1. There are presently 500,000,000 regular Facebook users. Meaning, actively using at least 3 times a week.  (An average Facebook user has 130 “Friends”).

2. 50% of active users log-on to Facebook in any given day.

3. 3,500 NEW people join Facebook every day.

4. As of March of this year (2010), Facebook has displaced Google as the number one first point of destination  for all internet users, everywhere.

5. People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook

Taking into account that nothing is actually bought or sold on Facebook and that the only content to FB is what the users bring to the table themselves, this is an astoudingly incomparable phenomenon:

No one swaps services or goods.

No one buys or sells anything.

Advertising and marketing is shunned by the users and only brings FB a measly billion $ in revenue a year (compared to Google that is, measly).

So the question to answer is that given the facts above, what are these 500,000,000 (and counting), users bloody doing on Facebook every day ?!?

What are we all doing regularly, that makes FB bigger and busier than eBay and Amazon combined?

How does it work, first of all?

DaVinci

Facebook users are given a template in which to construct their identities.  They build their ideas of their identities (and first encounter the very idea of Identity), with an expression of preferences, for music, film, books read, activities and hobbies.   They repeat favourite quotations, jokes, riddles and games.

And then they exchange those facets of their identity that have value with others who  share the same or overlapping aspects of their ideas of who they are.  FB users trade and share or rather transact, values.  The buzz is in the recognition, the feeling of commonality and consensus while at the same time recommending and referring from personal experience.

FB users are by and large self-occupied and self-indulgent but they’re also very creative and expressive of opinions, educated or otherwise.

So, what the hell are all those people doing on Facebook?

Creating, refining, learning, exchanging and reacting to Identity.

There is nothing in FB but for the assets that are brought there and yet the compulsion to share and exchange tastes, preferences, favourites, vacation pics, babble and extraordinary events with others is highly charged.  FB is bigger and more used than either eBay or Amazon and yet no one buys, sells or trades anything but who they are.

The phenomenon represented by Facebook and Twitter (as well as Identica, FriendFeed, LinkedIn and a dozen others) may well represent the single biggest threat to global consumerist capitalism the world has ever seen.  Sure, people seek peer to peer endorsements of what they should buy, eat, watch or steal; but the significant amount of time and effort being dedicated to merely exchanging ideas, points of view and opinions about those things greatly surpasses the time and effort dedicated to acquiring those things.  FB is about acquisition, but what is being acquired is information about the tastes, preferences and facets of others.

The present day lack of trust (much less, faith) in traditional authority, traditional governance or traditional sources of information  is being largely filled by the kind of peer to peer consensus and affirmation of value that stands outside of the market place.

I believe that we are standing at the nexus of a radical change in the very fabric of human transaction.

Nothing new is being exchanged, but the method and value of that exchange is becoming very rapidly, radically different.

In a non politically ideological, but overt way people (us),  in their (our) 100s of millions, are persuading themselves and others that the commodity yardstick of value has reached its natural end.

Half a billion people (and counting), are dedicating more of their time and effort to realising more primary human values than can be exemplified by financial gain or loss.

Half a billion people are recalling what the original values were that the markets feigned to emulate.

Half a billion people would rather share their family pictures with distantly recalled school friends and ex lovers than buy something new.

Half a billion people are remembering what it is to be more than a buyer, a seller or a broker.

Half a billion people may be wrong but you better watch what they’re doing.

The Golden Road to Golden Unity

The new market place of ‘Values’ has a tangible in put and out put.

The social internet permits the instant and facile proximity of individuals to intersect based on interest and principle.

Political causes are being championed, critiqued, refined and acted upon.

Petitions are being circulated and every interest can now be a special interest, if enough accumulation of support occurs.

In the same way that the Linked Data Movement represents a radical rethinking of the very concept of governance emerging from the event horizon, Social Media is steadily redefining the nature of human economics.  What exactly are we trading, buying, selling, brokering, investing in and speculating on?

Well, ourselves of course: Our Very Identities.

This is not so much progress as a return to origin.  If Life itself is the source of “value”, then how we define our lives dictates the nature of what we value and what we transact with others.

Move over neo-liberal, free marketeers, the time is coming when the commodity will define the market and the main commodity we have to barter, sell, buy otherwise transact is the rarest and most unique of ALL commodities; in fact it is priceless (without price), because it is in fact, Who We Are.  Who it is that defines what’s worth transacting in the first place.

Identity is the new Killer App.

Can I Get £50K a Year for Setting Up a Corporate Twitter Account?

If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!

On the same line, no less!

Ever since Google CEO Carl Schmidt admitted that Google development lab was taking on board semantic web development by gearing their search algorithms to scan RDFa triplets and microformat data, we predicted that the days of traditional SEO (e.g. spamming meta tags, image tags and title tags) were over.

