rare pattern thoughts in a blog

When I would talk or write about the semantic web, microformats, RDF and all that, people would often ask, "Why? Who cares?" or shudder with a "That's creepy!" Images of Big Brother tracking every move, to be indexed, measured and evaluated for Ungood behavior, or something like that. At best, people could see a kind of abstract benefit from making information more digestable by machines, you know, in the interest of having a sense of general order in the Interwebs or something.

But what about when the semantic web yields dividends back to the human experience?

It's just a little thing out of what's possible – a mere smidge of cobbled together APIs – but Mozilla Labs Ubiquity (a Firefox plug-in) is really something to see, for it gives you a peek into the kinds of things that will be possible (and now already area) with an Internet that has semantic meaning.

Check out this video, that's very much to the point:

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Oh my!

Without even finishing the video, I used it to Twitter about it.

It's like having the entire web available one click away.

About the author

Laura Scott is President of pingVision.