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Digg makes official its adoption of Semantic Web standard

betanews.com — It could be the very thing the Web has lacked all these years, even with its wealth of intermingled hyperlinks: a markup language for conclusively identifying context. Now, Digg is making the bold attempt to be its biggest "beta tester."

Bury

marksmayo 82 days ago, made popular 81 days ago

1070 diggs
digg it

benny786, on 05/03/2008, -16/+2how interesting...
- carguy84, on 05/03/2008, -6/+5Given how well digg things work....pass..
- expatcatalyst, on 05/03/2008, -6/+1Their just jealous that you were first....lol
  - scanman20, on 05/03/2008, -4/+2They're, not their you moron.
    - benny786, on 05/03/2008, -4/+0they are jealous arnt they expatcatalyst lol
mark076h, on 05/03/2008, -15/+103yeah thats nice, April passed and no new comment system?
- sodade, on 05/03/2008, -13/+8Considering that Digg freezes firefox 20% of the time I try to digg something, I'd say not.
  - Myztry, on 05/03/2008, -9/+6Ubuntu Hardy comes with Firefox3b5. Works beautifully.
    - Myztry, on 05/04/2008, -0/+1Are people having trouble? or does Ubuntu just trigger an auto-bury response? Meh. Works beautifully regardless...
  - isiz, on 05/03/2008, -10/+10Um, that isn't Digg, it's your computer.
    - Myztry, on 05/03/2008, -2/+9Firefox 2 did that on 'this' computer. Firefox 3b5 doesn't...
    - therightclique, on 05/03/2008, -0/+6Nope. It is definitely Digg. Digg's ***** code is freezing firefox all the time. As has been previously stated, the latest firefox beta works can manage it.
      - lemcoe9, on 05/03/2008, -3/+2Opera wins over Firefox AND IE. win
      - mikewill7seven, on 05/04/2008, -1/+1Try Safari on Windows its lighting fast on Digg even if your loading all the comments at once.
- boldfire, on 05/03/2008, -2/+11Kevin Rose recently tweeted that he has been playing with it, it's "siiick" and he's "creating a video to post in a couple days - we're killing bugs, soon soon!" http://twitter.com/kevinrose/statuses/802131333
  - therightclique, on 05/03/2008, -3/+13referring to web technology as "siiiick" just shows how retarded kevin rose can be.
    - praisethelard, on 06/06/2008, -4/+2I'm pretty sure he's akin to Tom on Myspace.
      
      They're both robots, possibly conspiring to take over the world via subliminal messaging in social media webKILLsites.
    - mrcabnit, on 05/03/2008, -1/+3How dare you compare Kevin to Tom!
ElbertF, on 05/03/2008, -0/+12http://digg.com/tech_news/Digg_Rolls_Out_DataPorta ...
GeekyGerge, on 05/03/2008, -1/+58Anyone mind to briefly explain what this means for Digg?
- kenvsryu, on 05/03/2008, -4/+109It makes rickrolls faster.
- expatcatalyst, on 05/03/2008, -3/+13Anyone mind to briefly explain what this means at all?
  - picpak, on 05/03/2008, -2/+17Now you can find deadfecesguy before the comments.
- plaing, on 05/03/2008, -2/+3Anyone mind to lose credibility when digg gets 10 out of 10 for beta testing semantics?
  - ddawggin, on 05/03/2008, -0/+2No, although Digg would lose credibility if a story about Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 reached its Top 10 in 10 minutes.
    - lamiaconfitor, on 05/03/2008, -0/+1we totally need to find one...
- jo42, on 05/04/2008, -0/+1> what his means
  
  Digg has a wet fart. Digg fanboiz go silly buggers.
Matt2k, on 05/03/2008, -2/+45For example, a paragraph about a subject defined by an online resource can include in its element bracket an attribute about [...] The subject is the person's name, the predicate is the act of naming, and the object is the resource where the name is catalogued. Imagine if you ran a certain online resource -- say, a wiki/encyclopedia thingie of some sort

