derek abdinor

The Semantic Web (Web 3.0 to some) is difficult to implement, scientists and linguists are not agreed on the methodology, and technical experts have thus far been implementing it poorly. There are no answers, and for the moment, the debate belongs in academia.

That’s the gist of this piece. And this whinge too.

This is annoying. A semantic web, a context-relevant metadata web is tangibly near, look at what we have:

1. converted tag soups to xhtml in a few years and general adherence to standards
2. got the structure-content-design thing bundled into all current web software
3. screen-scrapers
   
4. user-tagging of content
5. context-based translation
6. metadata about metadata about metadata
7. other browser software that can intelligently order content
8. RDF
9. Mash ups, with tagging to make not only sense of it, but to intertextualise
   

In my field, investor relations, analysts and market investors thrive on data to make analysis, and not only mealy-mouthed press releases but actual figures and bottom lines. This is used for analysis and directly impacts on the market and other business decisions.

Problems with comparing figures from different accounting jurisdictions (countries) skew analysis. That’s when XBRL was proposed. Based on XML, it tags line items within context and with metadata. Implementation is problematic and not currently well-implemented, but it’s a solution with buy-in and with a schematic. I contrast this market-oriented approach with the academic one purposely.

I feel the community won’t accept this. If anything, you can see by that list of technologies that they are crying out for someone to them all together, perhaps create a natural language sequence and an API or two.

In the spirit of the 90s, if your HTML is not pushing the limits, we’ll create messy HTML that will. If business wants a v3.0 with the benefits of refined metadata, business will get a v3.0. The W3C is about standards, they need to wrest this issue from the academics and sandbox it for the developers who are defining the web anew. Daily.

Facebook is sweeping the world with a sort of frenzy usually reserved for cute robotic toys offloaded onto the Japanese teen market. We all have fun on it, those with addictive personalities flirt with an obsession slightly less consumptive than meth.

I was always perplexed about 2 questions in the profile: what is your religion, and what are your political views? This coming in the same month as the VT shootings in a country where the USA PATRIOT Act 2002 (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) allows the govt to check databases of any library, website or other public office. It would be ingenous. Osama can’t be found with thousands of troops, but by tracking 6 degrees from a pimply-faced frat kid he’ll be found on FB.
Seriously though, the money behind FB is from data mining companies and the CIA’s shadowy “Information Awareness Office“. This would give “social networking” a bit of a Stasi-Orwellian flavour.

A very interesting clip on the popular website Facebook. Includes who has money in it, its origins (including US government offices) and their privacy policies and terms of agreement which state they can use and profit from any of the information you post on the site. Check it out! Original source: http://www.albumoftheday.com/facebook

In a seminal article recently released, the H1 was: “Why 1% of search market share is worth over $1 Billion”. Further actuarial information followed which is of great importance for SEO. The big numbers always tend to to lose me, but commentary to the article by Jakob Nielsen, made things hit home, he analysed:

The value per page view on a content site tends to be about 0.1 cents. Thus, pointing people to content is more than 100 times as profitable as actually writing that content.

In days of halycon yore (1999), some sage said in a Business 2.0 article something along the lines of:

the people who made money during the Yukon Gold Rush in the 19th century and who are still represented today were not the diggers or panners of gold, but the people who sold them the shovels, revolvers, coaches, clothing

So a single search in the US is worth 12 cents. In retrospect, did Dewey (of library cataloging fame) ever make 12 cents from his indexing system?

27 seems to be the number of ideas and answers to long-nurtured questions one hears/comes up with/is set right on/seeks clarification on. Thanks organisers.

Vinny Lingham wore his VC hat and threw down the gauntlet to Enterprise 2.0 aspirants: build it, we will come. He also introduced the new features of SynthaSite 2.0: basically Dreamweaver as a web app, for web 2.0 apps, for coders and code eschewers We’re picturing the day LAMP developers will refer to a SPUM- built site: SynthaSite, PHP, Ubuntu, MySQL.

Erik Hersman of Zungu spoke about Mobile opportunities in Africa. See earlier post on W3C and Mobile Web Initiative or see here, more relevant now with Southern Africa’s own W3C chapter. Really, if you’re an early adopter or pioneer-type, this is where you re staking pegs into rich, virgin soil.

Colin Daniels demystified Bullardgate. Pity, I was waiting for the Oliver Stone movie to come out. Bullard (Kevin Spacy); Bloggers (check your blogroll). Told us more about “The Times” launch, allows me to paraphrase Carlyle: “Close thy Nova, open thy Times”.

As for skyrove: wow. Future very bright, massive marketing opps but chips for scare tactics

Facebook has opened up its platform for extensible development by the community, so expect custom widgets on par with MySpace, but I believe, with far, far more reach.

We are seeing companies prefer open source solutions (Drupal, Joomla) over proprietary crap. Why? Rather have 300 000 developers behind your product than 5. Another thing is that prop software is so difficult to port or extend, you have to imagineer yourself into the original guys mind, and really: do you want to?

this is a brilliant move by facebook. Software guys may code widgets for FireFox and Yahoo!, Drupal and even PHP to up their geek credits, but what if you can code on facebook and impress ALL your friends? For the college crowd that make up the numbers at FB, these guys will be up all night and facebook is going to be the next public space (ww2?)

Picked up this article via IR magazine. In summary:

• IROs are beginning to monitor blogs about their companies
• Many blogs have far more credibility than chat rooms ever did
• Influential bloggers can affect reputation and even stock price
• Your disclosure policy should cover comments posted on blogs

I created a blog for Barloworld in 2006, but with all the gatekeeping built in it never engendered spontaneous discussion and debate as one would hope for. There is a space for it, as I learnt today, even in venture capitalism, more about that later…

Went to the launch of this auspicious organisation and its Southern African presence at the Meraka Institute, CSIR on Monday 14 May. The W3C have been credited with “inventing” the internet (along with William Gibson, Al Gore and Bill Gates) but actually their Director is Tim Berners-Lee, of “inventing the World Wide Web” fame. Essentially they’re saw what the browser wars of 97-99 were doing and decided a standards body was necessary, sort of self-appointed marshals of the Wild West.

Bragging rights include the best CSS2 reference for much of the early 2000′s, starting RDF, arbitrating RSS-Atom, extending the extensible Markup Languages. Tim, feeling slightly underachiev-ish, having created the web, decided to make sense of this all and has begun the Semantic Web project. Look at this, as well as the Mobile Web Initiative which Meraka is also doing good work towards.

Incredible: PageRank indicates a 10/10 for W3c.org, first I’ve ever seen!!!

SMS and email questions to +00944858586, email to investec@investoreports.com or use the question facility below.

Questions will be answered at the end of the presentation, time permitting. Management’s responses will also be available on this website within 48 hours of the presentation. Please note that questions will be moderated.

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Overview of the briefing

Operating fundamentals across the group have continued the trends seen in the first half and as reported at the interim results announcement on 16 November 2006.