Slashdot Mirror
Greatest Task of Web 2.x: Meta-Validation
CexpTretical writes "This Technology Review article about Web 2.x problems fails to mention the 800 pound gorilla in the room when it comes to fulfilling the dreams of the Semantic Web — i.e., assumptions about the validity of metadata or tagging schemes. We can add all of the metadata and/or tags we want to web resources but that does not mean that the 'data about the data' honestly or accurately describe the resource or are 'about the data' at all. This is why Google does not place much importance on the metadata already contained in HTML document headers for search ranking, because it cannot be trusted. And to validate it would require more effort than to search and index that data from scratch. Ensuring or verifying the validity of metadata would be a task equal to that of initially creating it, but would have to be repeated on an ongoing basis. Hence all of the talk about 'trusted networks,' which then require trusting the gatekeepers of those networks. Talk about 'semantics.'" Slashdot's moderation and meta-moderation offer one example of getting useful metadata in a non-trusted environment.
The tagging system might be a better example, or at least an example of mostly useless meta information.
What about the removal of accurate metadata, such as Slashdot's disabling of the "dupe" tag?
Especially here at Slashdot where a certain type of groupthink is very prevalent, it's not so much a matter of whether a comment is insightful or interesting so much as it adheres to the consensus view of the moderators. A non-conforming view is labeled 'Troll'. So in one sense, the metadata provided by the moderation system is useful in that you can tell at a glance how well a comment conforms to the Slashdot zeitgeist just by looking at its moderation score.
However since posts lower than zero do not get displayed automatically, views that are unappealing to the Slashdot community are relegated to obscurity regardless of their validity and correctness.
Linux sucks.
Slashdot's very own Hal Porter is an expert in the field of the Semantic Web and metadata classification and organization. Those of us in the UK who have followed his work know full well that he's soon going to be producing some excellent research. For years he's been telling us that the Semantic Web will take off and revolutionize the way we consider our data. I think he may be right, but I'm still thinking it'll take some time yet for most computer scientists, let alone average users, to see that he's correct.
I WIN MORE THAN YOU!
I have freaks! I did something right...
It's also about the software exploring similar data across different regions of the web to extrapolate veracity or falsehood. Think of it as programming software to recognize how to write new Wikipedia pages (correctly). Human contributions will ALWAYS have a margin of error; the question is, can we program software to do the same job we do, but much more efficiently AND correctly?
Slashdot article posted from parallel universe! Details at 11.
I thought it was "elephant in the room"? Googlefight!. We're talking orders of magnitude here... Please tell me that lame TV commercial that botched the idiom isn't starting a trend? I think 800 lb gorilla should remain as the Urban Dictionary's "an overbearing entity in a specific industry or sphere of activity" and not expand to the more abstract, from Wikipedia, "an obvious truth that is being ignored"
Well at least slashdot has the "tagging schemes" down. In fact, this article will most likely usefully be tagged "fud, notfud, yes, and no". If that's not an honest and accurate of this article, then I don't know what is.
You're completely correct. Most people don't moderate based on how a post or a story meets a certain set of criteria. They only ever get to the level where they "agree" with a story, or "disagree" with it.
When it was first becoming popular, I used Digg for a few weeks. Various people would post comments in stories I had submitted, saying how they had just "buried" the story as "OK, This is Lame" because they disagreed with it. Of course, that's now how Digg is intended to work. It's about a story's merit as a story, not about how it may conflict or agree with one's opinion.
I've seen other people suffer a similar fate. John C. Randolph, who many of us know for his past work at Apple, is often the victim of that sort of stupidity. Unlike 99.99999% of the Digg users, he has some clue as to how Apple works, and what sort of projects they're working on. Yet time and time again he's the victim of morons who outright claim his stories are "inaccurate". Unfortunately, there are so many morons that they completely outnumber those of us who know who jcr is, who know of his great work, and who know how perfectly accurate his information is.
