewer-oriented structure. At the Web layer, every web page shows an information organization based on the view of its publishers. Web viewers generally have no control on how web information should be organized. So the Web layer is upon a publisher-oriented structure. At the new proposed Graph layer, every social graph shows an information organization based on the view of graph owners, who are primarily the web viewers. In general, web publishers have little impact on how these social graphs should be composed. 'It's not the documents, it is the things they are about which are important.' Who are going to answer what are 'the things they are about'? It is the viewers instead of the publishers who will answer. This is why information organization at the Graph layer becomes viewer-oriented. The composition of all viewer-oriented social graphs becomes a giant graph at the global scale that is equivalent to the World Wide Web (but based on a varied view); this giant composition is thus the Giant Global Graph (GGG).”

Writing for GigaOM, Anne Zelenka worries that the GGG is not best-suited to the modelling of inter-personal relationships;

“But the Giant Global Graph itself is like Dustin Hoffman’s autistic savant character Raymond Babbitt in the 1988 movie Rain Man. Raymond knew all about plane trips but couldn’t make sense of human relationships.”

“...though Berners-Lee borrows social graph talk, he’s not really concerned with human relationships, but more about things that computers can understand, things like plane trips”

“The semantic web has always been about computers taking on more processing for us, not about computers allowing us to be more human, which is where the social graph might more naturally aim.

Semantic web fans would like to suggest otherwise. Nova Spivack, founder of semantic web startup Radar Networks, as well wants to make everything into a semantic graph story. 'The social graph is a subset of the semantic graph,' he told me.”

Whilst Tim's examples might support Anne's point, I'm unconvinced. The semantic technologies behind the GGG are all about expressing relationships between things, and those relationships might as easily be human or social as a manifestation of the airline timetable. Those social relationships, though, are about far more than the zombification of your 'friends' on Facebook. Rather, we can reach through to the implicit and explicit pattern of relationships between professional peers, students in a class, or citations of an author. We can map the shape of those relationships, and we can leverage existing capabilities to expose them back to participants in the relationship in order to allow them to see it, understand it, and use it in new and beneficial ways.

Richard MacManus also covers the story for Read/Write Web, concluding;

“I'm very pleased Tim Berners-Lee has appropriated the concept of the Social Graph and married it to his own vision of the Semantic Web. What Berners-Lee wrote today goes way beyond Facebook, OpenSocial, or social networking in general. It is about how we interact with data on the Web (whether it be mobile or PC or a device like the Amazon Kindle) and the connections that we can take advantage of using the network. This is also why Semantic Apps are so interesting right now, as they take data connection to the next level on the Web.

Overall, unlike Nick Carr, I'm not concerned whether mainstream people accept the term 'Graph' or 'Social Graph'. It really doesn't matter, so long as the web apps that people use enable them to participate in this 'next level' of the Web. That's what Google, Facebook, and a lot of other companies are trying to achieve.”

I'm not sure that Nick's concern was with acceptance of the term, so much as acceptance of the concept that their data become (potentially) more portable than they understand or wish. And Google, Facebook and the rest have a very long way to go in achieving (or even, in some cases, recognising) an open and actionable graph.

“Incidentally, it's great to see Tim Berners-Lee 're-using' concepts like the Social Graph, or simply taking inspiration from them. He never really took to the Web 2.0 concept, perhaps because it became too hyped and commercialized, but the fact is that the Consumer Web has given us many innovations over the past few years. Everything from Google to YouTube to MySpace to Facebook. So even though Sir Tim has always been about graphs (as he noted in his post, the Graph is essentially the same as the Semantic Web), it's fantastic he is reaching out to the 'web 2.0' community and citing people like Brad Fitzpatrick and Alex Iskold.”

On the Web 3.0 blog, we learn that;

“We sometimes forget the real use of data - that of providing value to humanity in various forms, and providing true functionality as the humans need it. Connections are good, but functionality is paramount. The fact that a company can store ticket information on the web is not sufficient, but the user being able to buy it is significant. A company storing data is not sufficient, it being able to sieve out information from it, transforming it into knowledge, and converting to action is paramount. Someone along this, functionality becomes the significant aspect.

URLs are becoming more potent with XML wrappers (RDF/OWL/SPARQL) around it. The new generation of applications will be playing on these enhancers to achieve seamlessness that we have sorely been lacking in the last 25 years.

The WebTop is becoming more significant than the desktop. Browsers that were a mere window to the world may become a real wide entrance to the world itself. In a very short time, local resources on a computer may have no significance in how users achieve functionality.”

Nova Spivack also offers a long and considered response, picking up on some of Anne's concerns;

“But if the GGG emerges it may or may not be semantic. For example social networks are NOT semantic today, even though they contain various kinds of links between people and other things.

So what makes a graph 'semantic?' How is the semantic graph different from social networks like Facebook for example?”

He continues,

“A semantic graph is far more reusable than a non-semantic graph -- it's a graph that carries its own meaning.

The semantic graph is not merely a graph with links to more kinds of things than the social graph. It's a graph of interconnected things that is machine-understandable -- it's meaning or 'semantics' is explicitly represented on the Web, just like its data. This is the real way to make social networks open. Merely opening up their API's is just the first step”

and concludes with;

“The Giant Global Graph may or may not be a semantic graph. That depends on whether it is implemented with, or at least connected to, W3C standards for the Semantic Web.

I believe that because the Semantic Web makes data-integration easier, it will ultimately be widely adopted. Simply put, applications that wish to access or integrate data in the Age of the Web can more easily do so using RDF and OWL. That alone is reason enough to use these standards.

Of course there are many other benefits as well, such as the ability to do more sophisticated reasoning across the data, but that is less important. Simply making data more accessible, connectable, and reusable across applications would be a huge benefit.”

So where does all of that leave us?

Well, I don't think we saw something new created last week. What we saw was a restating of some principles at the heart of the Semantic Web, a recognition that the social graph so frequently mentioned in relation to the big Social Networking sites shares many of those principles. Finally, we saw the beginning of an informed discussion that might - finally - see the fruits of many years of Semantic Web research and development surfaced in language that can be used in conversation with the pragmatists building the mainstream Web of today, aligned to technologies and techniques fitting for that Web, rather than simply making the gloomy shadows a bit more pronounced.

Which brings us, with all due respect to Julia Donaldson, right back to the Gruffalo! :-)

“'A gruffalo? What's a gruffalo?'

'A gruffalo! Why, didn't you know? He has terrible triples, and terrible graphs, and terrible OWL in his terrible ontologies.'”

Hmm. Maybe not. Read the original anyway, it's good...

Content adapted from a post to Nodalities.

Two Views of Internet Information Organization

We can view the Internet information organization from two opposite aspects: one is from the web publisher's aspect and the other is from the web viewer's aspect. Respectively I call them the publisher-oriented view and the viewer-oriented view.

According to Sir Tim, the WWW abstraction is trying to address that "it isn't the computers, but the documents which are interesting." Publishers upload their organized information (in documents) onto the Web. Therefore, the traditional WWW abstraction of Internet information is based on publishers' point of view. The information presented at the Web layer (specified by TBL) is publisher-oriented.

