OK, so maybe ‘famous’ is an exaggeration, but this is the story of how my story spread across the world, how my definition of the ‘semantic web’ (or Web 3.0) has become part of the online vernacular. And I didn’t even really know it was happening.

In July 2007, I wrote a blog post for my then employer, NESTA, in which I considered how to explain what Web 3.0 is in language that even my mother would understand. The blog has since passed on to that graveyard in the ether, and sadly I didn’t keep a copy myself (backup! must remember to backup EVERYTHING!) but here’s the gist of what I can remember:

The future is smart machines (and soup)

This was my attempt at explaining the woolly concept called ‘the semantic web’ or what many people call ‘Web 3.0′ in plain English. Web 1.0 is a one-way process, where someone produces some content, then publishes this content online, and then someone else consumes it. Online brochures – websites with static web pages and no interactivity are Web 1.0: a ‘push’ medium. To make a simple analogy, Web 1.0 is like buying a can of soup. Someone produced that soup, put it in a can, and then you buy it and quite literally consume it.

Web 2.0 changes the dynamic. No longer is there a separation between those who create the content and those who read/view/consume it. Suddenly the lines are blurred, and a new breed of ‘consumer/producers’ come into being. You visit a website like Facebook and you consume what’s there, but you also produce and upload content too – your photos, videos, status updates and so on. In my soup analogy, Web 2.0 is like having a pot-luck soup dinner, in which everyone brings their own batch of homemade soup to share with everyone. Everyone is a producer and a consumer.

When it comes to Web 3.0 or the semantic web, here a snippet of my original post from 2007:

The semantic web is about making computers behave (or ‘think’) more like humans. The easiest way to understand what this means is to use a cooking analogy. Think of each website where you put your content as a big cookpot. You might throw a carrot into one pot and tag it ‘carrot’, and into another you might put some spaghetti and tag it ‘pasta’. Computers are fine with this kind of input.

But what computers can’t do yet is understand that the thing you called ‘carrot’ is a root vegetable, is full of Vitamin A – and that you are making minestrone soup. It also doesn’t know that you have another pot simmering, and that there’s pasta in there. Or that you need to make a sauce for it. This kind of thinking requires context, and an ability to see the big picture – that is, to know what’s in each pot, and to understand that you’re making dinner. That’s all that data-meshing is; it’s about applying meaning to information from different sources. This is what the semantic web is all about; I call it the “web of meaning” or the “contextual web”. It means being able to ask your computer everything from “When did I last have Sally over?” to “Can I afford a new laptop this month?”.

In the soup analogy, Web 3.0 is like having a dinner party, but knowing that Sally is allergic to gluten, that Bob is away until next Thursday, that Tom is vegetarian, and that there’s a sale on carrots at your favourite market. Web 3.0 is about all those little nuances and relationships that sometimes sit in between or behind the raw information.

I even made a handy little image to help illustrate the concept. It looks like this:

Little did I know that this image would soon find its way across the world. A few days after posting it, I noticed that it had been translated into Italian, German and Portuguese, and that it had appeared in a few blog posts (thankfully with a credit to me – which is nice!). I didn’t really think much of it at the time – just a little something I had thrown together to help illustrate something quite abstract in a simple, visual way.

Fast forward 3 years, and today while helping a client with his WordPress blog, I noticed that he had a blog post about an upcoming Web 3.0 event – with none other than yours truly’s image being used to illustrate his point! He very helpfully pointed me to a great website called Tin Eye (thanks Dave!), where you can search for other versions of your image online. Lo and behold, my little image can now be found on websites in Turkish, Dutch and dozens in English – in addition to the other languages from before.

If you search on Google Images for “web 3.0” or “semantic web“, my image appears on page 1 in nearly every language version I tried. I even found someone had taken not only my images, but also my soup / dinner party analogy and put it into a presentation on Slideshare (thanks for the citation Dr. McGee ). The kicker is that she’s a professor at a university in Texas, my birthplace and homeland. Funny how I moved all the way to London to find my ideas made it back across the pond to Texas, without me even knowing it. Small world.

