I Have A Dream: My Personal API is almost here! (Part 2)
(Almost) as soon as I hit the "Submit" button on my last post, I see this post from RWW on a new startup (but really built on online storage company Mozy and an acquired personal information aggregator startup, into a...
I Have A Dream: Where is my personal API? (Part 1)
The words bubbling in the mouths of every tech, (digital) marketing person nowadays are: API, Web 2.0, social web, social networks, etc. etc. And on, and on on it goes. And frankly I am sick of it! Why? Because with...
The expected utility function of open data
I went over an earlier post and realized my message probably was hard to understand because of the poor english in it (apologies, it was late when I posted it, and did it from a stream of consciousness). I...
Where is the Semantic Web Killer App? (Part 2)
June 18, 2008 By Dan Grigorovici (Editor's note: This is Part 2 of Dan's column, "Where is the Semantic Web Killer App?" In Part 1, he analyzed the Semantic Web's credibility problem, and he urged the semweb community to answer some questions, including: Find out the business problem -- and also the consumer problem -- the Semantic Web is solving. We pick up his top 5 issues at No. 3.)
3. Build your strategy and business team for your Semantic Web startup
No matter how strong your technology is, solving the problems I discussed yesterday that are plaguing the discourse in Semantic Web startups in the consumer space today, we cannot do without strategy and business.
We need to let business people drive the Semantic ship, as they are in the best position to answer the simple questions I mentioned yesterday. In my experience -- as I am sure in any corporate technology project anyone has experienced -- successful technology products have been successful precisely because they were started with the end goal in mind (business preparing the requirements after identifying the problem in need of a solution), rather than the other way around. Having a healthy dose of business reading (Jim Collins' "Built to Last" comes to mind) will help in realizing that a visionary technology is nothing without being embedded with business vision.
It seems to me that the only reason why our community is so keen on evangelizing Semantic Web (other than the fact that we've spent at least the last seven years working on it) to everyone willing to hear, is that (or at least should be) that we believe in its benefits. But again: Its benefits have nothing to do with technology itself; its benefits are about making the use of information to consumers and businesses, better, or easier. Interesting fact though: Whenever I ask a Semantic Web preacher, "would you support a different technology that solves the same problem faster, with the same effectiveness, etc.?," I tend to get answers such as "we need Semantic Web." And this to me is alarmingly sounding like technological totalitarianism, probably because of our need to validate those seven years + we've spent trying to deliver the Semantic Web vision "since 2001".
So my question is: How do we address the consumer/user when the issue of which particular technology delivers the same end result is not really important as long as its needs are met? I suspect that only our business team will be able to show us the path in solving.
4. Don't prove the obvious; don't fix what's working
A few people I talked to in the industry mentioned there is no value in improving what is already working. In other words, if the output of our Semantic Web projects will be a much better organized, really inter-connected, data web -- essentially delivering similar information to what is being delivered today by non-semantic applications -- we have spent our time trying to (im)prove the obvious, or fix what was already working.
The promise of Semantic Web is that not as much that it delivers more relevant information to us, or that it opens up the Web to querying it like a database, especially if these are about what essentially could be delivered by a non-semantic search engine, or our incessant love for browsing loads of pages (which, by the way, has the advantage of making money for businesses today); it should be that it opens up NEW information that was not available/accessible before; that it's "smarter," and I now don't have to spend hours still not being able to find out "the relationship between the price of tea in China and the Kansas hurricane of 1978," or "show me the list of pop singers whose last name is Johnson who are NOT members of band x." If all we are improving on while building the Semantic Web killer apps is the "guts" of the Internet which will essentially deliver similar, but only slightly better information, we need not bother spending time on these. Instead, we should prioritize our development (both technical and business) by focusing on delivery of what we could not have delivered before without it. The reason I am saying this is because a lot of Semantic startups are really delivering the same information as before, only more effectively (while costlier, due to schema "complexity tax," Nick Lothian might argue). Let us take a second in studying what "more effectively" here means.
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