This publisher-oriented web, however, does not facilitate web information manipulation. The reason is simple: when manipulating web information, web users are playing the role of web viewer instead of the role of web publisher. Due to the view conflict, it is difficult to perform search on the basis of the viewer' view over information that is stored by the publisher's view. To solve this problem, a fundamental request is to organize web information onto a new abstraction layer that is presented on the basis of the web viewer's view. At this new abstraction layer, the Web becomes the viewer-oriented web. Sir Tim named this new layer to be Giant Global Graph.

The fundamental units at WWW (the Web layer) are web pages (documents). The fundamental units at GGG (the Graph layer) are social graphs. When we compare a web page to a social graph, a web page contains a set of information organized by the publisher while a social graph contains a set of information organized by the viewer. This difference represents the most fundamental distinction between the WWW and the GGG. Since both a web page at WWW and a social graph at GGG play the same role in their respective abstraction layer, we may assign a general name for both of them. In fact, I have already proposed a name for such a role in my web evolution theory. The name is web space.

I have predicted that the web evolution is ultimately shown as the evolution of web spaces. On Web 1.0, web space is shown as homepage, a typical form of web pages. So Web 1.0 was a typical publisher-oriented web. On Web 2.0, web spaces become individual accounts. Individual accounts contains information that is organized by both the publisher's view and the viewer's view. From one side, every account belongs to a particular web site. Therefore, the information organization inside an account is dominated by the website publisher's view. For example, I have a YouTube account in which I cannot associate a blog post at Blogger to a saved favorite song. Why? It is because the owners of YouTube has decided for me that such an association is not in their view, and thus it should not in my view either. On the other hand, however, a user account does provide web viewers limited freedom to organized information by their own views. For example, I really can organize different songs on YouTube by my own viewpoints though the association between a song and a blog post is prohibited. This analysis tells us that Web-2.0 personal accounts are transitional products between the publisher-oriented web and the viewer-oriented web. Since we are not able to directly upgrade the Web to its viewer-oriented aspect, the emergence of this type of transitional products is both necessary and certain. Web 2.0 is in a transition from the publisher-oriented web to the viewer-oriented web.

Following this path, on the next generation web (or we may call it the Web 3.0) web space will be shown as a typical viewer-oriented information-organization unit. Or by using Sir Tim's word, a web space at Web 3.0 will be a social graph. In each social graph, web users re-organize their information of interest based on their own view in contrast to the view of the original information publishers. Web-3.0 spaces will be more likely the viewer-side home-spaces in contract to the publisher-side home-pages on Web 1.0. By connecting all these Web-3.0 spaces (or social graphs) together we get the Giant Global Graph.

Summary

From the viewpoint of web evolution, the transition from the publisher-oriented web to the viewer-oriented web is inevitable. The proposal of Giant Global Graph from Sir Tim Berners-Lee is the newest evidence to this claim. Besides Sir Tim, this transition is also shown in the newest industry achievements. A typical example is the announcement of Twine. If we associate Twine to the proposal of GGG, we can see that what Twine does is exactly to re-organize web information from the publisher-oriented view to the viewer-oriented view. This is why Twine is so significant to most of the other Web-2.0 products. Twine is very close to be a real Web 3.0 product, though the current beta version is still lack of something essential.

This post is a compact version of a longer analysis of Giant Global Graph at Thinking Space.

• What makes a link Smart? Traditional links are not smart, they're simple pointers to pages. When we write about a book and link to the book's page on Amazon we mean to link to the thing but the link points to the page.

  A link is smart when it's capable of automatically identifying and understanding what the thing is on the page. Once the link is identified to mean a thing a lot of valuable information can be automatically presented to the user that's contextually correct for the thing.

  What I mean by this is that once a link is semantically understood to be about a specific book the user can be presented with options around that particular book - read the New York Times Book Review for the book, find similar books, save the book to social networks, etc. When the link is identified to be about a music album the actions and information presented are different and contextually correct.

• How about the 'link' in Smartlinks... where does it link to? With SmartLinks the user links like they normally would to a page on one of a dozen of sites - a book on Amazon, an artist on Last.fm, a stock on Google Finance, and a SmartLink is automatically inserted. The SmartLink is automatically inserted and when the icon is clicked a SmartLink pane launches that includes relevant content from across the web that's populated using semantic understanding of the original link.
• How is this information kept up-to-date? Everything is automated so the information is always up-to-date. For example, when a user links to a stock page on Google Finance the SmartLink understands that the link is about a stock and will instantly pull up-to-date information about the specific stock into the SmartLink pane when it's launched. When users link to new releases on Amazon, or one of our other supported sites, a SmartLink is automatically created for the book with relevant and correct information.
• Can I use Smartlinks on my own site or blog, and what would be the benefit from a content host's perspective? Yes, SmartLinks install with 1-click for Blogger and Typepad, there's a Wordpress plug-in and a single line of java script for all other blog platforms and sites. SmartLinks will then instantly appear on all links to supported sites - both for new posts and all archived posts.

  There are a lot of benefits for enabling SmartLinks on your site. They automatically enable you to provide a tonne of additional and contextually correct information in your posts. Your readers will have the instant ability to discover and explore what you've blogged about without leaving your site and without having to search or filter for more information - SmartLinks do all of this automatically and present a nice package of pure results. Additionally, a blogger can connect their Amazon Affiliate ID to SmartLinks so that all Amazon links within the SmartLink are monetized - this occurs for new posts as well as all old posts, enabling bloggers to monetize their archives.

• Can smartlinks be used alongside RSS or in conjunction with subscription technology? (e.g. for keeping up to date with past current Smartlink, like following a stock or tracking the popularity of a favourite song) Right now SmartLinks do not work with RSS.
• Where would I find Smartlinks at the moment? (i.e. Who is using this technology?) SmartLinks are enabled on a large number of blogs. You can see some great examples at:
  • http://madstocks.blogspot.com/ - wonderful stock blog that makes great use of SmartLinks for stocks
  • http://steffanantonas.com/ - a great blog that has SmartLinks enabled as well as a number of SmartLink Widgets
  • http://gothamgal.blogs.com/ - has a nice mix of book and music SmartLinks (check out the Typepad list in the right-hand sidebar - SmartLinks were automatically added providing additional benefit to something that previously existed)

• What are 'Semantics' on the web, and how do smartlinks feature in the 'semantic web'? Semantics is defined as "the meaning, or an interpretation of the meaning, of a word, sign, sentence, etc." To understand the meaning of a word is to semantically understand it. Semantic Web is an academic term about using standardized data formats and a language for recording the relationship between data so that computers can analyze and understand meaning and context of all data on the web.

  At AdaptiveBlue we're taking a top-down approach to semantic understanding. Our products are focused on bringing additional value to consumers in just a few basic verticals - books, music, stocks, etc. It's a noun-verb equation. We leverage vertical semantic knowledge and existing information on the web to recognize nouns and then apply appropriate verbs.

  Let's say a user quickly blogs about a great meal they had at a restaurant and includes a link to the restaurant's page on CitySearch with no additional information. Our technology is able to identify the link as a noun and understand that it's about a specific restaurant. A SmartLink is then automatically inserted that includes relevant verbs: read reviews, make a reservation, find it on a map, find nearby bars to grab a drink at afterwards, etc. All of these are for the specific restaurant and all of this is completed automatically and instantly.

