The most useful application for consumers is the ability of the semantic web to assist in competitive pricing and bidding for goods and services[4].  By extracting and analyzing data from vendors across standard sets of criteria, such as product, price or place[5], the next generation of search engines will make it possible for a consumer or business to make a demand in real time to the universal marketplace of the semantic web.  By entering the specifications of the exact product they are looking for, the price they are willing to spend and where they are in the world, the semantic web will return a set of links which meet the qualities of the exact consumer specification.  Currently, the way the web works, a consumer may type in the phrase “lowest airfare from Toronto to New York” and in half a second they will be presented with a list of 150, 000 web sites that share some or all of the words in the phrase “lowest airfare from Toronto to New York” in their titles, content or metatags[6] (text embedded in web coding that is visible to search engines but not end users).  The search engine is essentially reading billions of pages in the World Wide Book and returning the pages that contain those words, like a glorified ‘Find’ function in word processing software.  The semantic web ‘recognizes’ that we are looking for a ‘price’ from an ‘airline that offers flight service from Toronto to New York’ (product), that we must be in Toronto (place) and that we only want to see one price, i.e. the ‘lowest’ price.  Unlike a traditional search engine, semantic web technology returns only those vendors matching your exact specifications.  Even though we never mention price or flights in our search query, the computer recognizes the word ‘airfare’ as a subset of the classes ‘price’ and ‘airlines’ in its universal coding language and determines through deductive reasoning that we are in Toronto or will be in Toronto and that we don’t mean lowest as in ‘close to the ground’ but as in ‘least costly’.  The search engine application will then find and compare all those data bits that it identifies as prices of airfares from Toronto to New York and return the lowest price, even if we had searched for “airfare le plus bas de Toronto à New York”. 

Lucky for the consumer, the product vendor’s web sites are also crawling the market in real-time, assembling and analyzing data sets combined by the aggregate of competitors offering the same product.  Following defined sets of rules programmed into the ‘artificial intelligence’, those product vendors can then vie for the business of the ‘qualified’ consumer (a consumer that is ready to purchase) through competitive bidding performed by machines that are encoded with real-time, fact-based decision making.  Now those companies that offer the ad slogan “we will not be undersold by our competitors” can stay true to their promise in the real-time virtual marketplace by making a bid for that consumers business and undercutting a competitor at the moment of decision. 

The balancing of technology and market forces keeps the transaction from becoming too one-sided an advantage on the part of the consumer:  as the consumer looks into the marketplace, the marketplace also looks into the consumer.   The data sets also reveal what the consumer paid for their last trip from Toronto to New York, their credit score, and how badly they need to go to New York based on pressing business concerns evidenced from the company blog and since they’re going to New York, they might be interested in this luggage set or travel insurance. The semantic web market will offer what it thinks each individual consumer is willing to pay and what else they may be interested in while we’re shopping for airfare, based on individual and consumer statistics, probability and risk assessment gathered from an impossibly large set of numbers that only a computer can make sense of in real time[7].  These multiple tenders, offers, negotiations and decision making happen within half a minute, thanks to the ability of computers to read, extract and ‘do the math’ at lightning speeds.  An example of the coming semantic web storm is GoodRelations, a set of machine understood vocabulary for expressing price, services offered and market demand. The software was released in June of last year and is endorsed by the World Wide Web Consortium.  BestBuy, Yahoo and OpenLink Software are early adopters.

The ability to crunch large sets of comparable data goes beyond transforming the day-to-day economy into a consumer driven stock market with the same behavioural effects[8].  The applications extend to the stock market itself:  imagine millions of ‘investor robots’ crawling the stock market and behaving according to specified ‘rules’ of buying and selling.  Type ‘poker bot’ into google and you will get over a million websites touting software that will play poker under your account at any number of poker websites for hours and hours by a defined set of poker strategy and a computer’s instantaneous reading on pot odds[9].  Thanks to the universal coding of the semantic web, a poker bot knows that 4 Aces is worth betting the farm.  The opportunities for entrepreneurs will be limitless – discovering and forecasting demands for products and services or discovering solutions to common problems will be as easy as querying those consumer queries that went unanswered by the marketplace.

