23 Musings

The buzz around semantic web keeps on growing. Here's a really good article from Scientific American titled 'The Semantic Web in Action', first published in December '07. Also worth a read is the latest post on the Nodalities blog 'Semantic What?'.

According to SEMPO (the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization) it does.

Apparently money is shifting into search and away from print and classified at an increasing rate. The reason for this I'd surmise is that search is being seen as a way to follow consumers rather than just trying to put an ad in front of them. It's now widely accepted that most markets have a need to be active in search so it's natural for spend to shift towards it.

Key findings from the SEMPO study are:

• The North American SEM industry grew from $9.4 billion in 2006 to $12.2 billion in 2007, exceeding earlier projections of $11.5 billion for 2007.
• North American SEM spending is now projected to grow to $25.2 billion in 2011, up significantly from the $18.6 billion forecast a year ago.
• Marketers are finding more search dollars by poaching budget from print magazine spending, website development, direct mail and other marketing programs
• Paid placement captures 87.4 percent of 2007 spending; organic SEO, 10.5 percent; paid inclusion, 0.07 percent, and technology investment, 1.4 percent.
• Google AdWords remains the most popular search advertising program, but both Google and Yahoo sponsored search spending has decreased from a year ago

Here's how the spend is shifting:

Shifting to search is great for all the SEO agencies out there but is also going to make their jobs a lot harder as they have to work for their money to get clients to the top of the listings. As competition grows, so it becomes more difficult to get dramatic improvements in position, some SEO agencies have had an easy ride in recent years and that's going to get harder.

Other developments will also affect SEO such as the introduction of semantic search technology (as announced by Yahoo recently). Developments such as this could change the rankings entirely and again will mean the agencies have to stay ahead of the game and work hard (not a bad thing).

So says Tim Berners-Lee in this article on the future of the web, search and semantic technologies over on the Times website.

I tend to agree with him unless Google move into the semantic search space pretty quickly. With Yahoo announcing support for semantic mark-up within their search index Google will surely not want to be left behind.

I'd like to think the future of Google will embrace semantic technologies and make it a real 'discovery engine', surfacing links of high relevance to searchers through much stronger understanding of the content within.

As an aside; one thing I've been thinking would be a nice app would be a semantic web robot which you could set off to scour the web for content and with the added semantic features (rather than the more usual boolean profile based robot) it could learn as it went by allowing you to score results for relevance to you. The first really intelligent agent?

So Yahoo recently announced their Open Search platform. Now more details are emerging and Yahoo have announced they will be supporting semantic mark-up and making use of the structured, meaningful data that can be applied to web pages to help them index better and serve up more relevant results.

This is a big step forwards and if released into the main Yahoo Search will surely help them in their fight for users with Google and Microsoft.

Relevance is king in the search engine world, being able to interpret results by more than just standard search algorithms of content density and link equity has the potential to deliver a much more relevant results set to every search. As semantic mark-up and web standards increase in usage this could give Yahoo and edge they badly need.


There hasn't been a major move to optimise relevance in search results for years, this could give SEO's something to keep them busy. Rather than following the usual tactics of copy optimisation and ensuring pages are well formed, developers will now need to ensure they use the relevant semantic tags to add meaning to their pages.

The one thing that will bring the users flooding in is if an engine finds a way to deliver highly relevant results. Returning three truly relevant links is far more useful than delivering one thousand arbitrarily ordered links. I for one would immediately switch to using an engine who gets semantic search right.

I hope to see this implemented asap if Yahoo have any chance of capitalising on this move. Google will be hot on their heels otherwise...

Great comparison of the two online office suites here from ReadWriteWeb.

Certainly going to be an interesting battle as this arena hots up. I still side with Google for ease of use and true collaboration features, just want to see better integration with GMail and the arrival of a 'real GDrive' now!

Although having said that; some semantic understanding of my documents wouldn't go amiss...

Fantastic article from Richard Waters of the Financial Times here talking about the coming semantic web!

Quote: Imagine, for instance, being able to ask a computer, “Where should I go on holiday?” and receiving an answer that is as suitable as anything you could have come up with yourself. That level of computer-generated reasoning is on the horizon, says Nova Spivack, one of the entrepreneurs involved. It may still take 15 years or more to be fully realised, but between now and then lies a series of breakthroughs that will revolutionise the way we draw information from the web, he adds.