• Does this have anything to do with the much-vaunted 'Web 3.0'? I don't think anyone knows what's next for the web. Regardless we don't want to be known for a label or a buzz word. We want to be known for the value and utility that we bring to individuals. We're leveraging our technology to enable users to browse smarter and think that the benefits today are already strong and they're only going to strengthen in the future. You can attach yourself to any number of labels, but at the end of the day it all comes down to people and that's our focus.
• Do you see Smartlink technology changing the way we use the web? How/not? Yes. Currently we provide the smarts to understand that a page on Amazon is about a thing and can provide instant information that's contextually correct for that thing. That's valuable and different from how we currently use the web today, it provides a more efficient method to discover and learn more about the object.

  Understanding that a page on Amazon is a particular thing, and that it's the same thing that's on a page on Barnes and Noble or in a particular blog post is very valuable. This starts to shift away from a web of pages towards an emerging web of things and individuals will find a lot of value in a web of things

This isn't really surprising. If you hear about a "new internet phenomenoon" on mainstream news, the chances are it's either on it's way out or is so firmly entrenched as to be unremarkable. For a perfect example of this, look up 'Facebook' in a national publication and note the language used to describe it's shiny-new cover--regardless of the fact that most people reading this blog will have been on Facebook (or gone off Facebook) at least a year ago!

It even now seems that there may be a financial impact on describing your new startup as "web 2.0". According to Mashable!, several VC's are stating quite clearly that they won't back Web 2.0. Ihave also noticed talk of bubbles breaking and 'meteoric rises' withthe implication that it won't last very much longer. So many potentialbreak-throughs won't see their funding if they're too 2.0.

This phenomenon is firmly entrenched in 'techy' social networks likeDigg. When I dugg a news story about the semantic web, I noticed theoverwhelming majority of comments were along the lines of "semantic webis so cliche", or "Watch out, here comes Semantic Web 2.0, Run!".Semantic web is a term which has only been widely used recently(relative to "Web 2.0" which was popularised by web stalwart O'Reilly Way back in 2005) and is already met with derision and sarcastic scorn.

To some extent, I think this is a good thing. If VC's and financial backers are waking up to this, it means there might be more competitionfor funding and an increase in the quality of online startups. It mightalso mean some updates and refreshing of already-started-ups. Whiletechy scorn is easy to find and probably doesn't mean too much, the reality behind the bluster might just be the next set of updates toreal users' online experiences. Oh, and don't try calling it "Web 3.0". Just don't.

There's no pleasing everyone, but it seems to me that Web 2.0 is a phenomenon which, if you're not already using it on a daily basis (onFacebook, following Twitter, using Gmail), it's probably better not totalk about it. Webby people will start to question your breeding andchoice of apparel!

Generally this concept implicit web intends to alert us to the fact that besides all the explicit data, services, and links, the Web engages with much more implicit information such as which data users have browsed, which services users have invoked, and which links users have clicked. This type of information is often too boring and tedious for humans to read. So, inevitably, this type of information is only implicitly stored (if stored) on the Web. The implicit web intends to describe a network of this implicit information.

Implicitness Everywhere

Implicit information is everywhere. Implicit information on the Web is about things to which human web users have paid attention. For example, it is about which web pages are frequently read, how often they are read, and who read them. It is also about which services are frequently invoked, how often they are invoked, and who invoked them. Consider the number of web users and how many activities everybody has done daily on the Web, the amount of implicit information must be astonishing. The implicit information co-exists with every web page, every web service, and every web link. In short, great amount of implicitness co-exists with every little piece of explicitness on the Web.

Implicit does not mean insignificant or unimportant. By contrast, implicit web information is often valuable and even crucial in various situations. For example, implicit information of click rates can help editors decide which news are the most popular ones and thus they should put these news on the front page. In similar, the same type of implicit click rates can help salespeople decide which merchandises are among the greatest demanding and so they can arrange the next supply line.

Many companies have already started to collect implicit information and they take benefits from it. Alex Iskold had written a compact introduction on how some companies have utilized implicit information in their products. One well-known example is Amazon.com, which always lists related buyer recommendations with each of its online merchandise. "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought," many readers must be familiar to this label. And more importantly, many web users do care of the content underneath this label. This is a typical example of how implicit web information helps.

Amazon is not the only company that benefits from implicit information. Amazon is not one of the few companies that benefit from implicit information. In fact, nowadays almost every website that sells something, from baby toys to cars, has some back-end mechanism on analyzing the traffic (a typical implicit information) and adjust their sales plan based on the analysis. Implicitness is indeed everywhere.

Connect Implicitness

Implicitness is everywhere, but is fragmented everywhere. Implicit information on the Web is not connected. This is a problem.

Until now, implicit web information is generally separately stored, typically by individual companies. For example, both Gap.com and jcrew.com have their own stored visitor history but not shared to the other, although we may imagine that this information must be well connectible since both companies sell apparel and accessories. Someone may argue that Gap and J. Crew are competitors. So let us switch the pair to be Banana Republic and Victoria's Secret. The products of these two companies are well complement (in contrast to compete) to each other. But still the implicit information is isolated to itself, despite that both sides can benefit by connecting this independent implicit information. Readers can find many more this type of examples.

If sharing implicit information among big companies is still questionable (because these big boys hardly believe that they could get help from their little sisters), this type of sharing is much more critical to small websites. There are numerous individual sites that cannot utilize themselves well enough from their own implicit information because they are too small in size. At the same time, however, there are no effective way for them to share and find helpful implicit information, though everybody knows that there is plenty of this information on the Web.

All these discussions lead to one demand: we need the implicit web, which is not there yet. The goal of the implicit web is to defragment all the fragments of implicitness (where the name Defrag is gotten for the conference). But how can we indeed connect all the different types of implicitness on the Web to be a coherent implicit web? This is a grand challenge to the newly formed community of implicit web research. We do not have a clear answer yet.

No matter whatever, however, the solution to the question must be beyond web links. The implicit web engages with complex types of semantics. The amount of information on the implicit web is gigantic. The implicit Web is also very much dynamic. The traditional model of web link is too simple, too shallow, and too static to deal with all these challenges at the same time. We need big, creative thoughts to store and link all the implicitness.

The greatest potential problem to the implicit web is privacy. To companies, some implicit information may be too confidential to be shared. To individual persons, some implicit information may be too private to be public. We need innovative methods of privacy control on the implicit web.

Implicit Web in nutshell

In summary, I briefly list my beliefs about the implicit web.

1. The implicit web is a network that defragments every piece of implicitness on the explicit web, which is the generally known World Wide Web itself.

2. If the explicit web reveals the static side of human knowledge through posted data, services, and links, the implicit web reveals the dynamic side of human knowledge by recording how users access these data, services, and links.

3. The explicit web engages collective human intelligence. The implicit web engages collective human behaviors.

4. The implicit web is not part of the Semantic Web, but they are closely related. If the Semantic Web constructs a conceptual model of World Wide Web, the implicit web constructs a behavior model of World Wide Web.

This post is originally posted at Thinking Space.

