With most things online, the benefits are immediately obvious: Google Street View, say, or online banking, or social networking.
With others, though, we're baffled. Imagine if Audi unveiled its latest project, and instead of a car it was a tuba made of cheese glued to the back of a Mexican donkey.
That's pretty much what we think about these…
1. 3D shopping
Imagine online shopping without the speed, without the simplicity, without the easy comparison of related products and with a really crappy song by Sting blasting out of the speakers the moment you arrive. Shame on you, Amazon Windowshop Beta. Shame on you!
2. RJDJ
"Music without the mushrooms", says a man from Gizmodo. "A mind twisting hearing sensation", says the RJDJ site. "A way to share unlistenable nonsense created by people waggling their iPhones and banging on about how 'trippy' it is", say we. It's worse than Sting.
3. Wordle
Imagine a tag cloud with its usefulness removed and you've got a wordle: a block of text, a web page or an RSS feed turned into a pretty picture showing the most commonly used words in big letters. What, exactly, are you supposed to do with them?
4. The Semantic Web
First, there was the read-only Web; then, the interactive Web. Coming up: the Semantic Web. That means everything online will be semantic. Semantic means "related to meaning", so the Semantic Web will be the Related To Meaning Web. What does that mean? Only Tim Berners-Lee knows.
5. Google Wave
It's from Google! It's the future! It's… well, what is Google Wave? Is it for blogging? Document collaboration? Playing chess with a dog while checking your email? Nobody knows, as The Next Web discovered when it polled its users. Some 56% of users polled "log in and stare at it blankly".
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Your comments (2) Click to add a new comment
uscholdm
October 29th
2. I totally love the concept of "a tuba made of cheese glued to the back of a Mexican donkey" I laughed aloud for quite a while. Thanks!
And I don't blame you for having no idea what the semantic web is. There is a lot of hype and most of the examples touted as uses of the semantic web are not that exciting, and not very related to exploiting "meaning" in an interesting way**, or are of interest mostly to geeks.
But that is beside the point. Are you equally confident that a 电话, or perhaps a 轮子 are also useless? How could you know, if you have no idea what they are?
Go to babel fish and translate it from Chinese-simp and see what you think.
Wait till you know what the semantic web is before you proclaim it as useless.
I personally think that the research and industrial interest today on this topic will result in many useful things. I don't know if those uses will use semantics in an intersting way, nor do I know if the uses will be obvious to ordinary non-geeks. Time will tell.
** I wrote a paper on this topic. Enter the following into Google to find it. ["Where are the semantics in the Semantic Web" filetype:pdf] It was written in 2000, but most of the key ideas are still relevant today.
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dee
October 28th
1. I think the Amazon Window Shop Beta is really cool. Well its not the most practical way of shopping and it does only advertise the most popular stuff but its still visually appealing and the fact it aggregates music, video and audiobooks into one place with easy navigation is good. Plus Wordle is like the hipsters mind map. RJDJ is the only one I thought wtf to.
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