| Tuesday, August 3, 2004 |  |
| Google Scenario 2009 |
 Slashdot links to an article from 2002, called "August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web". A piece of fiction. But a surprisingly well done picture of a possible scenario for the web. Yeah, if Google played their cards well, they could pretty much control the earth in 5 years. Although control isn't the right term.
Lots of people talk about the Semantic Web. Basically it is that instead of just putting up free-form text, everything would somehow be marked up as to what it is. And various kinds of programs might them come along and extract some more meaning out of what is there. And potentially the whole web might get connected together in a much more dynamic and meaningful way. There are very smart people (I hope) working on standards that would make it possible. However, it is so complicated that most just ordinarily smart people don't quite get it. And so far there's nothing particular you can do with it. Anyway, that article there actually does a fine job at explaining what it potentially might mean for regular people. And it outlines the quite real possibilitiy that somebody, like Google, might suddenly get together some tools that actually make it work on a large scale. And they might do it so well that it revolutionizes the way we do a whole lot of things, like how we buy and sell products. The key is connected information, of course. If when you want to buy something, you can access all possible vendors of the product, and you know where they are, and you automatically can link it up with the satisfaction level of their customers, and any other factors you want to throw in, and you can get the list sorted any which way you want - you'd of course be stupid to just buy based on the first ad you run into that looks sort of interesting. [ Information | 2004-08-03 11:33 | 3 comments | PermaLink ] More > |