Semantic Web 2.0 Mashup

The online marketing world is finally realizing that social media is here to stay.

The first step was being amazed by how quickly leaders such as Myspace could tap into the market created by sites like friendster, and promoted through existing legacy networks such as the AOL instant messenger and the AOL messenger users.

The attention that big media has paid to these large networks was another big part of all the hype surrounding social networking.

Marketers and Publishers are still trying to figure out what social networking is, and what makes it so popular. Why now?

Other trends include Web 2.0 , application / data mashups, and the ‘semantic web’ envisioned by www creator Tim Berners-Lee.

The truth is that social networking is as old as the web. Newsgroups, USENET, forums, bulletin board systems were all the traditional ways of online social networking.

Most of the components that comprise a social network, such as user profiles, picture galleries, forums, groups, rate-me, etc., had already been around.

Three novelties that allowed the acceleration of the new generation of social networking sites were:

1. One stop shop for all “my” things. Music, Video, Friends, Work, Info
   
2. Public information of who your friends are.
   
3. Viral marketing techniques to promote social networks on away messages.

Never before had all of these features been available in one place that could be at the same time available to everyone else.

The public buddy list allowed you to delve into social groups that you might not have been able to locate just on keyword searches alone. By being able to see who is friends with who, the user has a vastly greater perspective as to the interrelationships among the friend users.

Forums in the past focused more on the topics, and the postings of the users, not on the friends and the detailed life of the user.

The focus away from the intent of the forum, and put the person and their social connections at the center of the service.

Social networks have also flourished by viral marketing campaigns on media such as away messages. These have offered their participants to sign up for their free page. Also, networks have strategically forced users to register for a profile if they want to see the photos or extended information of other users.

So, the social networking sites are here to stay. Now what?

What impact do these have on the entertainment / publishing universe?

What impact do they have on the current Web Search, Web advertising marketplace?

Social networks are all about decentralization. They enable groups to form and disseminate ideas and media without needing specialized web knowledge.

Social media has been around forever, but now it has crossed over to the mainstream.

It is now part of the young internet user’s everyday internet experience.

Myspace comments and mail messages are just another form of email. Myspace photo albums have replaced the other free digital photo gallery services.

The idea is all of a person’s digital files in one place, and every person in one place.

What are the possibilities with social networks?

What are the limitations of social networks as they currently are structured?

One thing that is clear is that social networks like open-ness.

AOL’s member profiles were 100% hidden from non-AOL members.

The result: AOL’s member profiles became irrelevant.

Large social networks may have much more openness in terms of free se, open information, but their owners will still prefer to restrict what kind of content they accept.

Originally there was a large controversy when Myspace users were linking to videos on revver.com, a video sharing site. Myspace had a policy of deleting such links, as they were apparently a competitive service.

These knee-jerk reactions show the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of a business model such as Myspace which on one hand relies on open standards and open access, and free flow of information, and on the other hand wants to maintain a degree of control over the services its users adopt.

No publishing format in web history has had so much success.

It is very reasonable to believe that the structures, relationships, features and tagging ability that is either supported or supportable by these social networks will impel developers on the leading edge to develop new standards that expand the legacy WWW, and HTML formats.

Social Media and Search:

Social media is great first because it presents an alternative to search.

Social media really offers another option between a long term, challenging, unpredictable natural SEO campaign and an expensive, take-it-or-leave-it PPC pricing environment on the major engines.

Marketers can engage their pre-formed, pre-screened audience in a direct and non-intrusive way with their message, product or service.

Marketers can also obtain market research, demographic, psychographic, and behavioral information with the greatest of ease.

Social networks have become one of the largest and most diverse collections of focus groups.

How will social search effect standard search engine results?

Large scale search engines such as Google were designed to index and retrieve documents from HETEROGENEOUS document collections. This means that the documents have no common thread regarding topic, length, format, or components.

Some documents may contain general knowledge, others contain technical information. Some documents are lengthy, others are terse. Some documents are on one topic, others on another. There is absolutely no similarity among the documents other than that they use standard HTML markup strategies and their hardware conforms to the WWW standard.

Searching heterogeneous data collections is a unique problem, and one that large companies such as Google have made a great deal of progress on.

One of the most interesting aspects of social media, is how it has created on of the largest datawarehouses of HOMOGENEOUS documents.

Profiles and other sections on Myspace are Homogeneous because each page contains certain structured information such as Name, Location, Favorite Music, List of Friends, Blog Article, etc.

The fact that the data collection is fully structured means that many of the generalities that drove the engines such as Google do not apply, and that more specific and powerful, and relevant techniques for information retrieval can be applied to said datasets.

Currently, it is believed that engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN treat social networking pages, (as well as social bookmarking pages) just as any other page.

Note: Myspace profile pages are indexable, but the other information is not.

Social networks also have the power to make a lot of the questions in search no longer relevant.

Who cares how to construct an algorithm to predict hard to find spam, when user behavior pins the tail right on the spam for you?

If distributed human computing and behavior is enough to predict what is relevant, spammy, and authoritative, then, who needs AI?

The vast availability of user data, on top of that user data being correlated with search behavior, advertising behavior, shopping behavior, even television viewing behavior, this data now becomes a rich source of knowledge.

New search engine AI will not be totally separated from the real human world, it will become inter-twined with it.

The most challenging aspects of knowledge retrieval and discovery will take place with a combination of the best computational processes along with the most elegant introductions of the social behavior and human interaction with data sets.

What are the new strategies for search marketers? What are things to watch for?

Social networking allows the quick and easy dissemination of information. Any negative sentiment can be spread lightning fast to almost all the important venues online.

Instead of managing “branding”, managing the REAL brand experience is now the prime importance.

Companies will find that there is no shortcut, or way around the reality they create with their users and customers.

In the new world of social media it’s publish, or die.

Engage a community, or be forgotten.

Social Media and Video content.

What social media has done for online chatting and some of its benefits of information retrieval through social tagging are really only the beginning of its transformation of the media landscape.

Large companies get this trend. They see these as the new media networks.

Myspace is the modern day MTV, which dominates the youth audience with a new and improved format.

Social networks will continue to play a part as the network that offers original and syndicated and linked content to it’s audience.

The mass entertainment, as well as the niche information and entertainment areas are currently being developed by major media companies.

The other networks had been delaying their push into broadband video entertainment until being beaten over the head by Myspace and its success.

Myspace has begun to vertically integrate itself by diving head first into the media universe. They have a joint venture with Interscope records, and have already released compilation and standard albums of their signed talent. They are also in development of a movie production studio, a television studio, and various Satellite Radio stations.

Myspace: A place for friends.

The question every Web 2.0 idealist is asking is, where is the place for friend feeds?