Source: Wikipedia

What's the promise of the Semantic Web (a.k.a. Web 3.0)? It is to make it easier for people to find things that have meaning to them - information, media, websites, etc. When they arrive at a website - they'll see more of what's interesting to them and less of what isn't! The reason I use the word "promise" is if we look only to the scientific community, there are debates as to whether the Semantic Web will happen at all - classifying and making new relationships out of collective human knowledge via computers. However, if we look to our entrepreneurs, some are actually bringing the promise alive today - even if their approaches are different from those conceived by the World Wide Web Consortium - the international governing body for the development of platform independent web standards and specifications. These are people with big brains that use words like "vis-á-vis", "concordantly" and "ergo". They are responsible for the architecture of the Web - they make it work! The formal name for the study of the meaning of terms in a vocabulary, and their relationships is 'Ontology'. This is a vast landscape that could take thousands of PhD level ontologists many years to chart. Our world is abundant.

Even in geographies where we lack abundance of food, we have abundance of thought. With each year, human knowledge grows at an astonishing rate. It is immense. And each of us has a complex framework of interests - where we pick and choose from the body of collective knowledge. Some of us like cooking, others prefer eating; you may like Rap music and I might be more into classical; I prefer earth tones in contrast to a colder palette; some follow college basketball where others might be equally passionate about the NFL. If you are picking up on my not so subtle point - there are infinite paths but limited time to explore. We often need help making choices. This is where commercial opportunity thrives. Where passion looks for satisfaction. Where demand forms.

Traditionally, consumer products businesses have reserved significant portions of earnings for developing and communicating brand. They worked to understand their brand attributes and produce a unique selling proposition. Then, through advertising and point of sale merchandising, they helped people choose their brand over another. Imagine walking into a grocery store without any branding - all generics. It would take forever to read all of the labels and make choices. Brands make things very easy. For example, both my mother and my wife's mother used "Tide" when we were growing up. We don't even think about it - out of the numerous brands of laundry detergent, "Tide" is always our choice. However, when the world began migrating from a physical marketplace to a virtual one, it became easier for new brands to enter the marketplace. This has resulted in information overload, and we need help making choices.

Consider the Music industry. If we reflect on the activity surrounding music that started back in the 1990's with services like Napster. Whether you ripped music from your CDs to MP3 files or supplemented your collection with songs from friends - you might have arrived at the realization that what you had been carrying around in your head as a massive collection of music wasn't all that big! Maybe you had diverse taste: "Let The Good Times Roll" by The Cars or "Prelude in C Sharp Minor" by Sergei Rachmaninoff to "I Want To Hold Your Hand" by The Beatles and "Black Rooster" by The Kills. What ultimately happens is you realize that your huge collection is a microscopic fragment of the broader music catalog. In fact, with just the commercial music available today - if you started playing songs 200 years ago and never repeated, you couldn't catch up at the rate at which new music is appearing. OK great - so how do you find the good stuff, from your perspective. For the last several years, companies like Pandora.com, Last.fm and Musicovery.com have been trying to help people find music that they will like. Pandora requires its subscribers to create a music channel by entering either a band or a song. From there, it begins playing related music. Then, the subscriber participates by giving a thumbs down to what they hate and a thumbs up to what they like. Pandora pays attention and refines the channel based on taste. Last.fm works like Pandaora, but is also a social music network where your friends make recommendations. The assumption is that your friends will have similar tastes, but different exposure. And Musicovery is about selecting mood (from dark to positive; calm to energetic) and genres (from disco to rap; jazz to country), then it builds a dynamic playlist. Like Pandora, you interact with the selections by indicating which songs should be banned! Music is a primal passion. Because it is so universally important, much effort has made advancements here that will eventually transfer to other industries.

The much anticipated application, Twine, will help us expand our knowledge by developing relationships with other people in specific topical areas. This is like a mindmap of all things which you have personally explored - from music to vacation spots to hobbies to sports to educational topics. What we are sure to find is that there will be common themes across categories, and people who share common interests in each of those categories. Most of us haven't spent any time creating or studying the set of interests that make up our personas. This is what Nova Spivack, Founder of Twine, calls a Semantic Graph. The result is that we may be surprised in a really good way as computers start making suggestions based on our unique combination of interests.

The fact that Web visitors are heterogeneous is what has made it difficult for marketers to be relevant. We have been trying for years... using demographics to make media buys for advertising or select lists for direct marketing. Recently, companies like Mindset Media have made it possible to buy media based on the psychographics of your target market (i.e. spontaneity, humility, carefulness, creativity, etc.). This is a huge jump in understanding the behaviors that might indicate whether a person will like your products or services. In other words, products and services are being promoted that are congruent with the behavioral profile of a Web visitor. My company completes the loop. Once the visitor responds to an online advertisement, whether now or a week from now, our clients' websites can detect the market segment to which they belong and immediately display the most meaningful content.  We make it possible to greet your market segments differently the moment they arrive using our patent pending Semantic Marketing technology - Semanticator™. After eight months of field testing, we're finding increased relevance results in a 41% increase in time on site, a 30% decrease in bounce rate and a 26% increase in conversion.