A Heads-up about What is Changing in the Web that May Catch You by Surprise
On June 17, Computerworld.com declared the Web has hit Critical Mass for the dawn of the “Semantic” (or “Meaning-based”) Web. In other words, the big new thing online will be “harvesting” based on the meaning of the information instead of the words used to describe it.
What you’ll need to think about:
- More extensive technical mashups of existing applications like Twitter and Facebook, with an intentional focus on specific business goals or resource/research projects.
- The bloom of MicroFormats for presenting information on your Web site – anything that can be tagged with a date/location coordinates/company name/personal name should be. These microformats will be embedded within your regular page, not in the regular META tags.
What you’ll see:
Let’s say you’re reading an article about bird watching, and a bird is spotted at “X location.” If the site used a microformat to describe the location, then you (the site visitor) would be able to do the following:
- Plot the location on an online map (like Google Maps)
- Export the location to your Phone/GPS device to go to the place yourself.
- You could also index the location for a historical archive of where that bird appears.
- Post the info on any of your Web presences – your site, Facebook, Twitter, or what have you.
What you should be doing:
- Develop resources for your customers that take advantage of this new “meanings based” information stream that can be harvested with easy-to-build scanning technologies
- Think about ways to tag your products or services into MicroFormats
- Start thinking about the Web in a whole new way
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Tags: digital communications, Facebook, Google Maps, GPS, meaning-based web, Online information harvesting, Twitter, web presence