It’s exciting to see Paul, Jack, =Drummond et al. at Parity releasing a useful customer app under their Azigo brand. They’ve taken the serious foundational work of Higgins and built on top of it a helpful I-Card application.
Their new I-Card offering is called “RemindMe“, and it’s designed to interact with sites you visit that include available membership benefits. By downloading the RemindMe I-Card (assuming you already have the Azigo Card Selector and associated Firefox plugin), you’ll start seeing overlays on various sites (like during Google searches) notifying you of available member offers.
For example, if you’re a member of AAA, you might not realize that the hotels you’re researching for your next trip will give you a discount. Azigo’s RemindMe I-Card will pop a notification into the search result page. Beyond benefiting members, the organization gains visibility as the overlay will appear for anyone with RemindMe, encouraging people to join to access the offer.
Based on a recent post by Phil Windley, it looks like they’re using the Kynetx Network Service to power the overlays. It makes sense to leverage their APIs and focus on the card management experience.
It’ll be interesting to see whether the I-Card model will take off, though. It’s going to be tough convincing people to buy into the experience enough to download a card selector application and then install various I-Cards. If they can hitch their wagon to a useful application, they should be able to go along for the ride, but they’ll need a compelling value proposition to overcome the download.
December 31st, 2008 | 
Organic Growth of the Semantic Web
I recently had a brief Twitter exchange with @MarkHawker about the term Semantic Web. It started with his tweet:
Quickly followed by:
To which I responded with:
He followed up with:
And shortly thereafter with:
Since I didn’t have a chance to respond quickly enough before the thread went stale (easy to do when I step away from the computer for more than a nanosecond), I thought I might as well follow it up here.
I’m not really one to be hung up on terms, so I don’t really mind the loose application of terms like “Web 2.0″. In my opinion, it’s just a moniker people can use as a placeholder for a grouping of technologies creating something more than what was originally rolled out in 1994. There are endless debates about what it really means, and I’m not sure anyone’s going to agree to a definition any time soon. Perhaps that’s a job best left to the historian class of 2050.
For sake of this post, assume that Web 1.0 was the “document web” where most links were essentially static. Naturally, what followed was an emerging desire to actively link resources in a way we could consider to be a more “dynamic web”. This more active type of linking opens the way for net-native applications and mashups we could call Web 2.0.
Regarding the term Semantic Web, I see it as a handler for something else again. We could just as easily call it Web 3.0, I guess, as some people do. What I see as the salient difference between the SemWeb and where we are today, however, is “context awareness”. Even in the dynamic linking we see around us today, what’s missing is connections being made due to inherent knowledge of and between the end points.
Returning to the thread with @MarkHawker, I see a major problem with the adoption of the SemWeb “technology stack” (eg. ontologies, RDF, SPARQL, etc.). Specifically, it’s that they’re currently a tough nut to roll on top of existing systems. That being said, I see nothing wrong with easing into them where appropriate to slowly begin to build traction.
In fact, if folks are using any SemWeb tech, I’m happy to hear them crowing about it. For example, if someone’s doing nothing more than using a triple store model for their data so they can move it around with RDF, I give them a SemWeb bonus point. Each step (no matter how trivial) we collectively make toward our end points being able to effectively communicate gets us that much closer to the goal.
Consider a company going to market saying they’re “Fully Semantic Web Enabled” and all they’ve done is add RDFa into their markup. If the market responds favorably to them, more cash will emerge to support further advancement across the board.
In the end, I’m much more interested in success stories around any of “the stack”, not waiting until someone implements “the full stack”. The fully-realized SemWeb is going to grow organically, and I doubt we’ll see a clear line dividing it from it’s predecessors.