27 Jul 2004 | Brad Hurley said...

If there's a President Ashcroft in the future, I'd better start finding a bridge to jump off. I sure don't want to be around to see that.

On a more positive note, this article provides the clearest explanation of the Semantic Web that I've ever seen. I feel like I'm finally starting to get what all the fuss has been about.

27 Jul 2004 | Scrivs said...

And to think he wrote that 2 years ago...

28 Jul 2004 | Arne Gleason said...

What a great read. I found it unusually engaging for the sort of subject matter (maybe the Semantic Web is not so vaporous a topic after all).

28 Jul 2004 | Jeff said...

Have to agree with Brad Hurley. I've been hearing about the semantic web for years now. I even worked at a company which Tim Berners Lee -- the creator of HTML and one of the earliest proponants of the semantic web years ago -- consulted at and I've never really understood the big deal until I read this article.

28 Jul 2004 | Al Abut said...

His hypothetical "Google Marketplace Manager" sounds a lot like iTunes for general shopping: a smart, web-enabled piece of desktop software that intelligently connects the relationship between the products you've consumed and stored on your local machine to the available similar products online.

I wonder how people can recreate that shopping experience with goods other than music, though. It's hard to recreate the browsing experience online. What else can you easily preview before purchasing like songs? Or download right away without waiting for the mailman?

28 Jul 2004 | Andrew said...

It's worth considering the possibly insurmountable problems of encoding human logic, particularly marketplace logic. See Shirky's nice essay on the subject. Something as simple as "what does X cost?" will differ based on the most arbitrary rules. What does my customer think my product is worth? Will that change tomorrow, based on some other information he gets today? What information might change his mind? And here's the thing: the more information that's openly available--say through Google--the less well logical predictions about these behaviors work. (Ford's passing reference to an "Open Product Taxonomy" has at least as many pitfalls that probably can't be overcome by sheer computing horsepower.)

Consider that in 5 years, Amazon and eBay will have five more years of historical pricing data and customer behavior data. That information will really be much more valuable in managing markets than future-Google's unlikely logical deductions.

02 Aug 2004 | Ron Bertelheimer said...

A reply to Clay Shirky, by Paul Ford