Is it the same as 'Web 3.0'? Or is it simply close enough for the distinction to pale into insignificance amongst those who don't see counting angels on the heads of pins as a worthwhile pastime?

Is it a neat idea that's resulted in some great Ph.D research around the world, but wholly impractical for actual implementation? Or does it presage the coming of the hive mind, the thoughts of which will be structured by The One True Ontology?

Is it the natural successor to Web 2.0? Or does it offer some interesting ideas and approaches that can be used to supplement the best of today's Web with relatively little pain?

All these - and more - are possible reactions to an attitude, an approach, and a set of technologies that Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the World Wide Web Consortium, and a multitude of university research departments have been pushing for a very long time.

At Talis, we take the Semantic Web pretty seriously. Not only are we investing significantly in the development of a technology platform that does much of the heavy lifting for those wishing to build semantically enriched applications, but we're also actively engaged in raising awareness of the possibilities introduced by an increased use of semantic technologies.

The semantic technology market is small, but growing. There is clear value in active cooperation between early adopters, in order to excite growth, to raise awareness, and to spark the creation of opportunities. Through an active Advisory Group, we engage with leading proponents of the Semantic Web; many of whom might traditionally have been seen only as competitors.

Another important way to help understand what's possible is by letting those who are interested hear other people talking about it. Not everyone can afford the time or money to attend great events like the Web 2.0 Summit, Semantic Technologies, Semantic Web Strategies, etc. For those people, we've been working for a while to assemble a (growing) body of podcasts exploring some of the ways in which semantic technologies can be pragmatically and beneficially deployed today.

You can hear, for example, from Nova Spivack, the CEO of Radar Networks who launched Twine in such a well-coordinated campaign at the latest Web 2.0 Summit.

On the investment side, venture capitalist Brad Feld discusses the opportunities for investment in this market, and Mills Davis trails his forthcoming report with some discussion of just how big the semantic technology marketplace could grow.

Tom Ilube of Garlik talks about the role semantic technologies played in enabling his business to take shape, Thomas Vander Wal takes listeners across into the world of folksonomies, and Tom Heath paints a picture of the potential for semantically aware recommendation systems. For the more technically inclined, both David Wood and Paul Gearon dig into the pros and cons of 'semantic databases' and triple stores.

All these and more have been touched upon in the past year of podcasting, and the enthusiasm and experience communicated by participants is a clear indication of potential in this area.

The media, both technology-focussed and mainstream, is clearly interested in the potential of semantics at the moment. Why not take an opportunity to delve a little deeper, hearing some of the leading proponents in this field dig deep into their experience in order to share with the their audience.

And yes, I'm always looking for new subjects - or suggestions of people you'd like to hear. Drop me a message at paul.miller@talis.com with your comments and ideas.

This picture above shows a simple abstraction of web evolution.

The traditional World Wide Web, also known as Web 1.0, is a Read-or-Write Web. In particular, authors of web pages write down what they want to share and then publish it online. Web readers can watch these web pages and subjectively comprehend the meanings. Unless writers willingly release their contact information in their authored web pages, the link between writers and readers is generally disconnected on Web 1.0. By leaving public contact information, however, writers have to disclose their private identities (such as emails, phone numbers, or mailing addresses). In short, Web 1.0 connects people to a public, shared environment --- World Wide Web. But Web 1.0 essential does not facilitate direct communication between web readers and writers.

The second stage of web evolution is Web 2.0. Though its definition is still vague, Web 2.0 is a Read/Write Web. At Web 2.0, not only writers but also readers can both read and write to a same web space. This advance allows establishing friendly social communication among web users without obligated disclosure of private identities. Hence it significantly increases the participating interest of web users. Normal web readers (not necessarily being a standard web author simultaneously) then have a handy way of telling their viewpoints without the need of disclosing who they are. The link between web readers and writers becomes generally connected, though many of the specific connections are still anonymous. Whether there is default direction communication between web readers and writers is a fundamental distinction between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. In short, Web 2.0 not only connects individual users to the Web, but also connects these individual uses together. It fixes the previous disconnection between web readers and writers.

We don't know precisely what the very next stage of web evolution is at this moment. However, many of us believe that semantic web must be one of the future stages. Following the last two paradigms, an ideal semantic web is a Read/Write/Request Web. The fundamental change is still at web space. A web space will be no longer a simple web page as on Web 1.0. Neither will a web space still be a Web-2.0-style blog/wiki that facilitates only human communications. Every ideal semantic web space will become a little thinking space. It contains owner-approved machine-processable semantics. Based on these semantics, an ideal semantic web space can actively and proactively execute owner-specified requests by themselves and communicate with other semantic web spaces. By this augmentation, a semantic web space simultaneously is also a living machine agent. We had a name for this type of semantic web spaces as Active Semantic Space (ASpaces). (An introductory scientific article about ASpaces can be found at here for advanced readers.) In short, Semantic Web, when it is realized, will connect virtual representatives of real people who use the World Wide Web. It thus will significantly facilitate the exploration of web resources.

A practical semantic web requires every web user to have a web space by himself. Though it looks abnormal at first glimpse, this requirement is indeed fundamental. It is impossible to imagine that humans still need to perform every request by themselves on a semantic web. If there are no machine agents help humans process the machine-processable data on a semantic web, why should we build this type of semantic web from the beginning? Every semantic web space is a little agent. So every semantic web user must have a web space. The emergence of Semantic Web will eventually eliminates the distinction between readers and writers on the Web. Every human web user must simultaneously be a reader, a writer, and a requester; or maybe we should rename them to be web participators.

In summary, Web 1.0 connects real people to the World Wide Web. Web 2.0 connects real people who use the World Wide Web. The future semantic web, however, will connect virtual representatives of real people who use the World Wide Web. This is a simple story of web evolution.

This article is originally posted at Thinking Space.

As Marc suggests in his introduction;

“One of the hottest of hot topics these days is the topic of Internet platforms, or platforms on the Internet. Web services APIs (application programming interfaces), web services protocols like REST and SOAP, the new Facebook platform, Amazon's web services efforts including EC2 and S3, lots of new startups talking platform (including my own company, Ning)... well, 'platform' is turning into a central theme of our industry and one that a lot of people want to think about and talk about.

However, the concept of 'platform' is also the focus of a swirling vortex of confusion -- lots of platform-related concepts, many of them highly technical, bleeding together; lots of people harboring various incompatible mental images of what's about to happen in our industry as a consequence of various platforms. I think this confusion is due in part to the term 'platform' being overloaded and being used to mean many different things, and in part because there truly are a lot of moving parts at play that intersect in fascinating but complex ways.”

How true. The Platform space is a great one to be in and it's brimming over with opportunity and potential; so much so that we're one company staking an awful lot upon the detail of our Platform vision.

Traditionally sloppy use of language, however, has led to a situation in which unnecessary confusion is now associated with a superficially straightforward term. Some of this confusion is introduced by innocent drift in the evolving usage of a word, but far more is down to the unfortunate fashion for everyone jumping on the bandwaggon and unleashing a 'platform' of their own. At least we've been using the Platform label for our own endeavours in this area for a number of years.

