Radical New Ways of Meaning-Making and Filtering
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The next phase of filtering will center on the evolution of the “Semantic Web,” which Ashish Soni, who directs the Information Technology Program at the University of Southern California, describes as an interactivity evolution a step beyond aggregation that aims to makes information more meaningful and useful. According to an article co-authored by Tim Berners-Lee, who is credited with founding the web, the semantic evolution “lets users engage in the sort of serendipitous reuse and discovery of related information that’s been a hallmark of viral web uptake.”
“Meta tagging” as we know it today is just the beginning. The Semantic Web builds upon any metadata (e.g. hyperlinks, location, time, movement or categories) to infer greater meaning from information.
However, Berners-Lee admitted that the Semantic Web remains largely unrealized. “They’ve been working on solving this problem for 10-15 years,” Soni points out. “But no one is anywhere near a product or solution yet.” He says that technology is the barrier. “It turns out that [automatically] understanding the relevance and importance of documents is hard.” Although efforts have a long way to go, each step will create new value for how we filter and make information more meaningful.
Who makes sense of the world?
The evolution of the Semantic Web depends largely on how we organize and structure information online, how pieces of information relate to one another, and how we relate to it all. This topic, called “ontology,” is a highly-debated area in technology.
“There’s this war between people who look for an algorithmic way to connect pieces and those that look for human ways,” David Weinberger says. Some people believe in automated approaches to tagging, while other believe in “folksonomies,” where we can figure out the main ideas of content by analyzing people’s hand-tagging, such as you find on Flickr images. While most technologists acknowledge utility in both, Weinberger says that depending on personality, they tend to favor one and never look at the other. “It seems to go fairly deep into what we think language is, what it means to be social, how much of the world you think can be synthesized and represented.”
There are flaws in both approaches. Weinberger explains that people mostly use hand-tagging to trigger their memory, not to make sense of a topic. Although it is a bottom-up approach, he calls it a flawed taxonomy. On the other hand, he notes, algorithms have not worked well either, “because people are pretty stupid about language and language is resilient against algorithmic approaches.” Nevertheless, he believes that it would be wildly foolish to think it will stay that way. “The scale of information is such that all assumptions about distilling information won’t hold.”
We do not need to place one top-level way of making sense over any other, which has been an implicit goal of traditional journalism. “The semantics here are in the users, not in the system,” Clay Shirky wrote. Therefore, the future of online journalism will be bottom-up approaches to making meaning.
Value of Discovery
A more developed Semantic Web will certainly help users more easily find information they want, but the long-term potential for journalism will be how it helps people discover new ideas and perspectives.
“Discovery is the untapped value on the web now,” Chris Anderson of Wired proclaimed at Nokia World 2007 and said filtering and information structuring is the solution.
In order to tap discovery’s value, media organizations could take two steps:
- Share metadata more broadly. Together, such data may be more valuable than if media organizations reserved data for their own purposes. Pooling metadata can help improve artificial intelligence, which drives the automated aspects of discovering new information on the Semantic Web.
- Take a long-term view of users’ online experiences. However, technologists, entrepreneurs and journalists share a key limitation in this regard: They can be overly focused on short-term results. For example, a Google programmer, who asked to not be named, said that the engineers and designers at Google usually look only at the short term. “Use-case scenarios,” a central tool for software developers, are typically created for users’ first ten seconds to ten minutes of interaction. This programmer believes tremendous value is missed by not looking at longer-term use cases.
The best-case scenario for independent media, according to Weinberger, is that “there will be structures in place that [enable news to] challenge me in ways that I want to be challenged, but that ten years ago I didn’t think I wanted to be challenged.”
For a complete analysis of the value of discovery on the web, download Vol. 3 of The Big Thaw.
This blog is an excerpt from The Big Thaw, a guide to the evolution of independent media, written by Tony Deifell of Q Media Labs and produced by The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets. Learn how your organization can use this report. For more information and recommendations from the study, click here.
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