i’m sorry, i just don’t know

Google has just applied for a patent (more on that in a bit) for Product View, a search system that lets you find text in images.  Could be incredibly cool for semantic webbites, if it weren’t for the whole patent thing.

WebGuild (a publication rife with lovers of Google) put out a pretty good list of cool things you can do with Google’s search.  Some of them are basic (using quotes around phrases), but I learned a few things:

• search for similar words by using ~ in front of the word
• search for specific file types e.g. “open education” filetype:ppt
• see the WebGuild article for more

Collective intelligence is generated as users engage with Web content. In a review for the book Programming for Collective Intelligence, Tim O’Reilly talks about understanding how users can help indicate the semantic meaning of Web content.

No one would characterize Google as a “user generated content” company, yet they are clearly at the very heart of Web 2.0. That’s why I prefer the phrase “harnessing collective intelligence” as the touchstone of the revolution. A link is user-generated content, but PageRank is a technique for extracting intelligence from that content. So is Flickr’s “interestingness” algorithm, or Amazon’s “people who bought this product also bought…”, Last.Fm’s algorithms for “similar artist radio”, ebay’s reputation system, and Google’s AdSense.

via jill

Richard MacManus provided a great summary of current trends of the Web.  He labeled the post “10 Future Trends” but these things are happening now.  Among these trends, and my rationale about why they are current, not future…

• Semantic Web-semantic markup is happening now.  Folksonomic tagging data provides machine-readable metadata that begins to fulfill the promises of the Semantic Web.
• Mobile- you can already purchase a .mobi extension for web apps built to run on mobile devices.  I want one just because it sounds cooler than .com or .org… definitely better than .biz (my least favorite extension)
• Personalization- widgets, greasemonkey scripts, and customizable stuff abounds these days.

I actually gasped while watching this. I know I’m a geek, but really, this is amazing.

Sea Dragon is a very cool data representation tool that allows for incredibly rich, dense data to be displayed on screen. Photosynth is a Microsoft Labs project. Pull these together with flickr and reveal the Semantic Web via images. Human semantic visual representations tied together… watch for the example of Notre Dame. Come on… be patient and watch the whole thing (minus the BMW ad at the end, unless you want to explain to Justin the subconcious meaning of water and powerful machines).

You know, when talking about the Semantic Web, I always have difficulty describing how relational, folksemantic data will change things for the average person. Maybe I’ll force-feed this video to everyone who doesn’t get it because of my inept attempts to explain it. Rah rah microsoft… maybe you aren’t the devil.