Florian Cramer, head of the Networked Media Master at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, ended the last session of The Society of the Query conference. The Alternative Search 2 session presented a few of the latest web technologies as potential directions for the web and search engine design in the near future: RFDa, which would make the shift to what Steven Pemberton named the web 3.0, and semantic search, as implemented in the Europeana project.

Florian Cramer concluded this series of presentations with a critical and somewhat pessimistic evaluation of the current state of the web and the idea of a semantic web and semantic search, as one of its potential futures. His three main arguments revolved around: “why search is not just web search (and not just Google),” “why semantic search is flawed,” and “why the world wide web is broken.”

The first point expressed his frustration with the narrow understanding of the notions of query and search engine on which the conference focused. As he explains, wikis and social networking sites also include the search engine functionalities.

As far as semantic search is concerned, Cramer usefully pointed out to the difference between folksonomies, the currently used form of semantic tagging, and the universal semantic tagging which a semantic web would require. While folksonomies are “unsystematic, ad-hoc, user-generated and site-specific tagging systems,” (Cramer, 2007), like the tagging systems of Flickr for example, the semantic web would require a structured, universal tagging and classification system which would apply to the entire web. Cramer is skeptical of the possibility to create this unified, ‘objective’, meta-tagging system because classifications, or taxonomies, are not arbitrary but expressions of ideologies, which would call for the discussion of the politics of meta-tagging. While meta-tagging may have its advantages, such as arguably empowering the web users and weakening the position of large web services corporations, although still maintaining the necessity of search engines to aggregate data, it also has several potential weaknesses. The semantic web model must be based on trust in order to prevent some predictable problems, such as massive spamming.

In the concluding section, Cramer expressed his concern that the Internet as a medium for publication and information storage is not sustainable and argued for redundancy in web archiving. However this desire for permanence raises questions about the nature of the medium itself.

Steve Pemberton starts off with explaining the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which proposes a link between langauge and thought. If you do not have a word for something, you cannot think about it, and if you do not think about it, you will probably not invent a word for it. Pemberton applies this idea to the term of “Web 2.0″, which has been created by a publisher who wanted to organize some conferences about the idea that websites achieve value by users transferring their data to them. But the concept of Web 2.0 already existed in the Web 1.0 era, namely in the form of ebay. Nowadays, when we can utilize the established concept of the Web 2.0 one can talk about and discuss this phenomena.

In his speech he suggests that people should have their own machine readable websites instead of giving their data to middlemen and mediators as the model of Web 2.0 requires it. According to Pemberton the problem is that the network-organization  the Web 2.0 separates the web into several sub-webs. Referring to Metcalfe‘s Law Pemberton states that this separation reduces the value of the web as a whole.

Additionally he mentions further problems prevailing in regards to the Web 2.0. First of all using Web 2.0 applications like social networks and photo-sharing sites forces you to log in to certain kind of organization, you have to adapt to their data format to be able to publish and work on your contents, which is equipollent to a certain commitment. Subsequently there is the question about the case of deletion or closure of your account or even the death of the network (like mp3.com, Google video, Jaiku, Magnolia). One has to rely on the provider that he keeps your account running, so that the data and the work you have put into it do not get lost. Facebook for example closed a woman‘s account because they decided that an uploaded picture showing her breastfeeding is totally inappropriate.

The crucial point of Pemberton‘s view is that we need personal webpages which have to be readable by machines, so that the sites can be scanned and used by an along coming aggregator. According to him the solution to enable machine readable sites is the format RDFa, which Pemberton refers to as the „CSS of meaning“ and which represents the incarnation of the Web 3.0. The advantage of RDFa is that it joins together different data automatically, things do not have to be joined together because RDFa already linked data together from different places.  Futhermore Pemberton states that the usage of machine readable sites has several advantages for users. For example the browser can provide the user with better experiences, if it is able to identify addresses and dates it could directly offer the possibility to find it on the map or inscribe it to the calendar.