Perhaps this is where the efforts of the online travel industry should be placed, the benefits of being first to market with an intelligent holiday finder (a kind of online concierge/travel agent experience) will be huge...

On the subject of semantic web, here's some more great reading from Ian Davis over at Nodalities.

Very interesting podcast featuring Tim Berners-Lee available here (thanks to ReadWriteWeb for the heads-up. There's also a full transcript available for those who prefer reading to listening.

Some really good insight in it!

Hat tip to Joe Buhler (who's excellent blog is here) for the heads up about this excellent article on Travel 2.0 from Booz, Allen & Hamilton.

It gets straight to the point of the matter by identifying that travel providers need to adapt to give their users a personalised buying experience that gives all the reassurance of speaking face to face with a travel agent while at the same time securing the best revenues for inventory. The ability to size up a website visitor and instantly offer them a tailored experience which meets their needs and offers them products they will be attracted to is seen as a kind of holy grail in the e-commerce world. Travel could be the industry to get that right as most companies have a wealth of data and understanding of their consumers which can be used to segment and target their offering more effectively. CRM based e-commerce is the way forwards (in my opinion), have a relationship with your visitors and let them know that so they feel special (and more inclined to buy with you).

A tough task, but the article goes on to rightly hint that the technology is now in place to allow this.

Another salient point from the article is that the large players operate pretty much on price alone with very little to differentiate them otherwise. Consumers are getting pickier now and this kind of approach won't work for much longer unless you have the user experience to match.

In my opinion the only thing holding the industry back from breaking this new customer focused way of selling is a lack of foresight and a nervousness which prevents them going the extra mile to offer the all out personalised, segmented buying experience. It won't be long though until someone breaks the mould and comes up with something truly engaging which also ticks all the commercial boxes.

Throw in semantic technologies and you will have a ground breaking web experience to offer...

Great article! Go give it a read!

Here's a video from Nova Spivack of Radar Networks giving a talk on 'Understanding the Semantic Web'. As usual from Nova it's well worth watching!

PhocusWright has released it's 2008 Travel Trends report which looks at some of the developments in the marketplace that it expects to dominate the year. There's a brief overview here.

In short they expect:

• Mobile to grow (no massive surprise there, it's been coming for years but travel has been very slow on the uptake)
  
  
• Consolidation in the industry to continue (again a safe bet, I don't think we've seen the last of the mergers, however this year I expect to see online only concerns looking at mergers to stimulate growth and increase market share)
  
  
• Social and e-commerce approaches to converge (strange one this, I know there's a lot of social experiments that are totally unconnected to a companies e-commerce facility but this will continue as players find their feet in the social waters. Any decent foray into social should always have an e-commerce edge anyway, even the most brand focused campaign should be aiming to drive bookers at the end of the day)
  
  
• Metasearch to come of age (this could be the biggy! I'm waiting for Kayak or someone like that to launch fully dynamic packaging through metasearch, that could be a clincher that sees off the competition. I also expect tour operators to move towards a more metasearch model online by supplementing their product through GDS')
  
  
• Media-based pricing (interesting move from Expedia earlier this year that has triggered this one, will certainly be interesting to see if others move this way, especially those with their own stock as price flexing to match their media spend will be more difficult)
  

I think they've missed one big thing that we will begin to see on travel websites and that's intelligent or guided search. My number one complaint is the lack of relevance in cross/upsell offerings that are pushed at you during an e-commerce process. The rise of tagging and meta data on products will help push this forwards (as well as the rise in technologies that provide this kind of functionality). Another interesting area to watch will be semantic web, expect to see a travel site of some sort try to get this right this year. Interesting year ahead!

Great article here from ReadWriteWeb. As a fan of well formed and structured mark-up, adding meaning to it in the form of annotation and things that should be standards such as Microformats makes perfect sense.

Radar Networks are one of the companies I'm really keeping an eye on at the moment. Their Twine product has great potential and CEO Nova Spivack has a lot of interesting things to say about the semantic web as a whole. Semantic web is without a doubt the future and as such makes any players worth keeping an eye on.

Here's Novas' answers to three questions posed to him on video recently.

Most interesting as ever as Trendsspotting goes out to ask some of the web's bloggers, influencers and experts to name their upcoming trends of 2008.

Surprised to see no mention of knowledge exchange, I (personally) think that with the rise of the knowledge worker the next logical step is a rise in services that enable and enhance the share of knowledge and intellectual resources, perhaps the birth of the oft mused about (real) knowledge networks... Also very surprised only one person mentioned semantic web as 'in' for 2008...