I'm imagining and I don't see how this solves any burning problems.
In other words: We already have a way to cite references that is easily viewable with a standard web browser. Not to mention-- contacting someone based on their name being associated with a paragraph? I can imagine this being useful 5 times in the history of the universe.
In other words: Yawn
Yeah, I know. Don't complain. But I remember about six months ago someone was chatting with a Digg developer about the URL truncating issue when you edit your post, and the developer was "Oh, that's a new one. I'll put it on the bug tracker" like they had never seen it before. And I'm going to get excited about adding a couple REL tags on hyperlinks on my profile page? Has Digg considered hiring, oh, programmers to fix real problems?
- displacednomad, on 05/03/2008, -1/+4Just imagining here...
  Since your Digg profile (and twitter, facebook, myspace, delicious, technorati, et al profiles) all have links to your online personas, imagine being able to follow comments and posts by a user across the internet. If I were to click on "Matt2k" in a post, comment to a blog post, or elsewhere, I could follow what you follow by searching your various profiles for any search term. Might be one method of getting me closer to the information that is usually hard to find on the internet if I could follow through to where the experts are going, rather than having to sort through pages of search results and forums myself. Or not, who knows?
  - xoxota, on 05/03/2008, -1/+22Oh yes. Automatic personal data mining. I don't see any potential drawbacks to this at all. Not one.
  - sq2shooter, on 05/03/2008, -0/+8Do people actually link up all their online profiles? Why? I have profiles all over the place and there are not any that are linked together in any way. I do that on purpose. I have a different user name at every site, an anonymous email address and I always sign up under a fake name. I have no interest in having all of them linked together or my actual identity exposed. Screw that.
    - Culyt, on 05/03/2008, -0/+2Depends on the sites, I like to keep my username constant across forums and such provided they are of similarish content, ie a persona for digg, reddit, tech forums etc..., maybe another persona for gaming forums, another persona for anime.
      
      I would like to link a myspace account to a facebook account if I mostly used it with real life people (although I don't really use either.
      
      I however wouldn't want to cross link my real life persona with my anime/gaming/tech ones since a lot of real life people wouldn't have much interest in such stuff it might even cause problems (ie you won't want your employer seeing Kirk vs Picard posting) and I wouldn't want abusive gamers tracking me down in real life either,
      
      In real life there isn't much way to link them, but I would like to beable to have people see my reddit profile from digg and visa versa.
  - BoonTobias, on 05/03/2008, -1/+0why don't you have a seat over there?
- darkfus, on 05/03/2008, -0/+3This is a new feature, its not meant to solve problems but perhaps enhance the user experience preemptively. I am sure there is interest in fixing existing bugs or shortcomings on Digg, but there is also interest in staying competitive.
  
  I imagine at some point the use of RDFa will allow you to read Digg without actually using Digg. Which in that case might spare you from the interfaces you loathe.
  - displacednomad, on 05/03/2008, -1/+1I'm beginning to see a future where browsers offer a two-faced version. One for web pages, the other for web content. Either two separate browsers, or on startup you choose to read your RSS feeds or go the actual pages.
    The trend I'm noticing anyways is that the internet is becoming a place of content, not design and gimmickry. If you search for Dave Barry, you not only get his blog, the Miami Herald, his wikipedia page, among other types of results, but now mixed in are pages that have his content even if they have nothing to do with him. For example, in the first ten results are a Dave Barry Quotes page. That's his content, but not his page. The newer browsers would find the content for you, as such, and display in your content browsers with your own stylesheets to boot!
  - Matt2k, on 05/03/2008, -1/+1> I imagine at some point the use of RDFa will allow you to read Digg without actually using Digg. Which in that case might spare you from the interfaces you loathe.
    
    I actually like the interface here in the web browser. I don't see the need to beat HTML into submission to dig its own grave with a replacement interpreter. The problem of rendering human information is already solved and it works fine.
    
    My real beef isn't with any of the dudes that work at Digg, it's with the W3C and their escalating arms race and to introduce new technologies to keep themselves relevant, when they really aren't any longer. And everyone just eats it up. If you want to use HTML as some sort of database, I think you're going to find yourself very disappointed unless a lot of real fundamental changes are made, Changes that really don't seem to be particularly interesting, useful, or needed. And even then, humans will find a way to abuse and break it and turn it into spam.
    
    > but now mixed in are pages that have his content even if they have nothing to do with him. For example, in the first ten results are a Dave Barry Quotes page
    
    Well, then it would seem the search result was a success? I don't see the problem here?
    
    > The newer browsers would find the content for you, as such, and display in your content browsers with your own stylesheets to boot!
    
    Search engines will have to become more intelligent to filter through the crap, but this is a problem for them to solve. Nothing we do will be relevant. Remember META tags and how well that worked out? We're basically suggesting that we do the same thing again. How short are our memories?
  - picpak, on 05/03/2008, -1/+1"I imagine at some point the use of RDFa will allow you to read Digg without actually using Digg. Which in that case might spare you from the interfaces you loathe."
    
