Web 3.0 News & Articles

With the planned Fall 2009 release of a feature-rich up-grade to its Text Mining Engine (TME), Nstein Technologies (news, site) is taking semantic metadata firmly into the world of Web 3.0.

For anyone that is not aware already, Nstein is a global specialist provider of solutions in the online media and web publishing world. TME 5.0, the company says, will include enhancements to linguistic abilities, Web 3.0 compliance and a number of new tools that will give users greater control over semantic metadata.

Both e-mail and instant messaging are pretty basic ideas. Originally designed back in the ‘60s, the two electronic earth-shakers were made to replace what we had back then: the telephone and snail mail.

Consider what we have now: blogs, wikis, collaborative documents, etc. Is it possible our faithful forms of communication are outdated? Google (news, site) thinks so. In an attempt to infuse old ideas with new technology once again, Google Wave is born. The communication service is a sort of e-mail, collaboration, instant messaging, networking mashup, and Google’s idea of what e-mail would look like if it were designed today.

As per usual for Big G, the tool is already making waves.

In the march toward creating the semantic web, web content management systems such as Drupal (news, site) and many proprietary vendors struggle with the goal of emitting structured information that other sites and tools can usefully consume. There's a balance to be struck between human and machine utility, not to mention simplicity of instrumentation.

With RDFa (see W3C proposal),  software and web developers have the specification they need to know how to structure data in order to lend meaning both to machines and to humans, all in a single file. And from what we've seen recently, the Drupal community is making the best of it.

CMSWire applauds those that take a current solution and put it on its head. Worio, a small search engine, isn't your traditional search engine, in that it all it does is find what you're looking for. While it can do that, Worio also aims to find the things you didn't even know you were looking for.

They call it a discovery-engine and it blends social media with algorithms that use user behavior as data points, rather than end points. For the past six months, they've been working hard to provide you with a broad range of discoveries related to the topics you search for daily on the Web. Today they announced that they have increased their discovery index from less than 10 million Web pages to "a critical mass" of 100 million since opening its public beta last July.

Stanford University is working on developing a new enterprise 2.0 e-mail system based on semantics. Traditional e-mail centers need specific e-mail addresses, group lists, or the like. But SEAmail (Semantic E-mail Addressing) seeks to eliminate this need by pulling e-mail addresses from large databases based on search criteria and a semantic understanding of those criteria in comparison with the databases.

The web, much like our global environment, is in a state of flux. The transition to what is being called the semantic web (or web 3.0) is happening and it’s happening while you read this. Therefore it is critical for businesses to understand the transition to enable them to plan appropriately for the future.

With an understanding of how crucial it is for businesses to have access to and understand the changes happening on the web right now, Dow Jones brings you a three part free webinar series called “Discovering the Semantic Web” starting on Thursday, February 12, 2009. The webinar is scheduled for an hour.

We’ve talked a lot about the benefits of semantics in the recent past with regard to search functionality, but you’re probably wondering if there’s anything else to be gleaned from linguistic development.

Straight up: you want to know if semantics, in any way shape or form, mean money. The answer, friends, is "yes." BooRah, a restaurant reputation report, is a prime example of this.

Move over scientists, we’re all feeling lucky these days. At least, we are when it comes to relevant search results thanks to companies like MetaDolce. To be more specific, OmniSearch is MetaDolce’s new and robust platform for semantic searching.

Last time we talked semantics the conversation featured Noesis, the semantic Web search engine developed specifically for scientific vernacular. This time around is considerably broader, as OmniSearch is designed especially for e-Commerce, social networking and informational websites.

We like wikis, but how does a wiki present itself in a business environment? Well, if Swirrl is any indication, then it is worth noting that we still have a way to go. The service aims to get business employees collaborating in a wiki environment, where users can contribute to static pages and data sets. However, the focus is all on the data, which utilizes RDF for a semantic Web experience.

The main focus of Swirrl is data collaboration. Users can collaborate on data by utilizing an RDF structure. RDF, for the sake of simplicity, is a way to store information in a way that is semantic, or related.

Although they are still growing in use and popularity, widgets are not new to the web. Something that is new is the ability to easily create your own flash based widgets without needing to know a lot of action script or other code base. This is where Sprout Builder comes in…

There are many out there attempting to rule the face of social web and provide an answer to the time consuming-ness of being social on the internet. Names such as Google, Facebook, and FriendFeed have been at the forefront lately. Enter stage left…SocialThing, the newest contender to facilitate being social online.

Web 2.0 brought about the evolution of the social web. But there have always been challenges working socially on the web, especially with social marketing or social networking. The challenge is that it can be difficult to stay active socially, even just in your niche. Google is trying to change that.

An interesting article in BusinessWeek poses an intriguing question: what is driving new media (think Web 2.0 and 3.0) — content builders or technology developers?

Because more people are blogging than are programming, BusinessWeek author Jon Fine suggests that “In the tug-of-war between the right-brain of media and the left-brain of the platform builders, the latter have the upper hand.”

When I say “contextual content network,” you say “pattern proximity.” Got it?

Contextual content network. (Pattern proximity!)

Very good. Now what exactly does that mean?

A start-up called Proximic has launched a network designed to overcome the limitations of contextual advertising technologies; that is, search and online advertising platforms based on keywords, which tend to miss the “core meaning of articles,” result in irrelevant or inappropriate advertisements, and make it harder to monetize online properties.

Riding the hype of the Semantic Web (it isn’t just around the corner; it will also make you blush), which Content Wrangler says will consist of “technologies that help people ‘do stuff’,” a geeky set of musicologists give us SeeqPod.

In its own way, the concept is pretty clever. You hit SeeqPod, conduct a search for a song, and in Google speed, you get real-live playable results.