Thursday, August 28, 2008

Behold the Promise of the Semantic Web

The Semantic Web is topic I’ve been fascinated with for some time. And it’s part of the reason I decided to get into the search space. After all, searching is the first step towards finding and acting. And it’s the combination of these 3 elements that make the promise of the Semantic Web so appealing.

Yesterday, I was tipped off to a new product being rolled out by Mozilla that represents a huge advancement towards realizing that promise. Dubbed Ubiquity, the tool allows you to click control-space (or whatever command you choose) and type in natural language to act on whatever web content you’re viewing.

For example, if you’re looking at an address, you can highlight it and type “map-this” and a Google map will pop up. Then you can type “email this to jimmy” and it will scrape your address book for people named Jimmy and compose a new email to that person.

What I like most about this product is that it’s out there. I mean that in both ways. It’s “out there” in terms of futuristic artificially intelligent web functionality. And it’s “out there” in terms of actually being up and running today. Rather than wait for the technology to get good enough to decipher intent from our activity, here’s a tool that learns as it goes and has some easy, practical things you can do with it immediately.

Kuods to Mozilla Labs for pushing the envelope here and creating an exciting and innovative product. I encourage everyone with a stake in the future of digital marketing and content to view the demo and start playing around with the product. The applications truly are limitless.

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