    Well in that case, shouldn't reddit do it?
- MariusAgricola, on 05/03/2008, -0/+1Semantic Web is not about new ways for web browsers to display things at all. Instead it's about allowing machines to gather the kind of contextual information that only humans are able to do right now. In overly simplistic terms, it comes down to being able to ask a question and get an answer. The most common example I have seen is trying to find the prices of a certain sized plasma television. While you can do it now by visiting several sites, there is nothing that just gives you a list of plasma television listings it finds on those various sites and displaying the output for you to compare and sort. There are some that have merchant-controlled lists of catalog items (pricewatch, shopzilla, etc.), but they are not the same as a dynamic set of results that draws from the Internet at large to answer the questions you are asking. So while the idea is that the data presented is for eventual human use, the way it is gathered is done by machines, and that requires adding semantics to data so the machines "understand" what it is they are seeing.
gak001, on 05/03/2008, -5/+3I am reminded of the old Hot Wheels commercials from my youth... "Digg is leading the waaay."
- p0tent1al, on 05/03/2008, -0/+3If by that you mean bugs about on their site, then yeah Digg is leading the way.
nek4life, on 05/03/2008, -2/+29Now maybe they can fix their "Digg This" button so it validates strict xhtml.
- fredmv, on 05/03/2008, -3/+4XHTML is pointless to use anyway. If you aren't serving it as application/xhtml+xml, then it isn't true XHTML regardless, which I doubt you (and many) are. So, if you are using the correct MIME type, keep in mind that it won't work in some user agents. HTML 4.01 Strict still makes the most sense in terms of interoperability.
  - Altanar, on 05/03/2008, -1/+2I didn't realize that, so I tried setting it as application/xhtml+xml and discovered the reason people don't. IE doesn't display xht pages; it downloads them.
    
    So I went and converted my page to HTML 4.01 strict, instead. **shrugs**
Philluminati, on 05/03/2008, -1/+15Wikipedia should be doing this. They've got the power to really make some great content. It's a great idea as well. The symantec web has loads of potential. You could find some friends in facebook and it would collect information about their food preferences (scattered across comments, bio, questions and the events they've been to etc) and google could be used to search for sites containing recipes that have been filtered based on everybodies allergies. (for example). The symantec web is about that describe not the formatting of the page - but what the information actually means. i.e. < telephone > 923232 < / telephone >etc.

However this concept has been around for ages and the only company to actually use it in any meaningful way is Microsoft. (Word has "smart tags" which recognize dates, phone numbers, etc in documents and allows you to create calendar events, address book records etc.)
- sjmulder, on 05/03/2008, -3/+1Apple Mail does this, too. Pretty nifty, too bad though that it doesn't work well in Dutch.
- richbradshaw, on 05/03/2008, -0/+2Wikipedia does use this in the about boxes for people.
- displacednomad, on 05/03/2008, -0/+2But I think we've shied away from it because that has always meant additional tagging of our content. Who really wants to write a paragraph of information and then go back to apply appropriate tags? But with the newer wysiwyg editors (like what you have with your email accounts, with cute buttons and everything) tagging can be as simple as highlighting text and pressing the button, such as highlighting "923-2323" and hitting the telephone icon.
  To use your example above, imagine throwing a party for friends, and clicking on their names and searching across all their online profiles to see what kind of food they like. Then your wonderful browser would make a short list of it, and you could throw a party based on your friends food preferences. "Everyone likes Indian food? Perfect, that's what I'm making for the party."
  - zackkitzmiller, on 05/03/2008, -1/+1By "making" you clearly mean "ordering."
- raynevandunem, on 05/03/2008, -0/+1http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaW ...
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Mediawiki
  
  It's an extension to MediaWiki, the server software used for running Wikipedia and multiple other wikis. This one (SMW) tends to place particular emphasis on tagging specific words in wiki pages with a relational wikitext syntax so that the data can be extracted for any specific or trivial purpose by any particular application. Don't see much else as far as additional visible features are concerned, and I personally think that there should be more tangible reasons or persuasions for adopting something like SMW as de-facto.
  