At least here at Slashdot, there's some limit as to who gets moderating privileges. It tends to be only the most intelligent individuals. Contrast this to Digg, where any 12-year-old cocktard is given the ability to moderate stories that tower above their intellect and understanding.
I don't think that meta-validatino can *ever* work.
It's a lazy shortcut to somebody with a brain doing the editing/moderating themselves. The masses are NOT always right and are often wrong, in fact (Wikipedia). Meta-validation is a way to let "the users" do the work, even though those users are generally not qualified to do so. The whole value in say, a web site, is offering useful, accurate information to other people who don't already know that information. Meta-validation is essentially mod rule, with no order or methodology. Meta-validation is a shortcut to profit, and as a result, it will never result in good, long-term information.
No sig for now.
Working with metadata from a non-trusted community is a few orders of difficulty harder than working with trusted metadata. All the examples from non-trusted user groups that I've seen are either 1) only able to track fairly simple data or 2) ambitious but disappointing. I'd put Slashdot's moderation and metamoderation in the first category. Relevance, quality, and a few kinds of description are possible, but these are fairly simple things to track. Most internet resources would require metadata that is much harder to validate to be useful.
A primary example of this that comes to my mind is the current crop of music recommendation services. The idea behind these sites is that they can, through one of various methods, recommend music to you based on what you like. I've experimented somewhat extensively with Pandora and Last.fm, and the difference in the quality of their suggestions is amazing.
Last.fm uses community data for recommendations. It tracks tags that users attach to songs and the collection of artists that each user listens to. Based on what artists you have listened to or which tags you select, it attempts to point out other artists you might like.
Pandora makes recommendations based on musical qualities. The data the service uses comes from the Music Genome Project, which paid people who have studied music to catalogue the musical qualities of songs in their database. Employees listen to songs and select which attributes are applicable to the song from a list of hundreds of attributes. To use the service, you enter some songs and artists that you like, and based on the musical attributes of those songs and artists, it recommends other songs you might like.
The results that the services provide, at least in my case, are like night and day. Last.fm's recommendations are heavily influenced by what's popular and how a common user would categorize an artist or song. They sort-of hit the right areas, but it doesn't get much better than Amazon's recommendations. Pandora's recommendations always seem to be more on target, even though it uses only a few artists or songs that you enter at the start, in contract to Last.fm, which can use my entire play history.
I guess a lot of this can be chalked up to the difference between association and relation - without some type of new innovation, it seems that community-based metadata can only be based on association, which is a far cry short of relation. Yes, it is a type of relation, but a set of data has qualities that a few simple tags from users are not going to be able to touch. It seems to me the next generation of metadata will only be possible when we can figure out a way to get the sort of data that Pandora uses from a community group. It's a daunting challenge that tagging and simple user activities like the Google Image Labeller have just started to slightly touch.
Solve the problems we all have, not the strawman problems that are created to justify the "solutions" being proposed.
If you really want to deal with meta-data validation, take that project up in Web 3.0.
For metadata to be useful at all, there has to be some way to come to a consensus, and the most logical way to come to a consensus is by what the majority thinks. However, there are too many examples where the majority is wrong for metadata to be truly useful in my opinion.
Here on Slashdot, there is a selection process and a reputation system that determines who has the ability to moderate. How does this "Web 2.0" address the fact that anyone can attach and moderate tags?
