Underscoring the increasing interest in globalization and localization among our audience of content and web professionals are three items this week. Today we announced that the the LISA (Localization Industry Standards Association) Forum will co-locate with the Gilbane conferences starting with Gilbane San Francisco April 10- 12, 2007. Last Friday, Kaija Poysti, introduced herself as our new guest blogger covering translation and localization issues (in her post, she doesn’t actually propose it, but she does point us to some reasons why we should just all speak Finnish). And, this coming Wednesday, we co-host a case-study webinar on how Sun has built a a global customer experience with their online content and branding.
Author: Frank Gilbane (Page 57 of 71)
The final results of the survey are at: https://gilbane.com/gilbaneboston_keynote_survey.html. We really appreciate the input from all of you who participated. The winner of the drawing for a free conference pass to a future Gilbane Conference has been notified, so if you contributed, check your email. We’ll announce the winner once we receive their permission.
There are two new posts on the CTO Blog to check out: Eric Severson on XML and Office 2.0, and Carl Sutter on What is the future of software as a service.
There is a post over on our events blog listing the top questions from the survey we are conducting for the “Future of Content Management” debate on Wednesday morning at the conference this week. The full results so far are published here.
The survey on the list of questions for our keynote panel on Wednesday is still open, but we have published the results so far at: https://gilbane.com/gilbaneboston_keynote_survey.html.
There are a couple of different ways to calculate the most popular questions based on a combination of the “important”, “interesting” and “not interesting” ratings. You can look at the results and come to your own conclusions, but no matter how you do it the popular questions so far are:
- What are the top 3 technologies that must be considered in any content management strategies in the next 12-24 months?
- Are search ‘platforms’ going to replace CMSs as the primary user entrance to content repositories?
- How will Blog and Wiki tools be used in enterprise content applications? How are they being used today?
- What is the number one advantage, and the number one disadvantage of each of the approaches represented on the panel (ECM suite, CM application, infrastructure CM, hosted CM, open source CM)?
- Are there any breakthrough classification or metadata tagging technologies on the horizon that will significantly impact content management strategies?
- How is widespread adoption of RSS/Atom going to affect content delivery? And what does this mean to enterprise content management or publishing strategies?
- How will the new SharePoint Server’s CM capability affect the CM market?
You still have 2 days to cast your vote, and to get to Boston to hear the keynote panel (which is open to all) debate these and other questions.
In a word, “expectations”. There is nothing wrong with the moniker itself, but when used as if it were a thing-in-itself, as something concrete, it inevitably becomes misleading. This is not something to solely blame on marketing hype – people crave simple labels, marketers are just accommodating us. We need to take a little responsibility for asking what such labels really mean. When forced to reduce Web 2.0 to something real, you end up with AJAX. There is also nothing wrong with AJAX or its components. The problem is overestimating what it can do for us.
Bill Thompson’s post “Web 2.0 and Tim O’Reilly as Marshal Tito” yesterday on The Register’s Developer site, is perhaps a little overstated, but is useful reading for VCs and IT strategists. Here’s a sample:
Web 2.0 marks the dictatorship of the presentation layer, a triumph of appearance over architecture that any good computer scientist should immediately dismiss as unsustainable. … Ajax is touted as the answer for developers who want to offer users a richer client experience without having to go the trouble of writing a real application, but if the long term goal is to turn the network from a series of tubes connecting clients and servers into a distributed computing environment then we cannot rely on Javascript and XML since they do not offer the stability, scalability or effective resource discovery that we need.
You may have noticed we haven’t posted here as much about Gilbane Boston as we have about our previous events. That’s because we now have a special Events Blog. Although we will still mention important announcements here, we plan to keep posts on this blog focused on analysis and industry discussions, which may include opinions on conference sessions etc. The Events Blog, on the other hand, is set-up so that any of our conference team can post anything, including our event announcements, press releases, deadlines, discount offers, and all other promotional news. Other useful permanent event links are our Conference Overview page, and our Speaker Submission and Guidelines page. See the latest post on Gilbane Boston at https://gilbane.com/eventsblog/.
The recent Web 2.0 conference predictably accelerated some prognostication on Web 3.0. I don’t think these labels are very interesting in themselves, but I do admit that the conversations about what they might be, if they had a meaningful existence, expose some interesting ideas. Unfortunately, they (both the labels and the conversations) also tend to generate a lot of over-excitement and unrealistic expectations, both in terms of financial investment and doomed IT strategies. Dan Farber does his usual great job of collecting some of the thoughts on the recent discussion in “Web 2.0 isn’t dead, but Web 3.0 is bubbling up“.
One of the articles Dan links to is a New York Times article by John Markoff, where John basically equates Web 3.0 with the Semantic Web. Maybe that’s his way of saying very subtly that there will never be a Web 3.0? No, he is more optimistic. Dan also links to Nick Carr’s post welcoming Web 3.0, but even Carr is gentler that he should be.
But here’s the basic problem with the Semantic Web – it involves semantics. Semantics are not static, language is not static, science is not static. Even more, rules are not static either, but at least in some cases, syntax, and logical systems have longer shelf lives.
Now, you can force a set of semantics to be static and enforce their use – you can invent little worlds and knowledge domains where you control everything, but there will always be competition. That’s how humans work, and that is how science works as far as we can tell. Humans will break both rules and meanings. And although the Semantic Web is about computers as much (or more) than about humans, the more human-like we make computers, the more they will break rules and change meanings and invent their own little worlds.
This is not to say that the goal of a Semantic Web hasn’t and won’t generate some good ideas and useful applications and technologies – RDF itself is pretty neat. Vision is a good thing, but vision and near-term reality require different behavior and belief systems.
