Think Different. That slogan has taken Apple pretty far. Can it do the same for William Dyson, founder of Factoetum? The third part of our innovation series continues (the first two stories are here and here.)

The creator of the service – which aims to change both the way content is created on the Internet and search (reported on here)—says that to be innovative, one has to be critical of the status quo, immune to the feedback of market surveys, and focused on making a product intuitive enough to be embraced by ten-year-old kids and 93-year-old grandmothers alike. He uses Rapid Application Development (RAD) to quickly create his prototypes – and then constrains them to the point where he thinks both ends of that age spectrum could quickly grasp how to use what he’s developed.

He credits his background in art and philosophy for what may be seen as an against-the-grain approach to standards and concepts that fall into the semantic web space, such as artificial intelligence and RDF. Such things, he thinks, ignore the fact that computers aren’t themselves intelligent and that ease of use needs to be factored into having a common way for enabling data objects to speak to each other on the ’Net.

“Because I’ve come from a social sciences background, once I started getting into technology I realized that we often build technology just for us, and that’s not the thing,” he says. “We’re supposed to make it easier for other people that aren’t technical to do things.” He’s not sure that the approaches that have had industry momentum behind them are going to be the ones that will have consumer momentum as well. “Where is RDF being used by the regular consumer today?” he asks. “My grandmother wouldn’t understand RDF.” Rather than just accept RDF as the right model for representing information about resources on the web and data interchange, “all things should have another voice.”

As for AI, “my view is that a person should be in charge and the computer just helps us do things better. The computer can never be intelligent in the way humans—it can spit back what it’s told but it can’t understand as a human can what an apple actually is, that it grows on a tree or fell on Newton’s head, and it can’t attach its learned knowledge to other concepts, he says. Factoetum may give the appearance of being built on AI foundations, but it’s not. “Search market leaders set up these frameworks of belief that there can be AI and they can solve the problems,” he says. “So everyone chases their ghosts vs. finding a way that really works.”

He says he doesn’t necessarily like to even use the word semantic in relationship to what he is trying to do with Factoetum, which is create “a fun giant global graph, that gives users a way to enter in and search for short pieces of information that can be linked to one another.” That said, he can live with the term.

And he sees Twitter as something of a more limited model of the innovation he’s tried to deliver, from the point of view that its creators understood that it can leverage the knowledge humans reading the tweets bring to the table. “So the limited number of characters is good, because on the Internet people have links to the rest of the information. And if I say something like Bhopaul, India, accident, I don’t need to spell it out. You as a reader bring understanding to that,” he says. “I understand that and tried to bring that into the design of what I’m doing. You as a human being have some knowledge and access to knowledge away from what I am building. That is the basis for creating Factoetum.”

Dyson says there’s a lot more thinking to be done about how solutions and services built upon semantic web and other technologies can be innovative in their presentation, as well. “Especially with electronic media, we tend to repeat what we understand in the off-line world—there are ‘pages’ on the Internet, ‘desktops’ that are operating system interfaces, and Wikipedia used to be the encyclopedia. Even at this point with the Internet, we are still kind of learning what is the best fit for the media.”