Blank (Media) Slate

I realize I’m showing up (fashionably) late to the semantic web party, but the timing seems to feel ripe. As I mentioned in an earlier post about what I call a “Semantic Servant“, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to (easily) cross-connect online systems. Despite the zealot debates between the Web 2.0 / 3.0 / Semantic Web crowds, there’s a lot to be gained from cooperative growth.

For example, I found this post about “Pinging the Semantic Web” by Harry Chen. In it he mentions there’s a lot to be learned from the blog pinging services:

As the Semantic Web grows, we also need similar services. Ping.SemanticWeb.Org is an experimental service for notifying search engines (or semantic web bots) about changes made in semantic web documents. The present service accepts pings from semantic web documents that describe SIOC, FOAF and DOAP.

He goes on to give some rationale behind his belief in this type of system. My personal favorite is his second point:

Second, a wide adoption of ping services can help to speed up the convergence of standard ontologies. In the blogosphere, we have seen the convergence of few RSS standards, which I believe is due to the wide adoption of ping services, as well as RSS readers and blog publishing software. If Semantic Web ping services are widely used, I believe it’s only nature for SWD publishers to adopt few standard ontologies that are supported by the ping services, and not to create the owner ontologies.

As much as I hate to admit it, the semi-formalization of RSS did for online content sharing what HTML did for Internet content publishing in general. What I mean by that is sometimes it takes an example of technology deployed in a useful context to propel it into mainstream adoption. There’s no reason why we need RSS to share content (we could simply use straight XML, or even straight HTML), but it certainly makes it easier — especially if everyone adopts it.

Now, all we need to do is come up with “an example technology deployed in a useful context.” Piece of cake.