The cynic in me gets a little annoyed at all those people using my image without citation. But the teacher in me is just pleased that I managed to make something that is helping to explain Web 3.0, and hopefully helping people understand a little more about the online world.

So feel free to use my image or my story, just be sure to send a little link love back my way.

Web 3.0 or the Semantic Web by Miko Coffey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.usingmyhead.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.usingmyhead.com/about/.

Next Tuesday I will be speaking about how you can create professional-looking websites quickly, at low cost and with high quality. Sounds impossible? Not anymore. The latest breed of web-based applications and tools have totally revolutionised the web industry, and next week I will be sharing my experience of working with these tools.

I will also do a live demo of Squarespace, showing just how easy and quickly you can put together a great little website. In fact, I am hoping to be able to create a full website within the 55minute session, so I’m setting myself a big target! If you are in London next Tuesday and want to see how it’s done, learn more about to the tools out there, hear my tips and pitfalls to avoid, then pop on over to NetSquared and sign up. Everyone is welcome so please do stop by!

Woohoo – how exciting. Those nice people over at Imagine Publishing have put together a nifty guide called the Blogger’s Handbook, which covers all the major blogging platforms, advice on setting up and designing blogs, and info about how to make blogging work for you. And yours truly is featured on page 114 in their feature on Squarespace.

It sure is nice to be recognised out of the millions of bloggers/designer-developers out there. And speaking of Squarespace, I have set up a showcase of my Squarespace projects, so hop on over to UsingMyHead on Squarespace if you fancy learning a bit more.

Web Designer Magazine

I was thrilled and honoured to find that one of my client websites is featured in Web Designer magazine this month. The Festinho website is listed as number 4 in their top 24 fave Squarespace websites, which is rather nice. The Festinho site has been a collaboration between myself and Raz at Auralmassage, so we are both chuffed to bits to find that our fellow web geeks think the site is pretty special. Pop on down to you local newsagents and pick up issue 162 if you want to see for yourself (we’re on page 70). Yay!

I seem to be doing a lot of Squarespace sites these days; in fact, yesterday we launched another one: www.cytoxgroup.com

I’m quite excited to be working with this client, as they are doing some really mindblowing work on Alzheimer’s disease. They have discovered some rather groovy things about brain cells and the cell cycle, and are working on ways of diagnosing and treating this disease BEFORE the symptoms start showing. Wow. How cool is that?

The website is chock full of science-y things I don’t quite understand, but I know they are lovely people doing great work at the cutting edge of their industry. It’s been another quick-turnaround project for me, with the whole thing being built and populated within about 8 working days. Once again, like my Festinho clients, they already had a website but couldn’t make changes, and they really wanted to be able to control the content themselves. They liked the sound of Squarespace and the speed at which I could translate their existing site into the Squarespace system, so whizz-bang* and we were done. I quite like doing these quick problem-solver projects, as both the client and I get nearly instant gratification in seeing the results.

We’re hoping to work together on another new site in future, as well as some rebranding, but for now I’m pleased as punch to be helping these guys get their message out online.

* Not the official technical term for design, build and content population of a website… but seems to be my slogan of the moment

It has been a super-busy month, and I’ve been whirling like a dervish. But the great news is I’ve just completed another Squarespace website, this time for an amazing event and set design company: Vivid Design Works. Caroline, Vivid’s managing director, wanted an online showcase for their work in designing sets, interiors and events, so I was thrilled to work with such a creative company, which meant I would get to exercise some real creativity in the design. The web design needed to be understated yet bold – if you can have such a thing – to reflect the company spirit of vivacity, but still allow the images of their work to stand out.

