Razorfish is very interested in the semantic Web and the opportunities it provides to our publishing clients. The term semantic technology can be confusing as it includes a growing range of developments that attempt to use structure and context to discern meaning from content in an effort to have computers better understand data and the relationships between the data.
My colleague Rachel Lovinger attended the Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose a few weeks ago. She sees three developments in semantic technologies (autotagging tools, semantic search and Linked Data) that warrant publisher’s attentionright now.
These developments are important to note. As the amount of content published on the Web increases at a rapid pace and people have less time to casually peruse the Web, readers will be looking for ways to get the information they want more quickly, and with less noise in the way. Social networking is one way that people gravitate toward things of interest—links sent or posted by a friend. Users will adopt tools that can accurately predict what they want, and provide it on demand.
There’s no better example of this ADD behavior than our findings from a recent user-research study we conducted with adults 18-25 years old. When asked to find information about a particular musician almost all users started their search with Google (no surprise there). The surprise came when this particular group of research subjects interacted with the list of search results. They spent zero time looking beyond the very first result. Many of them immediately and automatically went to the first result on the page without even scanning the other results.
The more publishers can infuse flat content (and flat Web pages) with detail and meaning the more valuable that content is to user. Content is certainly king, that is, if the user can find it in the context they are looking for it in. Publishers must now start considering how content they are producing is formatted, in what structure and with what metadata, otherwise they run the risk of their content becoming “invisible.”
Continues @ http://www.minonline.com
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=b4731c52-43b6-4329-8554-05f71f1f0a76 "Venuto: Semantic Magic-Infusing Web Content With Meaning 2")