- The data web , enabling to connect data from various applications and databases
- The Meaning web, an uber-categorisation of content so that machines and humans can search better,  connect the dots,  and overall understand better.

There is no question that the data web is on its way and will provide huge benefits.

When it comes to meaning, well, that’s a different story which brings me back to the title of this post: lolcat

Lolcat is an amazing phenomena. It’s being invented by the cat owners community (kudos for being the most creative community on the web). Members of the community started to exchange pictures of their cat along with funny catch phrases in broken English and in the process of doing this, the community just invented a new language, referred to as lolspeak. The flag web site is icanhascheesburger. Bear with me, this is something:  1M unique visitors a month,  top 2500 in Alexa, i.e more popular than ford.com and in the same ball park as intuit.com.

Not all communities are that creative and this is very instructive.

In the old days, web 1.0, people wrote for the general public. They wanted to be understood by as many people as possible and appeal to a broad audience. Time has changed; the web is now fragmented in a myriad of communities who have different agendas.

I don’t know about you but I can barely read my kids msn messages. It’s not that they are lazy (at least I hope), they just want to build their own virtual gated community. People initially used different infrastructures for this (myspace for musicians, facebook for college students) but as infrastructures grow,  open, interconnect  (social data in the cloud, isn’t that scary ?) what’s left is language.  Kids can’t hide on Facebook anymore. .

This is as old as mankind and reminds me of a story I read on the origin of Hiragana and Katakana explaining that in the old Japan, women and men were writing with different characters. How sophisticated !

So the rise of communities is driving people to write no longer (just) to be understood, but to be differentiated and build some form of new cultures.

Bottom line is that the English dictionary is obsolete and this is a major challenge for the semantic web ( meaning flavor).

As a conclusion, one last message to brands marketers in the pet industry:

if u herrz me, u shud buy keywurdz frum adwurdz. teh cats shur wuld lov it.

]]> http://blog.ecairn.com/2009/06/18/semantic-web-lolcat-and-japan/feed/ 2 domlah Yet_another_lolcat http://blog.ecairn.com/2008/08/08/dell-hell-the-symbolic-web-learning/ http://blog.ecairn.com/2008/08/08/dell-hell-the-symbolic-web-learning/#comments Fri, 08 Aug 2008 14:05:51 +0000 domlah http://ecairn.wordpress.com/?p=68 ]]> I find it amazing that the very story that made “social media”  known to a broad audience was made possible by the invention of an expression, a community code: “Dell Hell”

By coining the expression, “dell hell”, Jeff Jarvis made it possible to track the spread of his story around the blogosphere and measure its impact on Dell sales, share price aso.

Some data points:
Buzz and Jarvis represent a 25% market share of the “dell hell” search in google, for a total above 44K articles, way above “hp hell” or “apple hell“.

( sound like if you’re a consumer electronic manufacturer, a 3K range in Google for “yourname hell” is a decent score which is quite a number, just compare to walmart hell )

With his story getting momentum, J Jarvis also created a symbol that signals whether someone belongs to the social media community or not. As you read this post, either you already know the story behind “dell hell” and this is a strong indication that you’re deep in social marketing or you don’t and you are probably not spending your life in social media.

So what’s the learning there:

- one of the paradigm shift of the social web, is that people are writing for communities and no longer building one size fits all articles. This means using symbols & styles to discriminate who’s in and who’s out, things that only community members (and our patent pending search algorithm) will spot and decode.
- people also collectively build “explicit routes” for the content to flow. Using trackbacks and blogroll to name a few, writers creates community maps that overlay the web structure and take an active role in a process that used to be left to search engines

This, to us, means that symbolic web is the best candidate for web3.0 in a context where the internet is transitioning from universal to social.