The President of the United States of America has committed 1.1 billion dollars to the development of health care information technology universal encoding, to combine the aggregated diagnostic and treatment criteria of thousands of hospitals and universities, currently with isolated data sets[10]. Future visits to the hospital could include a diagnostic questionnaire performed by a search engine that provides a solution within seconds – incredibly important in life or death situations and invaluable in evaluating, preventing and treating possible pandemic breakouts[11]. 

Workplaces and organizational structures will be transformed as fact based and rule based decision making overtakes political or ego based decision making[12].  Company Value and Mission statements will actually mean something as they are able to be quantified and CEO’s can evaluate company performance on more the just the bottom line, but on how it reached its objectives based on the standard operating procedures it has defined in its corporate governance or set of ‘business rules’.  The day-to-day management of influencing behaviour and supporting company policies can be done by machines that know the expected rules of employee engagement[13], as long as that industry requires the use of computers.

          The most pressing evidence of the emerging dominance of the semantic web can be found in the Social Networks, particularly facebook, which regularly uses applications designed to extract, analyze and codify data from its users[14].  Less sinister is the example of Wikipedia, which aggregates universal human knowledge which grows and gets better through the participation of over 10 million registered users, 2000 editors and 50 languages worldwide.  The next evolution of Wikipedia is the adoption of semantic web technologies in dbpedia.org, a collaborative attempt to embed machine recognized language into 3 million plus Wikipedia articles[15].  Friend of a Friend Software (FOAF) is a computer understood framework of data sets for understanding the relationships and connections among people[16][17].  ‘Intelligent Agents’ or Web bots’ can make sense of the interconnectivity we have with each other through relationships, jobs, hobbies and interests.  It is conceivable that a ‘matchmaker bot’ will be carving out our children’s future based on the defined rules and strategies of the perfect marriage.

These applications represent the movement of the World Wide Web to:

 “A Web [in which] the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.”

– Sir Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web, MIT Professor and President of the World Wide Web Consortium[18]), 1999

The semantic web is not just a fad, it is an inevitable reality that will change the way we view economics, government and the human condition at large. 

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_code#UPC

[3] http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/sweo/public/UseCases/EDF/

[4] http://www.slideshare.net/mhepp/a-short-introduction-to-semantic-webbased-ecommerce-the-goodrelations-vocabulary-presentation

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_mix

[6] http://www.google.ca/#hl=en&q=lowest+airfares+from+Toronto+to+New+York

[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minority_Report_(film).  The similar technology conceived in the film ‘Minority Report’ was the result of a 15 person think tank hosted by Steven Spielberg in 1999 including three tenured MIT Professors affiliated with Tim Berners-Lee

[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_market#The_behavior_of_the_stock_market

[9] http://www.google.ca/#hl=en&ei= poker+bots

[10] http://healthreform.gov/reports/ruralsuccess/index.html

[11] http://www.w3.org/2008/05/HCLSIGCharter.html

[12] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_semantics_management

[13] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantics_of_Business_Vocabulary_and_Business_Rules

[14] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Semantic_Web

[15] http://dbpedia.org/About

[16] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOAF

[17] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework

[18] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee

A blog is a media outlet freely accessible to the public, making it highly visible to consumers with corresponding interests.  When written in an authentic, open and engaging tone, a blog brings the art of personal selling to mass media.  Real-time, informative and response sensitive dialogues are normally the property of person to person sales calls or follow ups[1], but a blog can achieve many of these objectives with a larger audience, and without the time commitment and travel costs.  A timely, conciliatory, humble and informative response to a public complaint, compliment or product query becomes an instant business opportunity:  the brand’s integrity, credibility and reputation are maintained within a single platform in a real-time one-on-one-on-many environment.  Through the use of a blog a company can maintain live, active relationships, providing personal, timely attention to a larger numbers of clients.  The blog replaces many of the time consuming elements involved with personal selling.[2]