In his attempt to introduce some clarity, Marc's post reiterates his basic definition of an internet platform;

“A 'platform' is a system that can be programmed and therefore customized by outside developers -- users -- and in that way, adapted to countless needs and niches that the platform's original developers could not have possibly contemplated, much less had time to accommodate.

We have a long and proud history of this concept and this definition in the computer industry stretching all the way back to the 1950's and the original mainframe operating systems, continuing through the personal computer age and now into the Internet era. In the computer industry, this concept of platform is completely settled and widely embraced, and still holds going forward.

The key term in the definition of platform is 'programmed'. If you can program it, then it's a platform. If you can't, then it's not.”

Check.

He then offers three 'kinds' or 'levels' of Internet platform, being careful to stress that one is not necessarily better than those it supersedes;

“I call these Internet platform models 'levels', because as you go from Level 1 to Level 2 to Level 3, as I will explain, each kind of platform is harder to build, but much better for the developer. Further, as I will also explain, each level typically supersets the levels below.

As I describe these three levels of Internet platform, I will walk through the pros and cons of each level as I see them. But let me say up front -- they're all good. In no way to I intend to cast aspersions on what anyone I discuss is doing. Having a platform is always better than not having a platform, period. Platforms are good, period.”

Marc's three levels are;

Access API

“Architecturally, the key thing to understand about this kind of platform is that the developer's application code lives outside the platform -- the code executes somewhere else, on a server elsewhere on the Internet that is provided by the developer. The application calls the web services API over the Internet to access data and services provided by the platform -- by the core system -- and then the application does its thing, on its own.”

Plug-in API Superficially very similar to the 'Access API', but the host application (such as Facebook) into which a developer's application connects does the vast majority of the work around marketing;

“Facebook provides a whole series of mechanisms by which Facebook users are exposed to third-party apps automatically, just by using Facebook.”

Runtime Environment

“In a Level 3 platform [such as Salesforce], the huge difference is that the third-party application code actually runs inside the platform -- developer code is uploaded and runs online, inside the core system. For this reason, in casual conversation I refer to Level 3 platforms as 'online platforms'.”

“Put in plain English? A Level 3 platform's developers upload their code into the platform itself, which is where that code runs. As a developer on a Level 3 platform, you don't need your own servers, your own storage, your own database, your own bandwidth, nothing... in fact, often, all you will really need is a browser. The platform itself handles everything required to run your application on your behalf.”

And there's more, and it's interesting stuff that Marc has clearly thought about long and hard.

Reading - and rereading - Marc's post, though, I kept coming back to ideas touched upon in two posts of mine about the relative openness of different Platform solutions;

“Facebook and Talis might very well be offering 'Platforms', but they're quite different in intention. Facebook's platform seems to be all about making the Facebook site as rich, compelling and sticky as possible; everything is sucked to one point. The Talis Platform, on the other hand, is about providing developers - wherever they are - with the tools and capabilities to easily link and manipulate data across and through the web. The former sits heavily 'on' the web, and feeds upon it to suck ever more into its maw. The latter is truly 'of' the web, giving a distributed community of developers and users powerful new capabilities to enmesh their applications, and to deliver capabilities at the point of need.”

Regardless of its position in Marc's levels, I truly hope and believe that the Internet platforms of long-term viability will be those that embrace the Network rather than feeding rapaciously upon it; those that are of the web as we are trying so hard to be.

A Platform should give the developer a helping hand. It should lift them up and provide them with a set of tools that make it easier to concentrate upon and deliver their core value whilst the Platform worries about the day-to-day mundanity that is mere context [to paraphrase Geoffrey Moore]. A Platform should enable the developer to realise the benefit of those tools and capabilities in places and manners of their own choosing, rather than expecting or requiring the developer merely to expose their assets within the bounds of whatever site(s) the Platform chooses to offer. Platform providers who realise and embrace that will be the ones to succeed.

Last week's Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco was pretty intense, all things considered. It's therefore lucky that this week is the Half Term school holiday in this particular corner of the UK, and peppered with days off to do various non-work things.

During the conference (sorry, 'summit') I managed to live-blog most of the sessions I attended, and the corpus can be found here. O'Reilly/CMP are also doing a great job of getting session videos up.

Now I've had time to reflect without the need to type and listen and keep an eye on the office, what were the trends and highlights for me?

I noticed two big switches since 2005 when I last attended this particular gathering. Firstly, although I didn't see much evidence of a credible alternative, there was far less of an assumption that Google AdWords were the business model of choice. And secondly the lobby conversations just seemed much less desperate than last time, when everyone and everything was frenetically for sale.

The iPhone was everywhere. I saw lots of people using Apple's latest, but don't think I saw anyone actually talking into the thing, which means that Nokia's phone-less (?) alternative may do well. We get iPhones in the UK in a couple of weeks, and Talis will be raffling one at our conference the week before that launch. Something tells me that my chances of winning that iPhone are about as high as those for Nokia to send me an N810.

There seemed less of an emphasis upon scheduled evening entertainment than previously. Richard MacManus comments on this, too. From my perspective it was a good thing, as it made my packed schedule of dinner engagements (and a trip to a real San Francisco home) so much easier to manage. In many ways, these (including one with Mr MacManus) were the highlight of the trip.

The main auditorium was a truly unpleasant place to spend time; way too crowded. The overflow room upstairs was a far better bet, complete with comfy sofas, power, wifi (which you could also get downstairs, if your battery was up to the job), and easy access to food and drink. It would have been nice to be able to ask questions with a video link to the sweatshopauditorium downstairs that was bi-directional, though. A second display showing the whole stage would also have been good. The main monitor kept zooming in to provide detail on faces/slides etc; it wasn't always focussed on the thing I considered important.

So what about the meat?

Well, in case you hadn't noticed, Facebook is going to be big. I don't just mean suggestions that Zuckerberg may be 'selling himself short' at a mere $15bn, or evidence that Facebook's platform is delivering profit for third party developers. More than both of those, there was an underlying - often implicit - recognition that growth opportunities lie in pushing content and functionality off our individual websites and into the cloud. Although I've argued before that Facebook is a very long way from being open, it's 'Platform' remains a compelling example of ways in which external content can be aggregated and consumed elsewhere. Imagine what would be possible in a more open ecosystem, an ecosystem of which Facebook could be a part? Were others (MySpace, anyone?) to seed such an ecosystem whilst Facebook remained off to one side, would the rate of fall in Facebook numbers equal or exceed their recent growth?

'Semantic' has arrived; the Metaweb/ Radar Networks/ Powerset pow wow with Tim O'Reilly (pictured) on the final afternoon was great, and was just beginning to go places when they ran out of time. More debate and analysis would have been nice, with (a lot) less demo. This was followed up by John Doerr recognising the whole space as a compelling investment opportunity, echoing trends that Brad Feld highlighted in his recent podcast with me. I found Danny Hillis' explicit distancing of himself from the Semantic Web odd (Shelley just found it funny...); I'll admit that I've done a little of the same, but more to demonstrate that there is plenty that the Semantic Web's building blocks (RDF, GRDDL, etc) can do right now, without needing to await the arrival of The Semantic Web. We do need to find better ways to describe this space, though; 'Web 3.0' can be unnecessarily confrontational/epochal, and 'Semantic Web' carries way too much baggage...