The winning concept was to have the website designed as though you were looking down at one of the Vivid designers’ desks, with some of the elements they might have there: scraps of paper, a sketchbook, masking tape, slides and photos from a mood board. I really like the end result, and feel the dark grey sets off the client images nicely, with the red accents adding the right amount of Vivid punch. Have a look for yourself and let me know what you think

This is my 7th Squarespace website to go live in 6 months, and  I must say I am really pleased with the speed at which I can deliver polished, custom websites to my clients. I can’t imagine having been able to deliver this quantity – and quality – of sites with all the features in the same amount of time using any other system. So far, all clients have fallen in love with the ease at which they can edit their websites, and we are both impressed with the sophistication and broad feature set that you get, for around the same price as regular web hosting that comes without a CMS.

Naturally, there are some limitations and things that Squarespace could do better… if I can find time to breathe I will try to summarise them in another post. But overall, I am pleased as punch – and in fact I’ve got to get back to work on yet another Squarespace site due to launch next week. Whew!

When the lovely people at Festinho got in touch, they needed to get a website live within a few days. Their existing site had been mostly designed and built already, but because it was created as a static HTML site, they couldn’t edit the content themselves. And before the site could go live, they needed to make some content changes. As Festinho is a charity festival, they rely on volunteers to do everything, so they needed something that key volunteers could access and edit easily without much training, so they didn’t need to rely on others or pay someone to edit things for them.

It’s a great cause, so I was happy to help out, and because Squarespace makes it so easy to design, build, and edit a website, it seemed the right tool to use. They already had a visual design, so I was able to translate this into a working ‘empty shell’ website in the Squarespace content management system within 24 hours. Within 96 hours, they had a fully-functioning website with all 43 pages of content in place, including blog, photo galleries, and contact form. Within 98 hours they had been trained on how to edit the site through the simple Squarespace CMS.

We’re still finetuning a few things, but the great news is that we were able to launch before their deadline – how often does that happen, especially when the deadline is less than a week?! Have a look at www.festinho.com and while you’re there, why not get yourself a ticket to the festival? It’s a magical weekend in the countryside, with all proceeds going to support Brazil’s needy children.

Last week I popped along to see a screening of Ivo Gormley’s documentary Us Now, presented by my old colleagues at NESTA. Not only was I curious to see the film, but I was also curious to see what was happening in the whole ‘social networking’ strand of NESTA’s Connect programme, as some potentially cool stuff seemed to be brewing just as I was leaving my job there.

Although I didn’t get much of an insight into the programme’s projects and output, I did enjoy Rohan Gunatillake‘s intro into the film, especially the tag clouds he had made based on the first names and employers of who had registered for tickets (no surprise that ‘Miko’ was a tiny speck in the cloud, dwarfed by ‘Paul’ and ‘Sarah’!). Rohan is the new member of NESTA Connect who is looking after the Web Connect side of things. I look forward to finding out more about what Rohan has in mind for NESTA.

The film itself was an hour-long series of interviews and case studies on various social media projects, based mainly in the UK. The intention of the film was to demonstrate how social media is not just a side activity people use to waste time and gab with their mates, but that the very nature of exposing connections and allowing for easier connection and collaboration between individuals could have a profound impact on society as a whole. Ivo Gormley introduced the film by stating:

more people can say more things to more people than ever before

- and there’s no way something as big as that can’t have an impact. I agree – there’s no denying this has had huge impact on the way business, governments and individuals now communicate. Transparency is now more critical than being ‘on message’; timeliness is now more important than dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s. This was touched on in the film, but the core messages of the film were about connectivity, participation and trust.

I was glad to see some case studies I hadn’t already heard of, and I particularly liked the inclusion of an offline case study: that of Morecambe Council, who decided to let the town citizens choose how to spend £20,000 of taxpayer money on a project of their choosing. The projects ranged from improving playground facilities, to cleaning up the churchyard, to building new track for the model railway. Each project had a live 5-minute pitch, and the audience (town citizens) could vote on who got the money – a real return to town hall meetings of not-so-long ago.

