SOME RANDOM DUDE

I read a very interesting article, Why the Semantic Web Will Fail, about one person’s thoughts on why the web will never reach its full potential due to the greed and short-sidedness of big business. The author makes some very good points in the article and it is quite compelling to read.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Semantic Web will never work because it depends on businesses working together, on them cooperating.

We are talking about the most conservative bunch of people in the world, people who believe in greed and cut-throat business ethics. People who would steal one another’s property if it weren’t nailed down. People like, well, Conrad Black and Rupert Murdoch.

And they’re all going to play nice and create one seamless Semantic Web that will work between companies - competing entities choreographing their responses so they can work together to grant you a seamless experience?

I think the author is right about one thing - big business is not a big fan of an open, sharing web and will fight it tooth and nail in the name of profit. My feeling however is that business really does not have a choice in the matter. The web is built on a very open, uncontrollable model - opening up infinite possibilities for individuals, competitors and or startups to ruin them in a heartbeat. The web is moving towards a more open model, like it or not. We do not rely on big business, big business relies on us. If corporations do not want to work in that model, all it takes is $15 for a domain name, $100 a month for hosting and word of mouth for some David to take down Goliath.

The web, since its inception, has been moving towards more a open and communal sense of data. Information and content is shared more than ever on the web. The author is correct in his statement about business - big business has fought it tooth and nail. Nevertheless, the trend towards a more open internet has continued, and if anything, has grown. Not all business is against this movement however - many successful startups have become what they are due to their willingness to share data. The list is too large to fully divulge, but Flickr, YouTube and Digg are three of the most obvious. These companies became what they are today because they shared their content freely and took the user’s experience seriously. Of course, Flickr and YouTube have been purchased by “big business”, but the corporate big-wigs are not dumb - they know that the very success of these sites depends on their open attitude towards information and content. To break those models would surely stifle the success of their newly acquired site and, in turn, stifle their own business. If, for whatever reason, the corporation still decided to do it, there would be numerous sites popping up overnight to try to fill the void.

Most of the true innovation on the internet is not done by big business. Because of the relatively low overhead to start a medium-sized website, very little gets in the way of smart people with smart ideas creating smart web sites. While big business is trying to figure out how they can monetize their web properties, small businesses, startups and individuals are innovating. Of course, many of these innovators will get snatched up by “larger fish” which can lead towards two different directions. The first is that the new owner tries to modify it to their financial agenda. This method has caused many good sites to (very) bad (very) quickly and many times the community does not even stay there long even to witness it. The second direction is that the site gets purchased and is relatively left alone to continue doing what it was doing. YouTube, del.icio.us and Flickr (to a certain extent) seem to fall under that umbrella up to this point. The model opens up the opportunity to slowly move big business towards a more open philosophy. They may not want it, but if the want to compete, they are going to have to eventually.

If the internet was like cable, I would completely agree with the author - however, that is far from the case. Big business accounts for a mere fraction of the content on the internet. With the takeoff of blogging, that fraction is only going to continue to go down. The only advantage business has on the web is money - something that may not be as potent as we think. The majority of successes on the internet have been due to a revolutionary concept, the fostering of a strong community or the publishing of highly desired content. None of these three qualities can come from money alone. Money always helps, but it is not the end-all-be-all. There are even times where I think money could be a hindrance…

I do agree with the author that big business will never volunteer to play nice. The problem is, if they continue to decide to play the way they are playing, the rest of the internet will leave and start their own game.content, corporations, delicious, digg, fair play, flickr, information, open data, open web, semantic web, sharing, web 2dot0 youtube