Can we just come to terms with our overpopulation problem? Admit it… this online world is becoming awfully crowded. And it’s not just the people you are connecting to, it is the content they are contributing.
13 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. There are over 184 million bloggers world-wide. 55% of active online users have uploaded and shared photos and 16% upload everyday. There is a lot of value in that content.. but there is also a lot of noise.
ReadWriteWeb recently begged the question, “Is Online Noise Really Bad For You?” Noise can lead to unexpected opportunities, personal growth, and training your brain for maximum recall. As much as I agree with them on the need for discovery, it seems like we are destined to become buried in the firehouse.
But what if there was a way to do both? What if the next generation of technology could enable both natural filters and a smarter way to discover new content?
Over the next week, I am going to be looking at how the next generation web will change the way you connect, discover, and share with the social online world. I’m also going to be looking at how this movement is going to make marketing more relevant and measurable.

That is where the Semantic Web can come to the rescue. The smarter the technology behind the web, the more the machine understands the content it is bringing you, the more it can make intelligent choices based on what it knows about you, your behavior, and your needs.
Maybe that sounds a little too creepy, but the Google Algorithm is already making judgments based on pure keywords. The classic example goes that it doesn’t know the difference between “Paris Hilton” and a “Hilton in Paris”. Your results are already being filtered, just not by much of anything useful.
THREE PATHS TOWARD RELEVANT DISCOVERY
One of the people I met at Web 3.0 was Markus Linder, who has been working on a technology called SmartAssistant. Although you’d really have to benefit from seeing them demo, the basic idea is using simple questions to help the user get matched up to an appropriate product. By asking what type of shows someone watches and the distance they sit away from the television, the possible TV sets for their home are ranked with explanations as to why it would be the best match.
The next interesting semantic start-up I wanted to mention is BooRah. Now I absolutely love Yelp, Yelp is great, but do I really need to sit there and read every single review. BooRah is RottenTomatoes meets ZAGAT. It takes a large pull of reviews from Yahoo, CitySearch, Yelp, etc. and aggregates them smartly into a single score and a single consensus.
Finally, there is Headup, a social browsing extension for Firefox. Headup integrates with data from Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm, and Friendfeed and then cross-references the data with your browsing experience. So as you browse, the technology is working behind the scenes to scan each page and point out anything that might be related to your world: your friends, your interests, your town. For example, it will could provide you with images and videos that are geo-tagged with the same location you are at, list the bands or dj’s your friends are interested in, and let you know about events in your area.
In each of these cases, the semantic technology is enabling, not hindering, the discovery process. It’s getting you to discover more relevant things and extract you from the noise.
For the overloaded Boomers and the busy Gen Xers, these technologies will make the online social experience less intimidating and more worthy of their time. For the Gen Y group, they can handle the overload, they can handle the 8 windows open at all times, but they are constantly searching for the content that will inspire their attention, the content to get passionate about. For them, this will bring it front and center.
Now, I won’t discount ReadWriteWeb’s opinion completely. I don’t expect Powerset to replace Google any time soon. Just look at the results of this search:
“what movie did Terry Gilliam direct” (Google) (Powerset)
Powerset gives me exactly the information I am looking for… data notes beautifully arranged on the page. There are box cover pictures, it clearly understands the question I am asking. Google on the other hand is overrun with data noise. The page is covered in news items and rumors. But wait, is Terry Gilliam really going to direct Harry Potter 6? Well… that’s old and not true, but at least it got be digging for a few minutes. Distraction maybe, entertainment yes.
The point is that there will always be a place for noise, there is no denying that. But isn’t it about time that we had some music?
Tomorrow, let’s look at the privacy concerns with all this openness. And for advertisers, how is this movement is going solve the problems of marketing relevance and social media measurement?
Marta Strickland