The Ayman and Naaman Show

So, I made a bold statement some time ago. I declared the Semantic Web dead, and started a conversation (e.g., SEW). Unfortunately, although not unexpectedly, many articles took the title from that post at face value, and did not bother looking inside. Thus, some people never found out that I never thought or claimed that semantic technologies are dead – just that the capital-lettered Semantic Web is dead.

Since I wrote about the “death” of the Semantic Web (now first search result on Google and Yahoo! if you look for ‘semantic web dead‘), I am proud to say, Yahoo! has been making some great progress in enabling – and motivating – the small-lettered “semantic web”. SearchMonkey in particular generates powerful motivations for developers to use lightweight semantics for their content. The benefits of these semantics could outweigh the effort, finally tipping the scale towards inclusion of semantics in key web applications – and in search.

Why am I reminded of this topic now? Search Engine Watch (again!) posted a good write up yesterday summarizing the views of Peter Mika (of Yahoo! Research Barcelona, “the last existing Y!RB“) about the semantic web. They do a rather good job quoting him, I guess, but a horrible job quoting me (“Naaman’s reasoning was the limitation of microformats” – in fact I claimed the opposite, the light-weight formats will enable and drive the available semantics).

More on the semantic web later, I am sure.

Updated: fixed source of recent article.

It seems like everything had been said about Chad Dickerson (who happens to be my boss) leaving Yahoo!. So instead of saying something new, I decided to take what was said by everyone (on Twitter, that is), visualized as a TagCloud using Martin and Fernanda’s ManyEyes project.

OK, I’ll add a few words of myself. For Chad’s new employees: you will be happy to come to work. Even Ayman will agree to that.

* The Twitter data was download using Summize, using a very short script I wrote last week for other purposes; more about my experiments with Twitter later, I hope

Facebook ads are not rolling said company to high financial grounds quite yet, but the impact of the platform is getting its lingo used in ads elsewhere. For example, Brazil, on a bus station in New York:

Unfortunately, unlike the Facebook page, there’s nowhere to click.

Only 2,128 fans? All the Brazilians still on Orkut?

hey naaman? did you get a new iPhone yet? i figure you must have since you tend to geo-code maps into most all of your day to day activities. recently a friend of mine pointed out that the GPS is not accurate enough to give turn by turn directions. as a result, we resulted to using me (ayman) to navigate from south park to the in-n-out at pier 39. so i got to wondering, how does a friend compare to your iPhone? lets take a little run down of the features:

so you see naaman, while its a tough heat when you look at the feature list, i am clearly more superior than the iPhone 3g. the question is, do you still have that beta invite code? b/c if not, i dont think you could afford the upgrade.

Ayman may finally be able to go out for sushi, well, as long as he improves the quality of his pictures. The Times reports that Flickr and Getty Images have reached an arrangement where Flickr photographs could be licenecsed via Getty Images. Here is the Flickr blog post and FAQs, and the lively discussion that’s already happening between Flickr and its users on the topic. Some users suggest the Flickr’s Explore feature would be prime target for recruiting from Getty. Explore is the feature that brilliantly uses the wisdom of the crowds (for real!) by exposing photographs that enjoyed significant activity: favorites, comments, views etc. that are merged into the “interestingness” metric. This metric turns out to be a great proxy for quality.

But Naaman’s guess that there’s much more to that relationship than the Explore photographs. Here’s what Getty gets from the Flickr agreement:

• Coverage. Flickr’s sheer size and number of contributers means that it has better coverage in terms of topics, subjects and even locations and events than Getty. Think of the London Bombing – Flickr had more content faster than any other news service. And I bet Flickr has more recent photos from, say, Timbaktu than any other service, private or public.
• Annotation. This is the big fish. I bet Getty spends millions of dollars a year in archival costs, laboriously adding metadata to images they acquire. Here they have an enormous self-annotated set of photographs where people annotate their images, motivated by various reasons (come on, I’m not linking to THAT paper again), but without a cost to any other party. Of course, the coverage mentioned above is only relevant when good annotation is available.
• Curation. Flickr’s “interestingness” measure mentioned above means that there is an easy way to find the highest-quality photos on each topic or location. While both the annotation and interestingness measure might not be perfect, they can quickly point a Getty searcher to some of the best photos in the world on any topic (see Timbuktu link above).
• Authenticity. Getty Images sell images for promotion as well as news organizations. Both have recently become attracted to the proposition of authenticity – either depicting real people “doing their thing” or captured by the “person on the street”. Flickr is certainly a good source for that.

What does Flickr get?

• Money! Money! Money! (part of the commission that Getty Images get for each photo transaction).
• Perhaps more engagement. Photographers might be drawn to Flickr for the prospect of actually making money of their creations.
• Fewer Creative Commons images? (not a good thing) I don’t know what Getty Images would feel about licensing Creative Commons images, who are becoming a significant part of the Flickr culture (most of Naaman’s images are available under a non-commercial CC license). If Getty Images would not like to use those, will users change their behavior, making the photos less available for the general public’s use?
• More Spam? (not a good thing). When monitary benefits are on the line, will users tend to Spam more by using various means to get attention to their images or add irrelevant tags?

Knowing the brillliant folks at Flickr, I am pretty confident that they’ll do it right so that CC and Spam stay where we all want them (up and down, respectively).

Finally, what do the users get?

• Money! Money! Money!
• Protection for their photos, perhaps? This has been a thorny problem for any photographer that publishes work online. I can imaging Getty Images protecting the license of photos they purchased. But maybe there will be a bigger incentive for Flickr/Getty to actually protect the rights of photographers, for any of their photos, all over the web? The technology exists… although it may be hard to apply for physical sales of prints that is done offline.
• Attention and bragging rights – that’s what it’s all about, right?

Most improtantly, what does Naaman get? Pick me, Getty!

* Reminder: the post above does not represent the views of Yahoo! or any Yahoo! employee – not even Ayman’s views.

OK, I didn’t forget that I promised to write about the Wisdom of the Crowd and the Brooklyn Museum, namely the Click exhibit whose website has several interesting features. I simply hope to go to see the actual exhibit before I write about it. In the meantime, here’s a cool video about “wisdom of the crowds”. The Nova Science Now people tell the “Ox Tale” (that is also recounted in James Surowiecki’s book), with the aid of the distinguished members of the Columbia University Department of Political Science.