In 2010, we’re still struggling to digest all of what social media throws at us. However, a shift has been happening since 2009 which alleviates the problem. We’ve begun to realize that it’s not how much content we consume that is important – it’s what we do with all of the social and other data available to us. The social is still important, but the resulting data is – slowly – becoming more important because it can be analyzed, filtered, mashed up, and personalized.
Structured Data & Internet of Things
Two relatively new trends are driving this change.
The first is the increasing amount of data being uploaded to the Web by governments, organizations and people. Much of this data is being structured using Semantic Web technologies like RDFa or microformats. In other words, it is categorized and encoded with meaning that machines can process. Recent examples include US and UK government data, Best Buy’s store and product data, and Facebook’s Open Graph.
And then we have the Internet of Things – an evolving trend where real-world objects and ‘things’ are connected to the Internet via technologies such as sensors and RFID tags. Everything from cars to houses to roads and more. The upshot is that the Web is about to experience a data explosion, as billions of sensors and other data input and output devices upload exabytes of new data to the Web.
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