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Another is using markets. For decisions which are repeatable and judgeable on the basis of external results, markets kick the hindquarters of taking the majority vote. Who cares what the majority of Americans (or of Slashdotters) think of Sony's chances at making a profit on the PS3 -- the market, disproportionately lead by people who a) have been successful in the past and b) are particularly interested in Sony (for good or for ill) has already long since incorporated that information into Sony's share price, which is basically a hard-to-read numerical guesttimate of Sony's future profit potential. Are markets wrong sometimes? Yep, we get irrational behavior there, too. But they are ruthlessly efficient most of the time.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
If you're talking about spam as in email, rather than blog spam or something, POPFile (or your Bayes-based solution of choice) will essentially end spam as a problem for you. I get two thousand spams a week and, on a bad week, see maybe three to four. This took perhaps an hour of my life worth of training over a week to achieve, and I reclassify all of the ones that are mistaken (thirty seconds worth of work a week). Saves me literally hours of deleting emails and I lose a heck of a lot less now that I'm not stuck stabbing the delete key a few hundred times a day, accidentally poofing emails from clients and family members. I think I temporarily lost one really important email in the last 6 months and about 3 that weren't of any consequence (password reminders, Amazon notifications, and the like that I knew were coming and was able to rescue easily).
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
It'd be interesting to compare the metadata on web pages and compare it with the indexing data generated by a spider...
*sigh* Once again. Ambient Findability by Peter Morville. Covers the Semantic Web too.
Web 2.0 is an empty buzzword for the evolution of the internet. There is no single event that can be unequivocably be called the atart of "Web 2.0".
According to Daniel Glazman, Tim Berners-Lee has officially given up on XHTML as of last week's W3C Advisory Committee meeting in Tokyo, and then apparently explains what Web 3.0 is supposed to be.
TBL is apparently not the visionary we all thought he was. Apparently no one in the W3C can (or is willing to) figure out how to relegate HTML to the junk heap, like a 286 computer: it was a good idea at the time, but newer technology has come along. Eventually, someone will want to see one in a museum. Contrary to popular reports, the W3C has not fixed itself, but merely rolled back the clock on itself a decade or so.
After 8 years, what do all the developers who embraced XHTML get for our efforts? Our smorgasboard of web standards becomes a (tag) soup kitchen once again.
Web 2.0 is a fleeting concept with no substance, it's existence can only be inferred by serruptitiously attributing semi-related events to its influence. Now that the inventor of the WWW has bought into this folly, and simultaneously abandoned one of the W3C's greatest achievements, how can anyone put any stock in what he or anyone else at W3C says?
I held out longer than most in my hopes that web standards could be straightened out, but now the W3C is dead by its own hand, after 6 or more years of atrophy, manic depression, and schizophrenia.
You can't search on them, you don't have any incentive to tag them for yourself (since everyone is limited to the same 5 tags or so), and you can't get "More articles like this". Is it any shocker that they've turned into a veritable festival of in-jokes which provide no information you couldn't get from reading the summary? Heck, after you've read the headline you can provide all the tags:
"Is Linux ready for desktop?"
yes, no, fud, notfud -- and it would be marked omgponies, dupe, and thistagisfreakinguseless if any of those options weren't automatically stripped.
Its almost like tags are designed to be useless here, in a way that they're not with delicious (put the periods in wherever you want them -- I use www.delicious.com and I am so very glad it works). I can use delicious as a "Hmm, I want to read this later" bookmark-shared-across-machines, to categorize Java samples for my own use later, and to do things which are of use to *me*. The social aspect grows naturally from the personal uses, because when you mark Sun's whitepaper as being about Java or this photo on flickr as being of sakura everyone else gets to piggyback on your diligence. But if there isn't any personal use possible then tagging is just textual autoeroticism.
You can mark me fud and omgponies if you want.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Read. Evaluate with brain. Synthesize. Write. Debate.
So, I'm really dubious about one of the myths about Google and metadata: that Google doesn't use metadata because it's unreliable.
Google does, in fact, use metadata -- tons of it. Google uses explicit metadata built into headers (like the description, robot control); it uses the rel-license microformat; and it uses titles and h1 headers. It also uses some crucial metadata that's not self-reported by the Web site -- namely, the number and text of links inbound towards a page. It also uses metadata in HTTP headers.
