Apollo and Dionysius
If I don't really care about the underlying structure of the web (just give me the candy!), then am I being amoral? After thinking about this since my last post, I would have to say yes. But after seeing Episode III, I now know how the dark side can be so appealing. It is the quick and easy way. The guardians of the good side are out there watching us play and they are concerned. We, the celebrators, are not thinking about noble causes - we are dancing on graves.
Reveling in my amorality, I happened upon a series of articles from Bio-IT World about the Semantic Web and it's role in the Life Sciences. It was like the rays of dawn peeking through the curtains after a late night of heavy surfing. There is the noble cause - saving people's lives through curing and preventing disease. There are the knights (literally in the case of Tim Berners-Lee) who say, "we...will save this land from chaos!" Finally, there is the bioscience/medical industry like a network of castles closed off from the rest of the world, unable to communicate with each without serious bloodshed and in-breeding.
What is most intriguing to me about this whole attempt to make the Semantic Web come alive through this most vexing of enterprises - is the possibility that this rebirth of the web may be twins or even a multiple birth. One of the Bio-IT World article's quotes Eric Miller of the W3C who says "what the physicists were to the original web, the life science community is going to be to the Semantic Web." That may be, but the web started to really matter once the scientists and utopians stepped aside for people like John Doerr, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gross.
Speaking of Bill Gross - check out his latest creation - it's an enterprise desktop search company based in Pasadena, CA, that doesn't seem to care about Web 2.0 or Semantic Web. It just wants to beat the pancakes off Google.
Reveling in my amorality, I happened upon a series of articles from Bio-IT World about the Semantic Web and it's role in the Life Sciences. It was like the rays of dawn peeking through the curtains after a late night of heavy surfing. There is the noble cause - saving people's lives through curing and preventing disease. There are the knights (literally in the case of Tim Berners-Lee) who say, "we...will save this land from chaos!" Finally, there is the bioscience/medical industry like a network of castles closed off from the rest of the world, unable to communicate with each without serious bloodshed and in-breeding.
What is most intriguing to me about this whole attempt to make the Semantic Web come alive through this most vexing of enterprises - is the possibility that this rebirth of the web may be twins or even a multiple birth. One of the Bio-IT World article's quotes Eric Miller of the W3C who says "what the physicists were to the original web, the life science community is going to be to the Semantic Web." That may be, but the web started to really matter once the scientists and utopians stepped aside for people like John Doerr, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gross.
Speaking of Bill Gross - check out his latest creation - it's an enterprise desktop search company based in Pasadena, CA, that doesn't seem to care about Web 2.0 or Semantic Web. It just wants to beat the pancakes off Google.
posted by :::::Todd::::: at
9:53 PM
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