  On a more general note: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_wiki
- SteveMax, on 05/03/2008, -1/+8Symantec web would suck. The browser would keep running all the time, be impossible to uninstall, use up 50% of your available CPU power and RAM, and make you unable to use anything in your computer if you close it.
  - joesmeat, on 05/04/2008, -0/+2I think you're describing Vista.
  - Philluminati, on 05/06/2008, -0/+1It can be either tagged on the server side (just a bit more XML, but hardly a lot) or processed on the client side, in which case it wouldn't be more effort than a Firefox plugin
thomasprebble, on 05/03/2008, -0/+5They say the idea of a semantic web could be used in fields as far reaching as politics. Just imagine how easy it would be to find out if your local MP campaigning against environmentalism was actually linked to the petroleum industry.
- danconia, on 05/03/2008, -0/+2Oh I'm sure net "neutrality" will give the government a way to keep that from happening... wouldn't want the public to know what's *really* going on.
kirakun, on 05/03/2008, -3/+13Huh? Content on digg? Looing for content on digg is like looking for a comb on a bald man.
- Myztry, on 05/03/2008, -1/+2My kids need their hair tidied.. okay... :)
- shitthisfook, on 05/05/2008, -0/+1What if he wants to comb his pubic hairs
jbetancourt, on 05/03/2008, -0/+1The Semantic Web is a means to allow machine based access to information. Right now the only way to access information is to to full-text search web pages and apply complex parsing. The obvious example of this are search engines, of course. So SW makes the web into a distributed database and distributed schema, not just of links but of data too. Starts the transition from web 2.0 to web 3.0.

Sure its an old concept and XXX already some of this. Semantic Web, of which RDFa is a small part, has bigger ambitions. But, who knows, it could happen.
thetanbark, on 05/03/2008, -0/+9If developers change to strictly semantic web markup, how much easier is it going to be for spam bots and spiders to gather all kinds of info about me? Shouldn't be too hard if we tell them <email>emailme@mydomain.com</email>, as HTML5 would even suggest...
- Squeeself, on 05/03/2008, -0/+1Not that it's hard for them now to harvest email addresses...My favorite is people hiding their email adddress like "email at email dot com." Like that's REALLY gonna help stop a spambot from harvesting the email. Since it's happening, there's no reason to make it harder for more legitimate uses.
  
  Not that I think semantic web is all that useful.
- BlackAdderIII, on 05/21/2008, -0/+1What does the syntax have to do with the content?
  
  Not adopting standards in markup is probably not the best way to combat email harvesting.
BobCFC, on 05/03/2008, -1/+21How about we get search working first?
TheMachine1, on 05/03/2008, -5/+10Glad to see Digg is not anti-semantic. That other tech news site is nothing but nazis.
- dxgg, on 05/03/2008, -1/+4I can't decide if that was funny or just lame.
  - joepeppitone, on 05/03/2008, -3/+2i've decided which one you are
philodygmn, on 05/03/2008, -0/+1I disagree meta-resource managment won't happen without money. Case in point being Wikipedia. One day, people will wake up to the fact that the infrastructure for this sort of thing is worth supporting even if it's not profitable in and of itself.
joeanon, on 05/03/2008, -0/+1Semantic technology is awesome, but today's offerings are all but useless compared to what we could really do.

This standard will be immature.
beaunewcomb, on 05/03/2008, -0/+1Sounds like it will help make things a little more organized in theory, but I think it will also be easy to spoof the content of an article for spamming purposes..
Whammo, on 05/03/2008, -2/+1And I always thought Digg was anti-semantic...
applepro, on 05/03/2008, -0/+2Actually... the "Search" is one of the poorest implementations of anything I've seen online from a "big website". That should be their A-1 priority.

But if they're going to do something and it seems like this semantic web standard stuff looks very top-level, they might as well implement it right.
- DarkSim905, on 05/04/2008, -0/+0What's so bad about Digg's search exactly?
synystar, on 05/04/2008, -0/+1RDFa is definitely something that is needed on digg. "Read da ***** article."
ilgaz, on 05/04/2008, -0/+1before such things, why not adopt OpenID system first? Perhaps people will choose YOUR openID instead of using others such as Yahoo openID.
I mean, if you are afraid that nobody will open account. In fact, Digg account login is so simple and streamed so people can use things like openid.digg.com/ilgaz for instance on other sites.
Vagari, on 05/05/2008, -0/+1Ummmm... Microformats anyone?
cope, on 05/10/2008, -0/+1this stuff doesn't work, people just use it to spam... hence the low quality of most meta tags.
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Digg makes official its adoption of Semantic Web standard

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