Google also uses lots of data that is unreliable or could be dishonest. After all, there's a huge dark business of blackhat SEO that has its sole intention to trick Google's bots into thinking pages are more important (or are on a different subject) than they actually are. There is no particular part of an HTML page or any other Web resource that cannot be a lie. Web spiders have to deal with this all the time, and they have to balance the information they get from different data sources to determine what's true and what's not.
It's true that Google's search results don't depend as heavily on the specific meta keywords the way many first-generation search engines did. But I think that's more a consideration of the remarkable naivete of early search engines than anything else.
Evan Prodromou | evan@prodromou.name | http://evan.prodromou.name/
You (sort of) can. Go to http://www.slashdot.org/tags/foo
Click the tags that are listed, rather than clicking the arrow. If the tags were meaningful you'd get similar articles.
Interesting. Maybe some "imtelligent poster" should study what groupthink* really is, as opposed to what this forum thinks it is.
*Not just definitions, but mechanisms, and scope. Throw in statistics and psychology for extra credit. Serve to an audiance that will go "ho hum".
This gorilla was last seen apparently emitting methane gas. Who knows where it will be seen next? In an electronic voting machine or a DRM format war perhaps?
... oh, there it's done.
Whether emitting gas or validating meta-information, this gorilla has maintained his importance and kept his mass steadily high. Are there larger gorillas? And if there were, would it matter?
Some thoughts to ponder while the pr0n is loading
The problem is that many people do not want honest discussion via the comment system: they want to be affirmed in what they believe. And some people would rather cater to the groupthink and adopt that as their own belief because they lack a spine. Since you don't seem to be one of them, please continue to both call them out, and mock them. Usually someone who spouts a line to feel like they belong can't hold their own in an argument, or invokes a logical fallacy when they argue.
A good counter to the moderators who think they can just moderate down anyone who doesn't agree with them would be to list who moderated what comments. Then, other members can check up on the moderators (without the silliness of meta-moderating) if they wish to. Also, I'd ditch the whole friends/foes system. It only further establishes a sort of collective thought.
ROFLASTC! Oh, it hurts to laugh so hard...
Haven't you heard that Web 3.0 is being released soon?
Carnage Blender
"In short, suck it up and at least admit there MIGHT be some bias in Slashdot..... Bitch."
Funny how we complain about mass media's biases, and yet we're supposedly immune. How very inhuman of us.
After 8 years, what do all the developers who embraced XHTML get for our efforts? Our smorgasboard of web standards becomes a (tag) soup kitchen once again.
No. What we get is the XHTML 1.0 and XHTML 1.1 standards to work with. For the vast majority of Web-based tasks, those are more than suitable. Being based on XML, they put a great deal more emphasis on correctness and consistency. While this puts an increased burden on the developer of Web sites and applications, it does often lead to far higher-quality pages. In addition, those standards have helped out browser developers extensively.
We had a client with a site mostly written in HTML 4.0. It didn't display well with several browsers, including Opera. So we did pretty much a straight conversion to XHTML 1.1. Now their site works perfectly fine with every browser we tried, including more picky browsers like Amaya, and text-based browsers like Links, Lynx, and w3m.
What we've seen of "Web 2.0" has been crappy. It's built upon layers of shit like JavaScript and Flash. For any serious Web page, those technologies are often best avoided. They bring nothing but browser incompatibilities and hassle. So we find that XHTML 1.1 works very well, with the result being web pages that display in virtually every browser out there, even ones as old as Netscape Navigator 4.x.
You will be fine if at lowest, core level you store your document data as XHTML -- or better, XML w/ an appropriate, fine-tuned schema.
...but you *must* start by having the data stored in a micro-addressable format -- i.e:"XML."
XSL makes it *trivial* to translate that data into HTML. (or leave it as XHTML, if the browser, or client device supports it.)
This translation can be pre-rendered, or done in real-time as a page or document is rendered and served. (yes, XSL is fast enough.)
Done right, you can future-proof the data that underlies your pages, documents, and user interfaces. You can share the same data between pdfs, Flash interactives, and web pages, necessary. You could even translate that data into other XML -- say, if you improve or extend your schema.