A well written blog can attain the ‘golden egg’ of creating product awareness in consumers:  good public relations and positive publicity[3].  A story on a company’s blog may well persuade or acquire the moral support of a target market segment, or it may be a good enough to be run in mainstream publication.  The blog has the potential to replace and exceed the power of the traditional press release as a standard tool in public relations and publicity.  By instantly publishing timely and relevant information, the world of the blog leaves the traditional press release and public relations campaign behind.[4]  Product credibility in the minds of consumers can be established without the long lead times required by some publications or the reliance on third party media.  Most importantly, the blog provides a company controlled message to the consumer in a relevant, searchable format at a time when the impact of traditional print media, newspapers and television is diminishing.[5]

The blog will continue to replace other traditional marketing communications methodologies.  Direct marketing, like mail fliers, telemarketing and spamming can sometimes seem pushy or annoying to potentially interested consumers, chasing away consumers and having the opposite effect on the goals of the business.[6]   Consumers are increasingly wary of traditional advertising and actively seek to avoid it through ‘do not cal lists’, spam filters and ‘no junk mail’ signs on mail boxes.  Blogging allows the business to draw in potentially interested parties in a non-invasive platform.  By bringing clients the into the business’ ‘inner circle’, greater loyalty is created and enhanced word of mouth and visibility opportunities are realized through sharing features on social media websites like twitter.com and facebook.com[7]. 

To enhance the pull of interested consumers, a blog uses search engine optimization. Search engines also aim to build consumer trust.  When a search query results in pages of advertisements, the audience gets weary and distrustful.  Blogs are loved by search engines for their content rich and educational approach; they fit better with the goals and objectives of the search engines.  By offering pages that are frequently updated, have other quality web-sites linking to them and by focusing on keywords and phrases that drive traffic[8], a blog can easily outperform a traditional web-site in search rankings[9]. 

Through building a content rich, relevant and interesting blog that draws in an audience through search engines, a business is able to demonstrate its industry expertise and further enhance credibility with the consumer.  The blog goes beyond the traditional advertising approach of ‘telling’ the audience what your business can do, to ‘showing’ that the company knows its product and industry better than its competitors, a feature that traditional broadcast advertising falls short of achieving.

A major advantage of the blog is that it requires no capital investment or the armies of marketing managers, PR professionals, graphic designers, web developers and sales managers that come with traditional marketing approaches.  The blogging vision for a company can be fulfilled immediately with a free account from hundreds of blogging websites like wordpress.com, blogspot.com, livejournal.com or blogger.com.[10] With a little extra time from a company insider and some relevant information to share, any size of business can fulfill traditional marketing objectives on a shoestring budget.

For the traditional marketing concerns of visibility, a blog offers a single solution traditionally addressed by a multitude of obsolete approaches.  Many of the positive elements of personal selling, public relations, publicity and direct marketing can be achieved through a blog, with a minimum of expense, retained control of the message and increased opportunity for consumer engagement.  Because of its multiple uses and low cost, the blog is no longer a fad.  It is the new standard in increased business visibility, product awareness and marketing communications. 

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing

[4] http://www.knowthis.com/principles-of-marketing-tutorials/public-relations/disadvantages-of-public-relations/

[5] How to Win Sales & Influence Spiders: Building Your Business & Buzz on the Web, Catherine Seda

[6] http://www.morebusiness.com/push-vs-pull-marketing-web2.0

[7] http://www.morebusiness.com/push-vs-pull-marketing-web2.0

[8] http://websearch.about.com/od/keywordsandphrases/a/blogseo.htm

[9] How to Win Sales & Influence Spiders: Building Your Business & Buzz on the Web, Catherine Seda

[10] http://www.google.ca/#hl=en&source=hp&q=free+blogging+websites