It's Just Semantics

"In other words, the site will provide a collection of schemas, or HTML tags, webmasters can add to their pages to make it easy for search providers to recognize their sites, which rely on this markup to improve the display of search results, making it easier for people to find the right web pages — and for search engines to display them." - Cliff Gerrish from Bookmarklet

"Even more important, if you are working in Javascript (which is very often the case when working with JSON), all you need to do is call eval on a JSON string to obtain a first-class Javascript object. This is huge. The subtle point here is that the output of an XML parser is a parse tree, not an object native to the programming language being used. With XML you are still dealing with syntax to a large degree. When you work with JSON you can go straight from a string representation to object (and back)." - Cliff Gerrish from Bookmarklet

"Remember — back before the W3C declared XHTML 2.0 is dead, heralding HTML5 as the future — when we all used to put type="text/css" on tags, as if we’d ever used a <style> tag that wasn’t CSS? Oh how silly we were! Yet we thought we were so cool, appeasing the validator. Then HTML5 came along, paving cowpaths, exposing the tedium of so many practices we’d once thought necessary." - Cliff Gerrish from Bookmarklet

"In a widely circulated 2010 article criticizing SEO practices, Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten made the same point by citing a Post article about Conan O'Brien's refusal to accept a later time slot on NBC. The print headline: "Better never than late." Online: "Conan O'Brien won't give up 'Tonight Show' time slot to make room for Jay Leno." The dearth of witty headlines on the Web is enough to make a copy editor cry. But rather than settle for a humorless future, some online editors are fighting back by refusing to embrace SEO guidelines for every story." - Cliff Gerrish from Bookmarklet

"Search - It is not first on the list for a reason. I don't think search driven businesses are interesting. Live by SEO, die by SEO. Don't be a google bitch. But you will notice that many of the top consumer web brands are higly SEO'd. Try searching on a person's name who is active on Twitter. I bet their Twitter feed will be one of the first five results. It is for my name (if you take out dups). Flickr did this very well. So does LinkedIn and Crunchbase. SEO is something that takes time to pay dividends. But you should build your product day one to be search friendly and keep at it. You can break your SEO with product changes and be careful not to do that." - Cliff Gerrish from Bookmarklet

"TO understand the strategy that kept J. C. Penney in the pole position for so many searches, you need to know how Web sites rise to the top of Google’s results. We’re talking, to be clear, about the “organic” results — in other words, the ones that are not paid advertisements. In deriving organic results, Google’s algorithm takes into account dozens of criteria, many of which the company will not discuss." - Cliff Gerrish from Bookmarklet

Here we get a lesson on the meaning of words in the context of a search query. Often this is mistaken for semantics. - Cliff Gerrish

Google Snippets harvest a summary of a page, Google Instant Preview harvests the rest of the pertinent information. Google provides a proxy for the web, no longer any need to visit particular web sites. - Cliff Gerrish from Bookmarklet

In particular, Dare's critique of XML is relevant to the idea that "meaning" in general should be wrapped in this format -- semweb. - Cliff Gerrish from Bookmarklet

"Ultimately, is Decor My Eyes right? Have all those bad reviews been helping, simply because there are enough links pointing at the site regardless? As I said, maybe. I took a cursory lookup last month (you can bet several SEO blogs will be doing detailed looks to come). Nothing immediately leapt out as a reason for the site to do well. When I looked with Segal last month, I found some sites that were worse than Decor My Eyes, in terms of content presented, that still were being ranked well by Google." - Cliff Gerrish from Bookmarklet

JSON replacing XML has an interesting impact on the movements that have built their superstructures on a foundation of angle brackets. - Cliff Gerrish from Bookmarklet

The interesting bit is that 'bad data is good too' -- How's that insight baked into the purity of the semantic web's so-called 'ontologies?' - Cliff Gerrish from Bookmarklet

"At the same time, RDFa was designed to work with the now-defunct XHTML 2.0 spec. Although RDFa is being ported to work with HTML5, it can be overly complex for many use cases. RDFa is a bit like asking what time it is and having someone tell you how to build a watch. Yes, RDFa can do the same things HTML5 microdata and Microformats do (and more), but if the history of the web teaches us a lesson, it’s that simpler solutions almost always win." - Cliff Gerrish from Bookmarklet

"Google today launched an ambitious effort to speed up searching. But what they really did is kill SEO." - Cliff Gerrish from Bookmarklet

"I can no longer file a story in our computer system without filling out a box, a small gray square that may well determine the future of serious journalism. The box is supposed to contain words and phrases that will help me reel you in. Search has become a journalistic obsession on the Web, and with good reason. Most people don't read publications online, patiently turning from national news to Metro to Style to the sports section. They hunt for subjects, and people, in which they're interested." - Cliff Gerrish from Bookmarklet

"For example, what people want (and are now getting) in  product search is not a list of pages, but a set of products displayed in some meaningful fashion. They want a map of the product space, not a list. The challenge of course, is that each kind of product has a different structure and a different set of attributes." - Cliff Gerrish from Bookmarklet

Notice that Esther Dyson doesn't use the words "semantic" or "ontology" is discussing the futures of search... - Cliff Gerrish

The use of the words "semantic" and "ontology" have been disasters for the linked data movement. - Cliff Gerrish from Bookmarklet