Make that data your bi*tch, and it'll do what you want.
The trouble is that if there was a assured way to implement it, it would already have been implemented. Metadata and tags are simply the 'killer app' for web 2.0
Despite all that has been said in the comments and elsewhere, there simply is no good implementation of metadata for the Internet that applies to all types of data and all instances of data sharing.
If you want to be a hero, figure this little problem out and the world will beat a path to your door... so to speak.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
I couldn't have put it better myself. If something is useful, expect the community to give back to it (such as by providing accurate metadata). If something is a useless joke, then expect the users to treat it as such. Now of course, even when there is a useful community driven tool you can still expect there to be pranksters and not-so-honest people who mess with the accuracy or try to game the system for profit, but these people are usually a small minority. All you'd need is some kind of counteroffensive tool that the majority can use to correct these inaccuracies. This kind of system isn't perfect, but nothing ever is. At least it keeps things pointed in the right direction without too much bureaucracy.
Largely nailed it, and I've made some suggestions in the past to change it. But there's one thing we're all forgetting. No matter what our complaints or suggestiions to improve. Taco will never change a thing because the moderation system is his baby. End of discussion.
Slashdot's moderation and meta-moderation offer one example of getting useful metadata in a non-trusted environment.
Why, oh why, would you include that at the end of the summary? Even if there weren't horrible issues with the moderation system (there are), this particular audience is going to rip that comment apart.
An example of unaccountable, gameable metadata that generates untrustworthy info that is almost as useless, through abuse, as it is useful.
Slashdot's moderation could:
Those few improvements could introduce some accountability and feedback into the now mostly abused meta/moderation system. Until then, Slashdot has little to teach the world about the right way to accumulate useful metadata in an untrustworthy environment.
--
make install -not war
(since everyone is limited to the same 5 tags or so)
For what it's worth, you can tag things any way you like. You're not limited to just the tags you see. I personally don't have the time or inclination, but try to click the little triangle next to the existing tags, and you'll see you can attach any arbitrary tags you wish to any article, and use your own "tags" page to see the various articles grouped by your personally-applied tags. In the main page, you're only seeing the most common tags. While it obviously needs some work (and apparently a lot better instructions for use) and I admittedly haven't bothered myself, I can see the potential, even if others decide to abuse it with the ever-present "yes" "no" and "maybe" tags.
Oh. You want your search results the same year. Forget it, then. Language analysis on modern computers is way too primitive to give you useful, bomb-proof results over indeterminantly-overlapping web pages where those pages may overlap by different amounts depending on the exact relationship being examined at the time, especially if multi-generational relationships are considered.
You are simply not going to get useful results this side of 2100, unless you are either willing to put up with artificial stupidity (the polar opposite of artificial intelligence) or really bad latency. Artificial stupidity is, sadly, how most search engines operate - usually on the very persuasive grounds that users don't expect anything useful and so don't mind trawling through a billion pages of adverts and fake links in the hope of picking up a nugget or two. Hell, with the click-through model, it might even be more profitable to produce endless junk and a bunch of adverts than to produce something of quality. I could easily see that. Users faced with what they want would have no incentive to give up and look at the banners instead.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Interesting. It wasn't always like that. I remember before when I clicked on a tag, it would just pop up an input that let me enter the same tag.
Great work on making the tag system less useless!
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
I only recently started posting on Slashdot, but I find your claim that the moderation system is mostly abused pretty inaccurate. While your suggestions for improving the system seem like they would be useful, moderation, which is certainly not perfect, successfully enables a large amount of people to share ideas and thoughts. Usually, at least in my experience so far, the truly thoughtful and thought-provoking posts get modded up, not (only) the ones that most readers agree with. I haven't seen anything that could rightly be called abuse, although I'm sure it exists on a small scale.