Great post here from Nova (creator of Twine).

Allowing technology to help us out in areas where we as humans are lacking is a really good mantra that can apply to web as a whole. Rather than spending all your time trying to create the killer app to make users lives easier (and your pockets fuller) why not concentrate on simple improvements that incrementally make the experience better for your users? The simple, boring, monotonous tasks are the ones that are easiest to automate and often have the best return!

Project 10x has a summary of it's semantic web available to download for free. Interesting reading if you find the future of online intriguing. Visit their site to sign up to download the summary.

Wondering what all the fuss is about the semantic web? Not understanding all the geek speak that goes along with it? Watch this video then; makes it all a lot simpler...

Alex Iskold has written a great article over at Read/Write Web posing some ideas about what could be the first semantic killer web app.

For me the killer app will be one of two things. Either a true natural language, intelligent search engine that understands what users mean by their generally vague search queries and intelligently learns from your searches to keep improving on your search results. The other possibility (in my opinion) is an organiser tool based on social graph portability and semantic understanding of the data you store there, thus enabling easy organisation of your data/contacts/information and intelligent linking/suggestion of uses for it. The second option is a little vague but it's something I personally would find useful as I have hoardes of personal data stored in various web services with no real links between them, joining this data up could be a very powerful thing.

Semantic search would be an amazing addition to a travel website. A lot of online travel sites are currently getting into intelligent search as a new way to browse content and mine prices and information, the addition of semantic understanding to these intelligent algorithms could make finding a holiday online a much more rewarding experience for the user by providing real suggestions and inspirational content accurately based on a users searches. Technology like this could also herald the end of the traditional booking engine as a starting point for travel sites and get back to a more user friendly model of assisted browsing and content mining.

I've blogged about Twine before, it's a really nice looking semantic web application from Radar Networks. Now Robert Scoble has had the opportunity to spend some time with them and videoed the experience and lot's of Twine functionality. Well worth a view. The version below is almost an hour long, there's a shorter version available here on the Scoble Show too.

I've held off blogging about TripIt until I could do it full justice. I can't trial the system and haven't looked at it in enough detail to give it a full assessment but I can't ignore something with this potential any longer so I'm going to give it a quick mention anyway (I'm sure there'll be more about this to come).

TripIt is an online travel planner/organiser with a bit of a difference. They've taken a different approach to most of these systems and rather than have you fill out all your details to then share or add to they let you forward your travel booking confirmation emails to their servers so they can extract data and meaning from them. TripIt then build a master itinerary out of all the meaningful data it can extract and present that back to you. You can then access it from anywhere and share it with whoever you like. It only works with certain airlines, hoteliers and other travel providers emails so has it's limitations at the moment but the idea is sound.

In fact the idea is more than sound in my opinion. I think it's fairly groundbreaking in the travel and also the online arena. Extracting meaningful data out of something as mundane as email confirmations is a great idea. Ordering the items by date and time and presenting them back in a nice interface that can be accessed easily from multiple device types is even better. Then imagine allowing users to add more stuff to the itinerary themselves, say even before they leave (transport to the airport, perhaps dropping the dog off at kennels) and you have a way to plan the full holiday experience much more easily. This offers a multitude of opportunities to then present offers and cross sells to entice users to buy something from TripIts' partners as well. Very smart!

Now TripIt have announced support for various calendaring solutions such as Google Calendar, Outlook and any other iCal supporting software. You can export your itinerary to your calendar which is very cool! They also announced support for PDF confirmations, address book import functions and international support for things like temperature (which they display with destinations).

All in it's a fantastic idea and I really hope they nail the trip planning concept! They seem to have the right entrepreneurial spirit to go far. For instance they were in the Techcrunch 40 event which shows they mix in the right circles and can hold their own with real web people not just travel (which is refreshing).

Now, all the rest of us need to do is start using Microformats to describe the mark-up in our confirmation emails, then get TripIt to support hCalendar and then we can all get involved!

Note: I mention semantic as I believe the way TripIt extracts meaning from email content is a real step towards a semantic application.

The semantic web is getting more and more coverage now that there are some semantic applications coming into the light and out of (or into) beta.

Here's a great post from Read/WriteWeb highlighting ten of the best of the moment. More to come on some of these when I have time but for now go read the post at the link above.