Many of the services that are being developed as part of the ‘semantic web’ are necessarily works in progress, but they all contribute to extending the success of this burgeoning area of technology. There are plenty more popping up all the time, but for the purposes of this post I have loosely grouped some prominent sites into specialities – social networking, search and browsing – before briefly explaining their uses.
There are billions of pages of unsorted and unclassified information online, which make up millions of terabytes of data with almost no organisation. It is not necessarily true that some of this information is valuable whilst some is worthless, that’s just a judgement for who desires it. At the moment, the most common way to access any information is through the hegemonic search engines which act as an entry point.
Yet, despite Google’s dominace of the market and culture, the methodology of search still isn’t satisfactory. Leading technologists see the next stage of development coming, where computers will become capable of effectively analysing and understanding data rather than just presenting it to us. Search engine optimisation will eventually be replaced by the ‘semantic web’.
Shaun Milne, founding Director of digital publishing company Planet Ink, shares his decisions and ambitions for new online-only magazine ecoforyou.
Why did you go for a turn-page magazine format?
There were a number of good reasons, not least it is a fairly straightforward skill to learn. We purchase the technology on license so we don’t need to know much about coding, we can just concentrate on the journalism and design side.
Also we think it adds a familiar process to the art or reading. People are used to turning the page of a newspaper or magazine, and this allows them to retain the ‘idea’ of that. We see it as combining the traditions of print with the best of the web and hope to build a community around it. At this stage not everyone has had a chance to play with digital magazines yet, so there is a certain novelty factor. Continue reading
Online Journalism Blog 