Jonathan Zittrain had some interesting things to say, and they're not nearly as contrarian as they might at first have appeared.

Mary Meeker was good value, as always... although impossible to blog! I was surprised by the lack of reaction to her figures illustrating the fall in US growth, relative to competitors to the east.

The Launch Pad, that gathering of exemplary startups, was hugely disappointing. I can't believe that was the cream of the crop.

Gene sequencing needs to be watched... very closely.

Real people don't think (quite) like geeks and venture capitalists! Craigslist, rejoice...

(Almost) everyone had a Platform, with some more black hole sucking-ish than others. It does appear, all too often, that the web is actually becoming less open than it has been of late. All these Platforms are sucking data and users and developers to themselves, and letting very little flow back out. It certainly fulfils short-term goals around eyeballs, advertisers, and the like. But it's bad for the web and, in the long term, it's got to be bad for (most of?) the guilty.

(Almost) everyone was recognising the power of intention/attention, and seeking ways to implicitly or explicitly harness both. Social and semantic graphs have something to say, here.

Photograph James Duncan Davidson/O'Reilly Media

With Ian Davis and I packing to join the UK contingent hopping across the Atlantic to this week's Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, it was interesting to see Anthony Lilley's piece on Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 in today's Guardian. He's clearly not a fan of the labels;

“So, finally web 2.0 is dead. Its jargon half-life has expired and the buzzword du jour is being interred and superseded. And by what? Well, you'll never guess. Long live web 3.0. Honestly, give me strength. We'll look back in 20 years and wonder when we decided to hand over the English language to people who can haggle for hours about the difference between versions 2.1 and 2.5 of some software.”

In amongst the criticism of marketing hype, and the grounding in nappy/diaper changing that I am so happy to have left behind for the giddy heights of the tooth fairy, Anthony follows John Markoff's line in postulating that Web 3.0 may be the Semantic Web;

“I'm coming to the conclusion that if web 3.0 is anything at all, then it's a step on the way to something I first heard about several years ago - the development of the semantic web. And, let's be honest, a version number is a better selling point than the word semantic is ever going to be.”

On the way, Anthony steps sideways into discussion of money;

“But I share some of the cynicism of a Canadian colleague who says that web 2.0 will actually come to an end when the venture capital money runs out.

Well, given that lots of Silicon Valley investors are suddenly starting to talk about web 3.0, maybe that day is near and web 3.0 is just a branding relaunch, kind of like Kylie's new look?”

Despite recent figures in the Financial Times, I'm actually not so sure that the money is leaving Web 2.0. Rather, I think that we're seeing the sort of technological bedding in that Brad Feld and Talis Platform Advisory Group member Mills Davis talked about in their podcasts with me. VC's aren't drawing back from funding Web 2.0 at all; instead, we're moving through the hype that Anthony rightly criticises, and we're emerging into an environment in which smarter entrepreneurs and smarter investors are once again becoming interested in meeting real business opportunities. Web 2.0 technologies are there, through and through, but there's far less interest in funding a company just because its website has curvy corners and a smidge of AJAX. That's a good thing. It doesn't mean Web 2.0 is dead. Maybe it does mean Web 2.0 has grown up a little.

Like so many others, Anthony also refers to Jason Calacanis' recent PR stunt. I commented on that at the time, but he draws value from Jason's assertion that;

“Web 3.0 is the creation of high-quality content and services produced by gifted individuals using web 2.0 technology as an enabling platform. Web 3.0 throttles the 'wisdom of the crowds' from turning into the 'madness of the mobs' we've seen all too often, by balancing it with a respect of experts.”

Well, maybe.

“The reliability of content and an understanding of the wider context in which content sits are rising in importance on the web and taking their place alongside the wondrous power of group communication, especially as more and more people join the party.”

Absolutely. Here, Anthony hits the nail right on the head. Long before the all-encompassing ontological wonder of the Semantic Web is realised (if it ever is), there is much that some of its building blocks can do to help us deliver real solutions to real problems right now. I touched on this mid-point between Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web in my presentation in Cambridge last week, and will be expanding upon those ideas in various places over the next wee while.

Behind the curvy corners and the blurring of boundaries between the Cloud and its access point, Web 2.0 is the manifestation of numerous trends, and Tim O'Reilly has consistently done a good job of expressing these. Open Source, Falling costs of storage, Increases in compute power, increasing ubiquity of access, commoditisation, software as a service, and more.

However, for all their advances, all too many Web 2.0 applications remain fundamentally 'on' rather than 'of' the Web; offering rich functionality and interaction within their own little microcosm of the wider Web. Through pragmatic application of robust elements of the Semantic Web stack, we can move far beyond 'simply' crowdsourcing an encyclopaedia, 'merely' tracking recommendations and behaviour within a single e-commerce site, or 'just' allowing 46 million people to turn one another into zombies.

It is this recognition that the power of the connections between resources is woefully under-utilised that is behind the Talis Platform. We are moving beyond the 'see also' links of the traditional web, and beyond the best-efforts silos of Web 2.0's darlings, to offer means by which assertions - and their provenance - may be made and tracked across the open web. Many of Web 2.0's ideas figure highly, as does a strong grounding in the technologies of the Semantic Web. Data is, of course, key... but we need to move beyond current presumptions in favour of use toward a model by which everyone is clear as to what data can - and should - be used for. Hence our long-standing interest in the Open Data movement.

Is any of this 'Web 3.0'? I'm not sure. Talis Platform Advisory Group member Nova Spivack has, in the past, attempted to defuse the whole Web 2.0/ Web 3.0 polarisation by painting Web 3.0 as merely a label for the third decade of the Web. Semantic technologies are part of that decade, but so are other things. Nova is one of those speaking in a Semantic Web session at the Web 2.0 Summit this week. It'll be interesting to see how his ideas are received in that temple to 2.0, and you can be sure that I'll be sat there taking notes...

Image of Kylie Minogue by Keven Law, shared on Flickr with a Creative Commons license. To understand why, you'll have to read Anthony's article...

Except, perhaps, in Nova's use of it to describe the third decade of the Web, 'Web 3.0' does seem to currently be causing little more than confusion; which is surely exactly the opposite of what a loose label such as that should be for? Despite that, it - or a term like it - will be needed as the media and others struggle to describe the transitional phase that we're entering as the exuberant outpourings of the early Web 2.0 days bed down into sustainable and longer-term activity. We can either craft these labels ourselves and use them to tell our stories, or we can have them created for us with language that will (doubtless) pit the new thingummy against the 'old' Web 2.0 in ways that are unhelpful. For want of a better term, many of us do seem to fall back upon 'Web 3.0' to describe something else, but I'm not sure that any of us actually like the term. 'Web of Data'? Maybe. 'Web of Intentions'? Possibly... and I'll begin to dig into why in an upcoming series of posts. 'Semantic Web'? No, probably not. It's far too bound up in the totality of Tim Berners-Lee's vision; something that we see small parts of in various labs around the world, but something that is an extremely long way from the mainstream web of today or tomorrow. Parts of the Semantic Web ideal figure extremely highly, but it may be unwise to shoot them in the foot by bogging discussion of them down in all that ontological big system stuff that seems to accompany any mention of the big SW.

