For at least the past seven years, Tim Berners-Lee and the W3C have been advocating and working on the semantic web, a set of organizing principals for the web. Some parts, like XML, are in wide use but the project as a whole has made little progress.
Google has the opposite approach - look at the mess that individuals have created, and try and makes sense of it. This has worked extremely well for text documents, but not so well for other kinds of information. The ensuing dispute has cropped up repeatedly, e.g. Google vs the semantic web or million dollar markup versus million dollar code.
Today I saw an interesting post from Aaron Swartz (the co-author of RSS 1.0) in which he proposes a third path. It's a rather obvious idea - now that I've read Aaron's article. :-)
Both the code and the markup positions make the assumption that users will be publishing their own work on their own websites and thus we'll need some way of reconciling it. But Wikipedia points to a different model, where all the users come to one website, where the interface for inputting data in the proper format is clear and unambiguous, and the users can work together to resolve any conflicts that may come up.
The Wikipedia model. It's clear that all three approaches can work and all will be used, but I wonder if there aren't many other domains, besides an encyclopedia, where the Wikipedia approach would take off.
If you are at all interested in the organization of information and the Web, Aaron's post is well worth reading.
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