It would be interesting to see if Gormley would have made a different film today, knowing what we now know about the Obama campaign and his commitment to returning power to the people. I think an interesting parallel could be drawn between the Morecambe case study and Obama’s decision to empower his constituency to canvas for votes using their own language in their own time. I think examples such as these set a precedent in which people expect to be involved, and once that’s set, it’s hard to go back to the old top-down ways. It’s this increasing expectation of participation that will create lasting, real change. The more we can collaborate, edit, re-write, comment on, vote, rate, review, participate, upload, remix, mash-up, link up and create content online, the more we will come to expect it as a baseline part of the deal, whether online or off.

It’s hard to convey the sense of hope and positivity the film embued, so I suggest you check it out for yourself. There’s loads of clips and info over here on the Us Now site if you can’t make it to a screening. And if you fancy seeing what impact the film had on the audience, Rohan has put together a Slideshare deck made up of people’s written response to the film on the night. Warm feelings just in time for Christmas!

At this year’s ad:tech there were a few decent seminars, but one speaker’s comments in particular has stuck in my mind long after the event. Umair Haque was part of the Chinwag panel discussion called ‘Micro Media Maze’ and he drew parallels between the current financial crisis and the state of the online landscape. Now that’s something you don’t usually hear at these types of conferences, so I was intrigued.

Haque explained that the reason for the huge crash in the financial markets was that Wall Street had sliced, diced and rebundled securities and sold them on, to the point where it was no longer sustainable. What made them fall is that they were doing this ‘remixing’ within an old paradigm. He drew a parallel between this scenario and the new online trend for widgets: after all, most widgets simply take existing content, and slice it up, mix it up, chunk it up and then spit it out for consumption. According to Haque (and I’m in pretty close agreement), most widgets today are just glorified redistribution methods for the same old junk, just streams of ads no one wants, repackaged with the shiny badge of being ‘widgetised’.

Haque went on to say that the media needs to shift out of its old paradigm if it is to survive; the old paradigm being the practice of shoving ads down customers’ throats. In an age where consumers don’t have to watch ads anymore, using widgets as ads just doesn’t fly. Tomorrow’s ads need to give value to consumers, tomorrow’s communication needs to improve or enhance the customer’s skills, not dull them with ‘stupid passive zombified entertainment’. That’s a shift indeed, but I do have (perhaps naive) faith. I’m just not sure how long it will take for media to catch on to the idea.

There are some great widgets out there – for example, the last.fm / Google Maps mashup that shows where the bands you listen to on last.fm are playing live. But widgets like this are usually created by the developer community, not the big media companies. And with services like Widgetbox allowing people to create widgets without the need for a developer or any understanding of code, the ratio of rubbish to brilliant widgets is only set to get greater.

What media owners need to do is take a leaf out of the book of Creative Commons and the blogging community, where people regularly give things away for the sheer joy of giving or being helpful to another human being. Take for example, the coolest thing since free wifi itself: Londonist’s free wifi map of London. It’s been created and made public for free, is constantly updated by the steady stream of reader comments in the original post, and is the sheer essence of sharing something useful: ‘giving back‘ without needing to be ‘given to’ first.

Whether or not this concept will fly with the business and revenue models of most media companies, is yet to be seen. I guess that’s what Umair Haque meant when he called for a paradigm shift. I only hope that it happens before the days when today’s young people, who have grown up living their lives online, take over. Because I will probably be too old by then to even remember what the hell a widget was in the first place.

Part 2 in the ad:tech London Follow-up posts

A few days ago I posted my own definition of the semantic web on the NESTA blog. I tried to explain what the next generation of the web will be like, in terms that even my mother could understand. I guess I did a pretty good job of it, because as of today it has been linked to several times, and translated into Italian and Portuguese. People seemed to particularly like this handy diagram I did:

If you’ve never understood what this term means, have a look at my definition and let me know if it makes sense to you. Because I predict you’re going to hear a lot more about it soon.

UPDATE Sep 2010: The NESTA blog is sadly now defunct, but I have posted a summary of my original blog posting – as well as a story about how the image above made it around the world – here: Web 3.0 in plain English

Web 3.0 or the Semantic Web by Miko Coffey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.usingmyhead.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.usingmyhead.com/about/.