Welcome to the new criteria for optimising your web data (not just the location of your data, but ACTUAL content) to make your data more find-able.

Search Engine Optimism (dig intended) is yesterday’s news and has paid certain snake oil, uh, SEO experts loads of money for effectively maintaining the status quo of web architecture i.e. haystack SERPS, irrelevant results to queries, duplicate content obstacles, and the never ending Red Queen’s Race of perpetual optimising and link building strategies.

SEOs are like lawyers who have repeat offenders as clients.

Rather than trying to sort out their clients to keep them out of trouble; SEOs prosper by claiming to hold the keys to Google ranking for their clients for which they charge and charge and  charge, utilising interpretations of web stats to fulfil their own prophecy.

Good for the law business, bad for society.

But that was then, this is now.

And now is about linking data  from ones own small patch of the web, dipping into the stream of semantic optimisation.  Making your data more readily accessible, more useful, more efficiently relevant to queries, and thus more find-able.

E.M. Forster’s famous adage   “Only connect.”  has never been more timely or relevant.  Only connect, indeed; only connect your data to the rest of the world.  By linking your data clusters, relevantly, meaningfully, Semantically, you are improving not just your neighbourhood but the fabric of the web itself.  You are making it easier for your customers, visitors, travelers, browsers and accidental tourists to find your data and hold their attention.

Semantic/Linked has never guaranteed an ROI except to indicate the losses if you don’t invest in your data architecture

Now Google has come on board in a big way with their own branded Rich Snippets, the rest of the Semantic toolbox is finally getting the attention, application and utilization it merits.  Necessity, the mother of invention has given birth again after a 14 year labor.

The Google Semantics tool helps to get synonyms  for  keywords during your search on Google  which helps for better SEO using Google own Synonyms also referred as Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is vital to Search Engine Optimisation and any web writing.

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else — if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

If you’re going to even try and win the race, you better start running; you web investment is already falling behind.

Tim Burton

The Future of Everything in Manchester, Not the North but the Centre of Britain

Events that have overtaken accounts include the city-wide Manchester Futureverything conferences and installations that underlined the optimism of the Linked Data movement and the Semantic Web.  It was a Woodstock of Semantics, with star appearances,  incredible speaking performances and spectacles of knowledge.  (Along with the requisite mud, broken loos and brown acid).

Linked Data in Practical Application

Iris Cursor Control

The image to the left is from the installation featuring technical innovations such as a laser that responds to eye movements connected to the cursor on a computer screen. The image on the right is an example of how Local Authorities are utilising Linked Data and semantically enhanced data to better access and cross reference stats.

The optimism and enthusiasm on display for the Semantic Web and it’s sub category (and jargon refinement), Linked Data was infectious.

Dame Wendy Hall, TBL’s right hand on the development of html and w3, was the key note speaker and pragmatically explained how Semantically enhanced data, once more widely adopted would redefine the very notion of governance.  She recounted an anecdote about how in the early days w3 stood for World-Wide-Wait given the download speed of html pages.

Professor Nigel Shadbolt, Semantic Evangelist No. 2  (TBL is No. 1; I am number 6), was cheerleading Gordon Brown’s luncheon with TBL in which he had dedicated a £30 million grant to establish the Web Science Institute in Southampton and Oxford dedicated to establishing a global standard for data publishing and best practice on the web.  This was incredible news as in contrast to the US commercial (Google) model, a custodianship of the w3 as an international public utility would put Britain at the centre of web excellence; effectively creating  an OED (Oxford English Dictionary) of the web.  The indirect revenue benefits of utilising brand Britain as a persuasive arbitrator of standard, practice and improvement for the web were mind boggling.  Not to mention that the web desperately needs a functioning consensus of architecture standards.

Of course  this was before the change of government in the UK and one of the first victims of the new coalition’s (and old Thatcherite) slash and burn economic agenda was the elimination of the £30 million budget for the Web Science Institute (that would have granted internationally recognised degrees!).    The English penchant for leading innovation up to the brink of success and then dropping the ball at the last minute is not only reflected in their  football.

But the real shining light of the Semantic speakers was Professor Carol Grodin of Manchester University who spearheaded a semantic production team department of over 50 graduate students and developers actively  enhancing data for directgov.co.uk as well as the BBC.  She is literally at the forefront, on the ground and running.  Her address and after lecture personal chat, reflected a world weary cynacism when it came to addressing the private sector’s reticence to pick up the Semantic gauntlet.  She admitted that TBL and the academics hadn’t understood how to market the enhancement and told us that she had left the word Semantic behind (except amongst the initiated) and how just referring to “Linking Data so it can be found more easily by machines and people”.  Taking on board Oxford SEO and Oxford Semantic’s trails and tribulations presenting semantic solutions, Grodin was kind enough to invite us on a tour of her department.  Her parting shot was “Don’t give up, quality will prevail; just imagine what the web would be like if TBL had been Bill Gates”!  After a spontaneous shudder at the thought, we bid her adieu.

