Information Management, version 2

Great quote from Shelley Powers: “Technology driven for the sake of technology and not the people using the technology will never been anything more than a minor nuisance at best, and a disliked, and unused or incorrectly used technology at worst.”

A colleague recently asked me what all the “Semantic Web” fuss was about. I offered that it was a second attempt at marking up human knowledge in a way that makes it easier for the machines to read. Editorializing (as always), I offered that it’s unclear what will motivate people to add additional markup to their web content to make life easier for Googlebot. The explosive growth of the first web was fueled by desire to disseminate information to a human audience. What’s going to drive the second one?