To bring this back to the point of the article, the type of metadata associated with moderation is of one of the simplest types. It results in a category and a number. The process of generating that data, though, is complicated yet functional, and I would say it's as good a start as most other systems currently out there to validating metadata in a community (I'd like to see some examples to the contrary).
It's only about .5% of the way to generating truly descriptive metadata, but it does what it needs to do. Now the tagging idea...that has a long way to go.
The last line in the item I submitted: "Slashdot's moderation and meta-moderation offer one example of getting useful metadata in a non-trusted environment." was appended by someone. I am not at all interested in Slashdot's tagging policies. I am more interested, in terms of semantic web etc., in things like RDF or any other means that would allow one to sift through so much of the trash in some automated intelligent fashion that does not rely on Google or Microsoft or any other not-for-your-profit mega-org.
DC.Title="Funnay looking 600lb Gorilla"
DC.Creator="Jehovah"
DC.Subject="Throwing Gorilla shit, serious business"
DC.Description="Monkeys throw shit and it's pretty bad, don't something bigger do the same"
DC.Publisher="Addison Wesley"
Task Mangler
The ~real~ Greatest Task of Web 2.x is to establish one good browser as the standard so CSS and ECMA can become highly productive instead of being such a horrific waste of development time.
.NET as the Orcs. Mono as King Theoden. Ballboy Chairkovsky as Saruman. Darl McNovell as Gollum. Darl McNovell's lawyers as more Orcs.
This is the war that desktop-bound Redmond cannot afford to lose. One browser to rule them all, the men of Middle Cubicle, the Dvorves of Dvorak, the Geeks of Ajax, the Elvish and the rhinestone-laden Elvish Impersonators. Starring...
The rest of this roman à clef I leave to you, my fellow Slash Hobbits.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Agree that web 2.0 has not made any impact yet on the Internet, but just happen to look at the more trusted corporate environments . Web 2.0 technologies is being used extensively by knowledge management solution vendors like Kanisa (bought over long time market leaders in Service Resolution Management space i.e. Serviceware), now known as Knova software. With companies like Ontoprise and Cerebra raising huge VC funding and projecting web 2.0 as enabling EAI platform it sure has great potential. Not to add that giants like Oracle have integrated Web 2.0 i.e. RDF capabilities and inferencing into Oracle 10g Spatial DB suites. Thus web 2.0 is slowly but surely making inroads into the industry. Not to mention that Google dabbles into Semantic web . visit http://blogs.smh.com.au/mashup/archives//004396.ht ml
Web 2.0 technologies would allow automatic creationg of meta-data from existing repositories with no meta-data to a reasonable extent.
Not sure how long it would somebody take the untrusted environment of the internet to come up with a commercially viable solutions.....
But with such movement in the industry, Web 2.0 is sure to break in into Internet , sooner than later
as a maker of artistic video collage for ten years, i recall reading a random database magazine or was it a random oracle magazine and that is where i first heard the term meta-data. video collage based search engines will be in my prognostication THE method of choice for perusal of content, three buttons Audio Video Data to rapidly media mark the unfolding collage for the mobile device with 4g media on demand capabilites. i don't care if any of this seems unfeasible, it will be the way things are. my old youtube account before it was taken away by the Eames foundation contained many collages of the sort i mean. i will fill it up again soon enough. meta data will be the industry devoted to watching and tagging, plain and simple and human, marinate on this for a bit.
You can search with them and omgponies is NOT stripped: http://slashdot.org/tags/omgponies Or at least find stories with specific tag.
First of all it just isn't true that slashdot moderation is an example of useful metadata from an untrusted source. The *presenter* of the metadata, i.e., slashdot, is a trusted source. When we see a comment with moderation 5 we know the slashdot system has moderated it 5 and that some random spammer didn't just lie and give it moderation 5. Sure this metadata is created based on 'untrusted' input but that is a different matter entirely and in reality the sources are sorta trusted because only accounts who contribute sufficiently get to moderate. The tagging thing might be an example of a useful app where the metadata is formed from untrusted input but either way the example isn't quite on target.
