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It's been more than ten years since Tim Berners-Lee first spoke about the semantic web and computers indexing all web-based data. He said, "The day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The 'intelligent agents' people have touted for ages will finally materialize." Since then a handful of companies have attempted to tackle the issue of machine-based indexing and language interpretation. None of them are perfect. Below are 6 unique approaches to semantic data collection.
It's time to wrap up the week's web tech news, reviews and analysis on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we reviewed a super-hyped new search engine called Cuil, analysed the BT acquisition of web telephony platform Ribbit, looked at why Google bought video startup Omnisio, and investigated why popular Facebook app Scrabulous was shut down. On the trends side we discussed how web apps can work together, checked out Ray Ozzie's latest vision for Microsoft, gave you an overview of 'brandstreaming', and looked at alternatives to Google Knol.
My first post for ReadWriteWeb, just over 1 year ago, started with the premise that search was “game over”, that Google had won and the only space left was (re)search - what users do after the basic search.
None of the search start-ups since then has made me change my mind. None of the cool new user interface features or ways of expressing your search intentions matter one iota, if the core search proposition is not better from day one. Well, enter the latest contender: Blekko.
Cuil did it by the start-up text book - stealth mode to big launch and then massive PR. That gets the early adopters buzzing and then its off to the races. That works beautifully when the start-up is actually creating a new market. Twitter is a brilliant example (leaving out tech issues and monetization, Twitter has to be one of the best examples of rapid market adoption). However this does not work well when it is a mature market. It is hard to see why so experienced a team at Cuil would have made such a fundamental strategic error.
Unfortunately for Cuil, this could be a great opportunity for Yahoo BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) to shine.
An alternative search engine launched last night. It's called Cuil and, if you're a reader of tech blogs and/or the New York Times, you've no doubt been hammered with the news all day. We checked Cuil out and had a mixed user experience, as did most of the commenters in the post. So it's a pretty average search engine, although like many before it Cuil claims to be a Google competitor. But why did it get so much PR upon launch? The results showed that Cuil is no different to the hundreds of alternative search engines we track every day.
Universal McCann has released a new report on the impact of social media (such as blogs, social networks, online video) on the media landscape. It surveyed 17,000 Internet users worldwide in March 2008. The report found that social media, in particular blogs, are "becoming a more important part of global media consumption for internet users than some traditional media channels." The report also found that social media is a global phenomenon (29 countries were surveyed), although there are cultural differences in how people use it.
While you're waiting for The Great Debaters to come out on DVD in a couple of weeks, there are a few places where you can put in some debate practice online in the meantime. One of the great things about writing a blog is that it is a platform for voicing your opinions. But it can also be rewarding to hear from the opposing side, and one thing we do often on this blog is ask for your views (as we did last week on the topic of video comments, for example). Below are 5 sites that organize debates around any topic.
BooRah is a semantic and natural language processing aggregator of restaurant reviews. The service pulls in reviews from numerous review sites and a substantial list of restaurant review blogs, then analyzes the emotional tone of the reviews it finds. Good reviews ("Rahs") and bad reviews ("Boohs") are collected concerning food, service and ambience.
It's a small but interesting site and the basic premise here is something that could be expanded beyond restaurants alone, something the company says it intends to do. I like it a lot.
Not too long ago, we discussed the problem of conversation fragmentation in the blogosphere and how new services, like FriendFeed, as well as old services, like Digg, were providing places to have conversations about a blog post off of the blog's web site itself. While many saw this trend as a natural evolution, some, mainly content producers, were upset, now having to check several different places around the web to track conversations about their content. However, for Rob Diana (aka "Regular Geek"), the discussion around this issue served as an inspiration to build a service that can help: YackTrack.
Last week trendy micro-blogging service Twitter launched officially in Japan, after the company had "noticed a significant percent of Twitter usage consistently originating from Japan". At the time of launch, Joi Ito - an investor in Twitter - claimed that Japan usage "was nearly 30% of Twitter earlier on", but had dropped to "about 13% as the US user base has grown."
However, the signs are that Japanese Twitter usage is set to explode in popularity - Twitterlocal shows that Tokyo is currently by far the city with the most Twitter usage.
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