Mike’s Digital Laboratory

Ok, this is it, I’m calling it. In my opinion we are now at a  tipping point that  hails the large scale emergence of the next generation of the web, the  “semantic web”. (ok , call it web 3.0 if it helps)

The big event that marks this on the calendar (this last Tuesday) is Google’s announcement of support for microformats and RDFa, which they call rich snippets.  And the support of both formats is interesting I believe the  support for RDFa may be of somewhat more significance. To be clear I really think  this is the “beginning” of a significant transition period of sorts that may take a year or so.  I have observed that major sea changes of this nature don’t happen overnight.  For example the web was technically fully functional in the 92/93 time frame. But it wasn’t until 94/95 that the wave of popularity started to swell. I believe it will take a year or two for the tide to fully change the course of the web semantically as well, but it will.  You can’t stop the tide short of blowing up the moon.  And in this case the moon is Google. And by semantic change I mean that a vast majority of “actively developed” web sites ( in an approximately mere two year time span) will contain a rich variety of  structured data that is both readable by humans and discoverable by machines.

So how does all this happen in such a big way?  The key to understanding this level of change is human behavior, not technology.  The technology is simple and it turns out that’s almost a requirement for major change.  Making fire is simple, the wheel is simple, bicycles are simple and telephones believe it or not is pretty simple ( got some tin cans?)  And so it goes that the basics of the web html and http are pretty simple and so is RDFa and microformats.

It’s all about human behavior

So what’s the behavior game here? Well it turns out that the behavioral needs also have to be simple for mass adoption.  We all get cold (fire), we all have to move heavy stuff (wheels) and we all need to get places. (bicycles).  Well on the web there is a simple need, we all need to get noticed.  The need for search engine optimization (SEO) will drive this change. In this case it is the behavior of the people (and their tools) that publish on the web that are the change agent.  It’s really that simple. The sequence is surprisingly predictable.

The first generation will be (and probably already have been) hand coding rich snippets into web pages. Next will come the changes in the tools. (actually already underway) Web publication tools with built in functionality to easily insert rich snippets will make it painless and invite the technical and non-technical publishers alike. SEO marketing wonks will then start to talk about <deep voice>”how important it is”</deep voice>to add rich snippets and finally it will become just the way pages are authored and not even mentioned much.  When was the last time you heard any web authors talk about inserting meta data keywords in their work?  You don’t hear about that much but you can bet all the good developers do this best practice regularly. It’s just “how it’s done”.  In some ways it’s all very reminiscent of how RSS took off.

As all this happens the back end applications start to blossom and provide very large rich data sets for new semantically enabled search and discovery tools, which in turn feeds back to drive more people to populate their web sites with semantically rich data. It’s a positive feedback loop that ramps up in a big way. Oh and don’t forget the VC begin to take notice as well, pumping more dollars and energy into the system. Google may may lead the way in terms of popular drive but you can be sure that a whole host of others have been and will be finding ways to leverage the semantically enabled web for other purposes.

Is it really that simple?

And so the behavior changes.  Or does it.  Well now comes the messy part. Change is messy and right off the bat there will be naysayers, and thankfully so.  Because the first implementation will not be perfect, and there will be much thrashing of ideas opinions and gnashing of teeth, and this is how stuff  gets done on the Internet (and where all the fun is.)    Bloggers will complain,  for example already today I read reasonable critiques of Google’s intentions but then again read their readers responses, the perceived problems are probably not insurmountable. Then later the big players start making public statements this way or that and so it goes. The key thing is that the developer dialogue continues to unfold, course corrections are made, and stuff gets better. Huzaah!

And for me well I’ll be watching this closely and of course my site should support RDFa now shouldn’t it. It already has a bunch of RDF metadata, (see my previous post from last year.) I supoose now I must venture on and try out some of the RDFa and microformat solutions for Wordpress right here on this blog.  Hello? (tap tap) Google? Can you here me now?