First the bad news: If your company is in the online content business, there's a two in three chance that it won't survive.
Now the good news: Emerging tools can help content creators and publishers be among the fortunate one-third. But not if you're a follower.
That was the message delivered this morning by Thomas Tague of Thomson Reuters in the opening keynote of this week's Web 3.0 conference in New York City. Tague, who leads Thomson Reuters Calais Initiative, focused his talk on monetizing content in today's dismal advertising environment.
Whether you call it semantic technology, linked data or Web 3.0, the point of these tools is to make web or site searches more relevant and meaningful to the user. But Tague said the real value of structured search to organizations ultimately comes in three areas: cutting costs, increasing revenue and increasing competitiveness.
"Fundamentally the mission of semantic technologies is to get value out
of content," he told the audience in a packed ballroom at the New Yorker Hotel.
Part of that value will come from organizing the vast quantity of online content generated not just by commercial content providers, but by users through a wealth of Web 2.0 tools that revolutionized Internet publishing by making it vastly more interactive.
"Web 3.0 is about cleaning the mess we made and harvesting the value we
created with Web 2.0," Tague said.
He lamented the long rollout of semantic technologies without commercial benefits. "It's been 10 years now and we're not seeing the range of business applications
we expected to see," he said. Tague, however, thinks that is changing quickly, in large part due to a sense of urgency brought on by the collapse of online advertising revenue in the past year.
What content providers must do now, he said, is use semantic technology to:
- Reduce costs by making workflow more efficient
- Improve metadata tagging to take advantage of Google's recently released "Rich Snippets," which allows Google to provide more detailed and compelling search returns. This will enhance the user experience, thus increasing engagement.
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