Robust, pragmatic, and Web-scale deployment of the technologies and ideas of the Semantic Web is not a replacement for Web 2.0. It is an evolution, a change of emphasis and approach. It is the realisation of many of Web 2.0's under-delivered promises, and a powerful step forwards for incumbents and new entrants. The opening up (legally, technically, and practically) of the data that drives the current social web is the big story. The particular W3C recommendations that make it possible are a means to an end.

As Nova comments;

“The Semantic Web is not about AI or anything fancy like that, it is really just about data. Another and perhaps better name for it would be 'The Data Web.'”

Nova also remarks;

“I agree with Tim that the Web 2.0 era was a renaissance -- and that there were certain trends and patterns that I think Tim recognized first, and that he has explained better, than just about anyone else. Tim helped the world to see what Web 2.0 was really about -- collective intelligence.”

Absolutely. And it is here that the opportunity lies in taking a huge step forward. We're seeing plenty of interesting examples in which silos of reasonably collective reasonably intelligent data are growing and being mined.

The opportunities are so much greater with an open pool of data, to which context, role and reason can be applied, and it is here that semantic technologies such as RDF have so much to offer.

Nova goes on to say;

“The fact is, while I have great respect for Tim as a thinker, I don't think he truly 'gets' the Semantic Web yet. In fact, he consistently misses the real point of where these technologies add value, and instead gets stuck on edge-cases (like artificial intelligence) that all of us who are really working on these technologies actually don't think about at all. We don't care about reasoning or artificial intelligence, we care about OPEN DATA.

From what I can see, Tim thinks the Semantic Web is some kind of artificial intelligence system. If that is the case, he's completely missing the point. Yes, of course it enables better, smarter applications. But it's fundamentally NOT about AI and it never was. It's about OPEN DATA. The Semantic Web should be renamed to simply The Data Web.”

I know for a fact that Tim 'gets' - and passionately believes in - Open Data. I've seen him talk compellingly on the subject, and read his thoughts online more than once.

It does seem, though, that he's not yet making the connection between the power and importance of Open Data and the importance of the open web of data that a move from the siloed databases of today's best Web applications to a distributed network of flexible and actionable RDF data.

Getting the data out there (with appropriate licenses to encourage use and reuse, of course) is only part of the job. The networks of association, inference, context and more make the sum of the parts worth far more than the individual records or databases... and this doesn't require (despite fears to the contrary) any wholesale adoption of inflexible ontologies or the widespread crafting of RDF.

Now I really must finish the set of posts in which I hope to show more clearly how web-scale and sustainable deployment of Semantic Technologies promises to enrich (not replace) the vibrant ecosystem that Tim has so eloquently captured in his descriptions of Web 2.0.

Each piece is thoughtful, each piece is well worth a read, and each differs somewhat from the others in outlook as they delve into 'ontologies', 'classic approaches', 'machine intelligence', 'SPARQL', 'Turtle' and other geekiness [meant in the nicest possible way]. I do wonder, though, if all of them are bypassing some fundamental points as they seek to clarify their own perspectives to themselves, to one another, and to the world; points with which I suspect that each may actually agree.

First, I definitely don't think that a company, technology or approach can only be either 'Web 2.0' or 'Semantic Web'. Sure, some companies will see themselves (or pitch themselves) in one space or the other, but there's going to be an ever-increasing number that reside firmly in both. Ultimately, of course (and figures in the FT this week, suggesting that

“The pull-back was particularly acute in Silicon Valley, as big Web 2.0 investors such as Benchmark Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Omidyar Networks, the private financing vehicle of Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar, cut back on their investments.”

might more logically be interpreted as supporting this argument) companies won't be Web 2.0 or Semantic Web. They will be companies that solve a particular set of problems for a particular set of audiences. Some of the tools in the toolbox they use to do this will be Web 2.0-ish, some will be Semantic Web-ish, some will be both, and some will be neither. Those things that currently differentiate us - and to which we apply labels in order to reinforce the differentiation - will become mainstream, run of the mill, mundane, and simply expected. That's progress, and it's a good thing. Web 2.0 won't go away. The Semantic Web won't go away. Shouting about either might, and it doesn't have to mean that their importance has diminished.

Second, 'collective intelligence' applies equally to both. Tim O'Reilly's absolutely right that it's been a key differentiator of many Web 2.0 darlings;

“By contrast, I've argued that one of the core attributes of 'web 2.0' (another ambiguous and widely misused term) is 'collective intelligence.' That is, the application is able to draw meaning and utility from data provided by the activity of its users, usually large numbers of users performing a very similar activity. So, for example, collaborative filtering applications like Amazon's 'people who bought item this also bought' or last.fm's music recommendations, use specialized algorithms to match users with each other on the basis of their purchases or listening habits. There are many other examples: digg users voting up stories, or wikipedia's crowdsourced encyclopedia and news stories.”

It's also front and centre in Semantic Web work, though. For example that from ourselves, Radar Networks and others. See this white paper [PDF] for one, and watch here and here for public sight of internal developments... soon. The connections that RDF makes so manifest are a perfect way to express, traverse, and mine the habits, behaviours and desires of the collective.

Third, 'a formal ontology' is not a requirement, and nor is pushing structure in the face of the user.

Tim makes a good point here;

“The Semantic Web is a bit of a slog, with a lot of work required to build enough data for the applications to become useful. Web 2.0 applications often do a half-assed job of tackling the same problem, but because they harness self-interest, they typically gather much more data. And then solve for their deficiencies with statistics or other advantages of scale.”

I'm not sure, though, that SemWeb/ Web 2.0 is the dichotomy here? Rather, it's a split between purist, all-encompassing, and hugely flexible on the one hand and pragmatic and 'good enough' on the other. I would agree that stereotype would often place Semantic Web developers on one side of that divide and Web 2.0 startups on the other. The technology is not the point there, though, so much as the mindset. Believe me, we can do some great stuff to harness self-interest, gather much more data, and solve the deficiencies with statistics and other advantages of scale in a Semantic Web-ey Platform... :-)

“But I predict that we'll soon see a second wave of social networking sites, or upgrades to existing ones, that provide for the encoding of additional nuance. In addition, there will be specialized sites -- take Geni, for example, which encodes geneaology -- that will provide additional information about the relationships between people. 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.”

Too right, Tim. But I'd definitely suggest that those building the second wave should be talking to Talis, to Radar Networks, to Metaweb and to some of the other proponents of a new and far more Web 2.0-inspired Semantic Web paradigm. There are way too many synergies there to ignore...

Dan Brickley's comments in response to one aspect of Danny's argument are also interesting;

“Let me clear something up. Danny mentions a discussion with Tim O’Reilly about SemWeb themes.

Much as I generally agree with Danny, I’m reaching for a ten-foot bargepole on this one point:

'While Facebook may have achieved pretty major adoption for their approach, it’s only very marginally useful because of their overly simplistic treatment of relationships.'

Facebook, despite the trivia, the endless wars between the ninja zombies and the pirate vampires; despite being centralised, despite [insert grumble] is massively useful. Proof of that pudding: it is massively used. 'Marginal' doesn’t come into it.”

Too true. I've complained about Facebook, too [for example here and here]. But I use it, and millions of others use it. And it serves a purpose. That doesn't mean it can't be better.