As for the issue of metadata on the web it is a serious concern and search engines can't continue to just ignore it. As ajax and other dynamic presentation technologies become more and more common less and less of the content on the web will be encoded in simple HTML. Sure everyone who writes up some fancy ajax site and isn't an idiot will leave some html files around for google to index but this doesn't solve the problem. If everyone who visits the site sees something other than the info in the HTML then the HTML itself has become the metadata.
This problem is solvable since, as the success of google itself indicates, if the data is being used by the end user for some significant purpose the authors stay honest. The reason websites sometimes give bogus meta tags is because it doesn't affect the user's experience in the least. If we get something like the semantic web where the users are actually making use of the metadata then things are no different than they are now.
I hope this is what happens as the other option where google starts learning to crawl through ajax calls is much less pleasant. It was bad enough when all ruby actions were gets and google would trigger all sorts of things to happen in your app. It will be far worse if they are deliberately trigger all the JS scripts on your page in order to search effectively. And they *need* to be able to search effectively as that is the heart of why the web works.
Alternatively maybe google could start incentivizing accurate metadata descriptions of *other* pages (via outgoing links) by giving your web page a boost in the rankings. Thus, like wikipedia, perhaps enough good contributions would outweigh the bad ones.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
I don't know Hal Porter, but i agree with with him on the future of the Semantic Web. To me it's a next step in the Personal Computer revolution:
1 : with the pc, people can create powerfull content (illustrated by the success of Word Perfect),
2 : with the internet people can exchange those creations,
3 : with the Semantic Web, people can integrate those creations,
Integration is a very difficult process (for humans and non-human entities). But i'm sure it'll happen, simply because the value that of that process can be predicted.
The current state of internet and software is still very much in the above 'step 2'. This status quo is heavily influenced by big players: they are 'the reigning champions' and for them it isn't necessarily a smart move to take the next step. MS Office and many website CMSystems are still very proprietary and have good reasons to be like that. Google exists because the internet is so 'unsemantic'.
To take the third step in the PC revolution; the practical application of the principles behind the semantic web, we need CMsystems that make a clear distinction between creating content and publishing it.
For creation, authors use software that depend on RDF schema, OWL, etc, .
For publication, webmaster then apply the tools suitable for the publication channel: web browsers, minibrowsers, Google Earth, browsers for handicapped people, etc.
The semantic web at this moment is hampered because there aren't tools for webmasters to create content without knowing how to apply semantics easily. Smarter CMS software could take care of that. And with that smarter software it'll be easier for people to recognize and apply what makes the semantic web so interesting:
- the search for info process becomes much more aligned with the way people think about something, how they approach a problem.
- involving algorithmes that aren't limited to just one domain of data.
The semantic web is about letting machines get better grip on human data, so it can respond better to what people want.
Don't expect the general internet public to embrace the semantic web. Like it's foolish to expect the general citizins to be in favour of trade agreements that lower trading barriers. The internals of such agreements and how to benefit in the long run are very difficult to understand.
But, let the avarage citizin visit an electric appliance store and they'll buy the best, cheapest, mp3 player. And that player is the result of the openess and integration that comes from all those trade agreements.
On the one hand, people are trying to sell Web 2.0 as the "semantic web", on the other hand, AJAX is a big part of Web 2.0 apps and makes it harder and harder to actually get at other people's semantic data.
In the end, the whole thing is just marketing hype. Web 2.0 is just the haphazard collection of messy technologies people happen to be using on the web in 2006, and don't expect things to get any better in the next few years either: the W3C, Adobe, and Microsoft will see to it that things remain messy and complex, because, heck, if we actually made the technologies clean and simple, how would these companies and the swarm of overpaid and underqualified consultants make a living?
I think the tags are great; they let me get my whole article's worth of Slashdot groupthink in just a few seconds of skimming.
