experience matters

Richard Tseng | Critical Mass Toronto

There’s an old statistic my dad used to say to me. “The Saturday edition of the Toronto Star contains more knowledge than a person living in the 16^th Century got in their entire lifetime.” It made no sense to me why anyone would want this much information. The funnies were about the only section useful to my sixth-grade self. Everything else just seemed to get in the way.

Today you can access the Saturday editions of every major newspaper in the world online. You can also get near-instantaneous Wikipedia entries, tweets, blogs, RSS updates, and tons more, all of which makes it even harder to separate information you want from information you don’t. Enter Web 3.0, a.k.a. Semantic Web.

Web info overload and why Web 3.0

This iteration of the web promises to better serve users with a smarter search system. In addition to 2.0’s content creation and 1.0’s system of content delivery, 3.0 aims to manage content as well.

What does Semantic Web mean?

The first version of the web was a means of delivering documents online through methods of download and display. The second, web 2.0, allowed users to generate their own content through tools such as blogger and youtube, flickr and myspace. 3.0 aims to have the web intelligently filter content for users.

One way of achieving this is OWL (Web Ontology Language), a language that both computers and laymen can easily understand. Another is through a universal sharing, linking and describing service such as XDI. Both allow computers to pick up on the context of what’s posted and categorize accordingly.

In this way, the results you get would be specific not so much to the terms you enter, but what you intend to find. The software wouldn’t just give you links that mention the term you’re searching for. It would also figure out why you’re searching for that term and rank results based on what you mean. Basically, it’s semantics.

A web without marketers?

When the web first began, it was possible for users to manually filter out the pages they didn’t intend to find. There would only be a few hundred relevant mentions and perhaps a dozen that were most pertinent. The rest you opened and closed relatively quickly or learned to avoid.

Today, despite the best attempts of aggregators, SEO, Google Ads, and other sorting techniques, advertisers frequently show up inappropriately or worse, don’t show up at all when they should.

The semantic web would help us avoid these problems. Ideally it would allow us to speak solely to those we targeted. With added filtration, we would also be able to author messages that were more target-specific. The web will get more personalized, and so will clients’ abilities to serve customers.

On the other hand, this could be the end of non-consensual advertising altogether. Computers that can return exactly what you want can also filter out everything you don’t. The software could be smart enough to know that even if the ad in question matches the users’ request exactly, because the user also requested not to receive any advertising, the ad is never seen. In effect, a safe search for ads.

A web without privacy?

Another aspect of a personalized, intelligent web is the erosion of anonymity. Users’ preferences could be stored online rather than in their computers as they increasingly access the net through multiple platforms and devices. We are already starting to see this. Email is slowly becoming the standard sign-up ID and multiple accounts are being merged (i.e. using facebook to blog, email or access flickr, etc.).

But in order for Web 3.0 to understand user intentions, it will need to glean more and more specific information from individual users. As the resulting ethical concerns become even more hotly debated, digital marketers will need to recognize the implications. For example, some people accept that their brands know everything about them while others want to believe in anonymity. For brands, recognizing these preferences and behaving accordingly will be crucial to whether they can retain customers.

Will it happen?
Whether all of the web can go semantic is up for debate. Computers have not historically been good at dealing with vagueness. Logic fails when confronted with inconsistencies. Computers accept nearly all human input as fact even though humans don’t always input the truth. Content in the form of images and videos are still not automatically recognizable to computers without human tagging. While a new version of the web is in the works, how long it will take to get up and running is pure conjecture.

Being ahead of the upgrade

Still, there are things we can do now to pave the way for a semantic web. As with much of interactive, Web 3.0 is primarily about anticipating people’s needs. By designing smarter sites that are both intuitive and comprehensible, we’ll stay relevant with the advent of smarter search. By providing value, creating services and delivering ads which users can opt into or out of with ease, we prevent pushback from privacy-conscious consumers.

Clay Shirky's newspaper would do nothing but aggregate

With content more plentiful and easily produced than ever, aggregation and delivery could actually become a more valuable service than production. Clay Shirky’s ideal newspaper has no original content whatsoever. We should remember this for clients who still think going viral is a matter of aping what’s hot on YouTube right now. If we do create content, keeping it 100% worthwhile, interesting and relevant will keep us from being filtered out of existence.

Summing up

We’ve gone from hard drive capacities smaller than a single comic panel to computer networks larger than our own memories. Web 3.0 is trying to help us retain only what we want to know. Aside from having far-reaching cultural and ethical consequences, it will also mean that, more than ever, brands have to be worth engaging with. We have to ensure our messages stay in the need-to-know. For soon clutter will not only be ignored, it won’t be seen at all. There may be more in the Saturday Star than in a Renaissance man’s head. But that’s not to say he’d find any of it worth reading.

Richard is a Copywriter in the CM Toronto office.