Contact Theatre, Manchester University

It was rewarding to see a spectrum of professionals and academics coming together to discuss and debate the future direction and imminent consequences of what is now for public consumption referred to as Linked Data, or Open Knowledge.  Unfortunately, we are still yet to see that enthusiasm reflected in the short term thinking of most digital agencies in the UK.  Even Talis, the self -proclaimed Semantic developer and hosting company appears to be stuck within its own conversation with itself and apparently unwilling (or unable) to take  innovations to markets beyond the library sector.   We hope that this will soon change as this emerging movement needs commercial organisations with the track record and the courage to push the Linked Data agenda forwards into the market place. Talis is in a prime position to further that aim.

• The Linked Web is a Semantically Structured web that opens up siloed databases
• The Open Data Movement is transforming the direct gov site of government information that makes the Freedom of Information a tangible reality.
• Tim Bern-Lee, the new British digital Czar is orchestrating a £30 million pound Semantic enhancement of government data for the benefit of access and relevance.
• Awareness: Technologies  are  collecting data at a stupefyingly increasing rate about people, places, products, processes.
• Analysis: Businesses are requiring more discerning intelligence and analytics software that apply rules to the data being collected in order to make effective use of it.
• Alternatives: These rules of structure  assess whether certain conditions are then triggered.
• Actions: This is the specified outcome triggered through all the previous steps.
• Auditability: The ability to use all of the above to add more intelligence to an application or system over time.

It all comes down to this: The future of computing is less about what we as humans do with technology. It’s about what technology does for us automatically, guided but unseen by us.

This was down to a couple of factors beyond our control.

Number One Reason: The Semantic Web movement has taken several rather unpredictable turns in the past 6 months which have in some ways made the original premise and basis of this blog redundant.  Primarily Google’s adoption of RDF and micro format protocols in their Rich Snippets development platform which has set a common template for meta data semantic enhancements.  But Tim Berner Lee’s  Open Data (or Linked Data) initiative has encompassed and overtaken the Semantic Web as the primary objective for integrating government data in the UK.  This goes well beyond the predictions that have been made on this blog regarding structured data and its effectiveness in providing better data architecture.  ”By 2020, the semantic web envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee and his allies will have been achieved to a significant degree and have clearly made a difference to average internet users.” according to Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.

So the Semantic web has arrived in the public sector even though it’s enterprise applications and private sector relevance is still meeting with stiff scepticism and overtly unfathoming disbelief.   We will be attempting in the blogs that follow to underline some of the new definitions of Linked Data,  Open Enterprise Data and the Open Data Movement that has shifted the goal posts on Semantic Search.

Our main blog contributor has been involved in senior executive meetings with leading Digital Agencies from London to Manchester (including Mindshare, FastUK, RedWeb and Amaze)who on a ground level understood the importance of Semantic Search for prioritising relevant data and optimising websites; however, when it came to actually applying a commercial model to the development of enhancement service products, fell well short in imagining the significance of impending changes.   The old business models of killer applications, new coding languages or a Search Engine product quickly became stumbling blocks for otherwise astute business minds to get a handle on how Semantic was going to change the web and what it meant in terms of offering better digital services.

Much time has been devoted to persuasion and presentation when the fact remains that only the actual change is ever going to convince the commercial world of its importance.  Being a pioneer often means being the bloke at the end of the trail with an arrow sticking out of his back.  In the  case of the Semantic web and Linked Data, it means turning to the government funded public sector and academia that are less wedded to ROI models as they are to improving the playing field.  We expect one of the more innovative and adventurous agencies will shortly let their developers and project managers out of the closet and exhort the virtues of making data more accessible, better structured and linked to their clients.  But until a digital account manager can show his customer a pertinent URI ranking higher than a URL on Google,  getting them to cover the cost of enhancement is going to be a hard one.

Which brings us to Number Two Reason for the delays in this blog:  the Recession.  Expenditures have been way down as the country tightened its belt and down sized.  The University of Oxford placed a hold on all third party IT contracts in the Autumn of last year and many Oxford based publishers and NGO’s found themselves tottering on bottom lines rather than exploring new information architectures.

But  Number Three Reason had the biggest impact on halting our progress and that was down to our main contributor succumbing to a health issue that caused a short term incapacity.  He had survived a near fatal automobile accident in Manchester in 2007 as a passenger in a digital agency (PHP Media), CEO’s sportscar  which had left him with a shattered femur and 18 metal pins holding his hip together.  This had held things together literally for two years until the wear and tear of his socket and joint caused the hip to collapse.  After several months of  debilitating pain, he was able to undergo a complete hip replacement at the Nuffield Orthopaedic  Centre in Oxford and has now made a full recovery.