Turning, finally, to Alex' post;

“The first problem is that RDF and OWL are complicated. Even for scientists and mathematicians these graph-based languages take time to learn and for less-technical people they are nearly impossible to understand. Because the designers were shooting for flexibility and completeness, the end result are documents that are confusing, verbose and difficult to analyze.”

Well, yes and no. That's what tools are for. And in a large number of cases the RDF may actually be auto-generated as part of some process of aggregation or value addition of which the data creator or manager need have no explicit awareness. The RDF may very well be generating an aggregation of tiny snippets of data from large numbers of transactions; the interaction of a single user with a single resource doesn't have to result in a whole RDF document of its own. More on that later.

And, also from Alex;

“Going back to John Markoff's example of a computer booking a perfect vacation, one can't help but think of a travel agency. In the good old days, you would go to the same agent over and over again. Why? Because just like your friends, your doctor, your teacher, the travel agent needs to know you personally to be able to serve you better.

The travel agent remembers that you've been to Prague and Paris, which is why he offers you a trip to Rome. The travel agent remembers that you're a vegetarian and orders the pasta meal for you on your flight. Over time people learn and memorize facts about life and each other. Until machines can do the same, knowledge of semantics, limited or full is not going to be enough to replace humans.”

Exactly. And that's where network effects, collective intelligence, behavioural observation and all the rest kick in. The knowledge comes from observation of an awful lot of behaviour; not from having the traveller fill in some long-winded and tedious form detailing an RDF graph representation of their travel preferences for all situations. Context matters. I, for example, want a window seat on short-haul flights, and an aisle seat on long-haul flights. It's not a simple preference one way or the other. I don't have a preferred airport to depart from, as so many other factors come into play. I'll go to a more distant departure airport for a better departure or travel time, for example. I won't always travel with the airlines I've got frequent flier cards for... but they don't have to be cheapest before I can or will. It's more complex than that. Current systems don't understand.

“Perhaps the worst challenge facing the semantic web is the business challenge. What is the consumer value? How is it to be marketed? What business can be built on top of the semantic web that can not exist today? Clearly the example of instant travel match is not a 'wow.' It's primitive and, in a way, uninteresting because many of us are already quite adept at being our own travel agent using existing tools. But assuming that there are problems that can be solved faster, there is still a question of specific end user utility.”

Talis. Radar Networks. Joost. Metaweb. Garlik. Need I go on? (I can... :-) )

“The way the semantic web is presented today makes it very difficult to market. The 'we are a semantic web company' slogan is likely to raise eyebrows and questions. RDF and OWL clearly need to be kept under the hood. So the challenge is to formulate the end user value in ways that will resonate with people.”

Absolutely right! SWEO is part of the answer. Companies like ours getting out and showing what can be done, and why it's valuable is crucial too... and we're getting there.

And to answer my initial question; No, I don't think everyone is confused by or about the Semantic Web. We do, though, have a lot of different niche views of value (or lack thereof), clamouring for attention. These overlapping - and not necessarily incorrect - perspectives certainly could appear to be a result of confusion, if viewed from the outside. Language is a complicated thing, and these are complex ideas. Describing one with the other requires a number of iterations to arrive at clarity, but we're getting there.

There's a lot more to say, but this post has now gone on long enough (especially as I initially meant to simply point you at some interesting blog posts...).

Other companies, including Dell and the NYTimes, also use use Twitter to push out all sorts of content, from product updates and discounts to industry information and news. And isn’t it a bit ironic that the NY Times is so prolific on Twitter? They came across as a skeptic back in April.

So know that we know there’s some real-world scenarios for this stuff, the question becomes how to best incorporate these communication tools into an integrated and cohesive marketing strategy? I’d suggest start by stripping away all the Web 2.0 monikers and buzzwords and boil it down to content and communication. From there think about what everyone else is thinking about. How do I come up with creative ways to distribute my content? After that, think about how to be a facilitator. Once a brand becomes a trusted information source or content provider, conversations happen. Tools like Twitter and Jaiku can drive those conversations. And conversations build brand.

It is basically a strong arm tactic to get me to keep paying for cable TV. It's shady, but what can you do when you've got the bandwidth blues?

So I caved and they cut my cable TV down to basic which dropped my bill from $100 a month to $64 a month.

Or so I thought.

Starting February first, my bill should have been $64...it was $100. It was also $100 in March, April, and May. During this time I called them on several occasions asking them to correct their error. In May, they told me it was fixed, and my account was credited for the error and my bill would reflect the change next month. When the next bill arrived...no dice...it was $100.

I called again this last week and asked them to fix the problem, but the person told me they didn't have any notes that I had requested this going back to January, so he could only credit me for May. I told him I was ready to disconnect my cable altogether and that's when the smooth talking express got underway.

He gave me this whole story about how his computer system couldn't give me a credit, but instead what he would do is drop my Internet bill to about $32 a month and my TV would be $5 a month...meaning in 6 months, what I have already overpaid them for 5 months...I would essentially earn back...and then some over time. In a bit of a time crunch and not wanting to argue about it any further, I just said go ahead and do it.

The issue I have here is why can't companies like this just be completely honest and above board? Why have these secret discounts for ticked off customers? Why always have these complicated packages and services people don't want? Why cant we pick what we want...get what we need...and not have to deal with all this time wasting?

I'm pretty sick of companies excusing bad service with discounts. Can't you just get your act together and provide a service that I love so much I'm willing to recommend it to my friends and family? No hidden fees and discounts...just good solid performance and a dedication to excellent customer service. Period.

AT&T Inc. has joined Hollywood studios and recording companies in trying to keep pirated films, music and other content off its network — the first major carrier of Internet traffic to do so. The San Antonio-based company started working last week with studios and record companies to develop anti-piracy technology that would target the most frequent offenders, said James W. Cicconi, an AT&T senior vice president.

In the coming weeks, the USO will help AT&T distribute the phone cards to troops throughout Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan, South Korea and Japan. Each donated phone card will provide 20 minutes of free talk-time from Iraq to the U.S.

I'm listening to Pandora Radio through my Sonos today when up comes a track from one of my favorite artists, Cock Robin.

Only in Sonos it looked more like this:

Yes, C**k Robin.

Just as a bit of background, Cock Robin is a great band that takes it's name from the saucy and scandalous book, The courtship and marriage of Cock Robin and Jenny Wren. If you want to see this shameful book for yourself, you can grab the pdf here. It is a tumultuous tale of passion and murder between fowl of the opposite sex.

The interesting thing to me is that Pandora employs tons of REAL LIVE people to categorize music. And yet somehow no one noticed that this obviously doesn't fit into the obscene column. Even if it did, I'm an adult and I can handle all sorts of words. I always find it entertaining that people still believe that if you put a star in a seemi**ly obsc**e word, that it makes it somewhat "safer" for child**n who obviously don't have the im*gin*tion or intellig**ce required to figure it out.

Um...yeah.

Personally I think that is a load of #$%^&*!.

All I have to say is it is good to know that if D**k Cheney ever starts up a musical career, our eyes are safe.

BTW...Buzzcocks song Orgasm Addict...apparently acceptable for your children.

PS...Pa**ora...you know I l**e you!.