Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

There is a lot of energy being put forth right now into the Semantic Web, making the web more readable for machines, instead of just humans. Rightly so, a smarter web in the end means a better user experience.

The idea is simple... for the search tools to be able to identify the not so subtle difference between something like "Paris Hilton" and a "Hilton in Paris". Now this could be determined by the format of the information (RDF), which would hold different attributes for a person (age, hair color) than a hotel (location, price). However, others have theorized that user search history, like whether you have recently looked up gossip stories vs Parisian restaurants, might soon come into play.

So, with that in mind, if these "expert systems" are really going to be taking a look into how we interact with the web and bring us news, content, and search results based on their interpretation of our tastes... is it cool or creepy?

Examples:
Amazon "The Page You Made" - Cool
Pandora - Very cool
Netflix "Our Best Guess" - Just slightly creepy
Google Search Goes AI - Full out sci-fi creepy

An exceptional experience in "expert systems" is still forthcoming.  And while I am all for a more intuitively organized web, I still would like to believe we are pretty far off from having machines understand the subtlety of things like taste in movies.  Does Netflix really understand my appreciation for things that are so bad they are good?  Doubtful. 

Marta Strickland