We trust that his return to regular contributions will bring us all up to date with news and information on Semantic web and Open Data developments.  The concept of open data is fast gaining acceptance and is all set to cross a critical mass. It has assumed the shape of a movement and has given rise to an open-data ecosystem that consists of open data publishers, software developers, data analysis tools, researchers and end-users. The open data movement certainly facilitates the availability of a wide variety of data on your fingertips.

“

The  Semantic Web Gang we are joined by Brand Niemann of the United States’ Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for a discussion of efforts to apply semantic technologies to Government data in the USA and elsewhere.  Listen to the podcast.

“Semantic web technology” is being used to reconnect Colombians displaced in the country’s civil conflict.

“The displaced population in Colombia is the most vulnerable because their fundamental rights are massively violated,” Juan Sequeda, who works on the project, told the BBC World Service’s Digital Planet programme.

“Their [physical] social networks are weakened.”

The international team aim to use smart technology to allow people to search currently incompatible databases of missing persons.  Often families are split up in the process. When this happens, they are told to register their details on a national database - known as the unique registry of displaced persons - set up by the Colombian government.

However, other registries have been set up by NGO groups - such as the Red Cross - meaning the displaced millions are spread over several databases.

Frustratingly for those who have lost connection with their families, these databases don’t “talk” to each other or share information.

Researchers aim to solve this problem by creating a “semantic knowledge layer”, which will link crucial information (such as names, addresses, age, etc.) across all the databases.

Semantic technology is seen by some as the next step for the world wide web, as it allows a much richer understanding of huge data sets.

In Colombia, this should mean that searching for specific people will be more effective and allow people to ask complex queries such as “how many cousins do I have in Bogota?”.

“It’s all about how you integrate data,” said Mr Sequeda.

Ivan Herman

development activity. He talks about how in the past year all the primary components of the semantic web have come into place for developing new applications. Linked Data, Microformats, OWL, RDF, RDFa, SPARQL have all been established now as universal formats for linking data.  He mentions that the SPARQL workgroup at w3c has continued working to refine the query language for retrieving semantic search information.   He discusses the development of OWL 2 which addresses many of the shortcomings of OWL 1.  He explains the the RDF framework as a means of linking open data on the web as a necessary evolution of web published data along the road to achieving a semantic web.   “Whether or not you say semantic web or web of data is just a matter of terminology”.

Herman highlights how the Health science and pharmaceutical industries and have been the quickest to experiment with and deploy semantic applications.  There have always been large public databases on medical and biological information and they have been motivated  early on, in integrating these divergent databases through linked data formats like RDF.

Some of the core w3c work groups involved in refining the semantic web components can be found at the w3c site including:

Semantic Web Coordination Group

The Semantic Web Coordination Group is tasked to provide a forum for managing the interrelationships and interdependencies among groups focusing on standards and technologies that relate to this goals of the Semantic Web Activity. This group is designed to coordinate, facilitate and (where possible) help shape the efforts of other related groups to avoid duplication of effort and fragmentation of the Semantic Web by way of incompatible standards and technologies.

Rules Interchange Format Working Group

This Working Group is chartered to produce a core rule language plus extensions which together allow rules to be translated between rule languages and thus transferred between rule systems. The Working Group will have to balance the needs of a community diverse including Business Rules and Semantic users Web specifying extensions for which it can articulate a consensus design and which are sufficiently motivated by use cases.

OWL Working Group

The mission of the OWL Working Group, is to produce a W3C Recommendation that refines and extends the 2004 version of OWL. The proposed extensions are a small set that: have been identified by users as widely needed, and have been identified by tool implementers as reasonable and feasible extensions to current tools.

SPARQL Working Group

Formerly known as RDF Data Access Working Group, it developed the SPARQL Query Language recommendation published in January 2008. The group is currently chartered to make small updates to the SPARQL specification that have been identified as users and implementers as feasible and useful extensions.

Semantic Web Deployment Working Group

The mission of this Working Group is to provide guidance in the form of W3C Technical Reports on issues of practical RDF development and deployment practices in the areas of publishing vocabularies, OWL usage, and integrating RDF with HTML documents.

This group is also responsible for the development of the RDFa and SKOS specifications.

Semantic Web Interest Group

The Semantic Web Interest Group is a forum for W3C Members and non-Members to discuss innovative applications of the Semantic Web. The Interest Group also initiates discussion on potential future work items related to enabling technologies that support the Semantic Web, and the relationship of that work to other activities of W3C and to the broader social and legal context in which the Web is situated.

Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group

The Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group is designed to improve collaboration, research and development, and innovation adoption in the health care and life science industries. Aiding decision-making in clinical research, Semantic Web technologies will bridge many forms of biological and medical information across institutions.