News, Blogs, Welders, And
The Semantic Web

Vox Ignis Editorial, October, 2006

f you followed CNN's early coverage of the bombing of Baghdad in 2003, you saw the emergence of a new technology into mainstream consciousness. CNN wanted first-hand news reports from inside the city (during the bombing) so they turned to the Internet and followed the online diary of Salam Pax, a man hiding in his Baghdad home, watching the bombs fall around him. It was terrifyingly personal. It was also the moment when blogs (or web logs) were formally recognized as reportable news.

Blogging had been around for several years before CNN took it into the mainstream, but that one moment in history brought the practice of typing online personal diaries into focus. Blogs were news, so the Internet had to change.

Since 2006 blog creation has accelerated to one new blog every second, a number which doubles every five months. So hundreds of new blog-oriented websites have been spawned, setting the stage for a power struggle between the old, established news empires and the new, online blog services.

The need to organize blogs immediately caught the attention of search engine companies (most notably Google), who saw that the path to dominance in this arena lay not in blog hosting, but in blog searching, categorizing, and presentation to the general public. This is where the problems began.

The distinction between a personal blog account of a house fire and a newspaper article on the same topic is almost impossible to define - especially for a machine. Search engines don't know the difference between personal and professional writers. So a search engine query for "August Bronx fire New York" yields a list of personal blogs and media articles all mixed together. Which ones are factual accounts? Both, but from different perspectives. And to make things even more confusing, magazines and newspapers are now publishing bloggers. USA Today prints several blogs every day.

Burner bloggers are also caught in the mix. Searching for online news about "Seattle Regional Burn art" displays a list of Seattle regional news articles, blogs about the music scene, Critical Massive website links, images of forest fires, and an account of an unfortunate metal artist who lit a cigarette too close to his acetylene tanks. The human brain still has to sift through all those links to find the one relevant blog about burning art at Critical Massive, the Seattle Regional Burn. This situation is a mess.

Tim Berners-Lee, the recently Knighted father of the World Wide Web, has a solution for this mess: change the current web into a "semantic web." On the semantic web, all data is tagged with descriptions called metadata. Machines could then search these tags for the data's intended meaning, in addition to searching the data itself. Article and blog authors would then be able to notate their works with meaningful descriptions, which would lead search engines directly to meaningful results. No more mess. But an overhaul of the web's basic design is still years in the future.

In the meantime, if you're making burn barrels for a Regional Burn, don't smoke too close to your welder. The report of your death will be buried somewhere between cancer research and welding tips.

Aldric
Sr. Project Manager, Vox Ignis
October, 2006