... "
For instance: "IT: Vista Designed to Make Malware Easy" is tagged "troll, fud, vista, notfud, microsoft". I mean -- that's it! That's the whole discussion right there. Point, spastic head-nodding, counterpoint, rehash of the original article. Thank you sir, may I have another.
I'm hopeful that on some future "Slashdot Mobile," they'll remove everything but the titles and tags, and display it as a feed. Maybe after that, they'll even get rid of the titles, so you can just see a constant stream of tags.
Forget a boot stamping on the face of humanity; that's the future for you: "microsoft fud notfud troll itsatrap google dupe evil internet hardware nvidia slashvertisement pigpile dupe sun esr fud ubuntu dupe microsoft dupe
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
"the contrarian viewpoint always looks insightful, regardless of it's merits."
Only to those who failed critical thinking in college.
"Slashdot, not being any great exception to the human condition, does what it can to reduce this, and in my eyes does about as decent job as you're going to have done when you let the mob moderate itself."
We wouldn't let the prisoners at a prison guard themselves? Why do we think it would work here? The solution has always been under our noses, however it costs money. Paid knowledgable (subject matter) moderators that have a stake in the success or failure of their efforts.
Great minds think alike. Basically Taco should seed the population with paid insightful posters. Lead by example and demonstrate the way it should be, instead of letting the mob mentality drag everyone down.
"Slashdot's moderation and meta-moderation offer one example of getting useful metadata in a non-trusted environment."
/. are offline. Suddenly I'm a troll!
Popularity rating != useful metadata.
Look, people agree with my post. Points for me! Awww, my opinion is unpopular. Modded down! Awww, all two of the rational mods on
The fact that posts marked "interesting" and "insightful" tend to have that appearance does NOT in any way mean or imply that they are the MOST interesting or insightful comments in a topic/thread. The fact that the mods here are the "me-too" type (why not? They play the game) doesn't help keep good posts up, and it definitely doesn't help good posts that are initially modded down for no good reason.
Point: No, Slashdot's moderation is NOT a good example of useful metadata. It's a great example of a non-trusted environment, though.
Google does not place much importance on the metadata already contained in HTML document headers for search ranking, because it cannot be trusted.
But the Search Engine Optimization Expert that our Marketing Director hired told her that META tags were crucial to good search engine placement! I spent a week tagging every page on our site with the exact meta values that the SEO Expert told us to use!!
You can't tell me that the SEO 'Expert' was just making stuff up knowing that there was no way to disprove his recommendations. If that's true, then maybe he was lying when he said that Google cares a lot about extraneous whitespace, too...!
This is one of the reasons my company's approach is to go into the actual content of the text and extract metadata ourselves. Available as a Firefox extension at http://sws.clearforest.com/Blog/?page_id=32 and as a full web service at http://sws.clearforest.com./ Give it a try - it's not the full semantic web - but it's a step in the right direction. Rather than relying on the site's owners to tag correctly - you can at least rely on the site's content.
"The system is reasonably good for fairly simple points and I think most people try to moderate fairly."
I wouldn't say even that.
Example:
Note the timestamp and moderation
Note the timestamp
Anyone who says there's no evidence simply isn't looking (intentionally I suspect). And let's not get into the nonsense that "Slow down Cowboy!" is.
stuff around the net using it.
Some people are still trying to make easy cash about tech-trends it seems. But, it became an old trick.
Read radical news here
I suppose it's a testament to the viral nature of the internet (or maybe just the sheepish nature of humanity), but "tech" writers/bloggers have certainly made this the hackneyed phrase of the day. Hell, I feel a little guilty using "viral."
And to Joe Clever, let me save you the keystrokes...
"Welcome to the Internet"
How the hell is this modded troll? /. has become what it has.
Our business' information architecture depends upon XSL transformations. Every point made by the parent is valid.
What a shame
"There is nothing nice about Steve Jobs and nothing evil about Bill Gates." - Chuck Peddle