Interestingly enough, just the other day I was playing with Google squared, the big G’s response to Wolfram Alpha, and thinking how it had soooooo many possibilities – it literally made me think in new directions – and yet, sadly, it fell way short of my desires to actually return meaningful results.
And then today, in my inbox, I find a notice about how Google bought Metaweb yesterday, and I got so excited I had to blog about it.
If you haven’t ever heard of Metaweb, watch this video:
Google says:
“Over time we’ve improved search by deepening our understanding of queries and web pages. The web isn’t merely words—it’s information about things in the real world, and understanding the relationships between real-world entities can help us deliver relevant information more quickly.”
Relationships has been the soap box that I’ve been pulling out to speak from a lot over the last 2 years. With my interest in semantics and web 3.0 I’ve realized that relationships is where it’s at for a very long time.
Relationships between people is what the social structure in web 2.0 is all about – relationships between words and themes is what LSI is all about – and relationships between entities is where web 3.0 HAS TO GO.
For those of you who have been Theme Zoom fans for a while, you can think of themes and silos as a kind of pre-cursor to entities – and rest assured in the knowledge that all your hard work to build your websites using themes and silos will not become obsolete as Google starts to implement the changes that are bound to come in adopting Metaweb technology. You will probably have to add some references to their entities, but you will not have to restructure your website or rework your content.
In truth, I’ve been dubious that a Tim Berners-Lee vision could actually be accomplished due to the sheer amount of cooperation that would have to happen to allow this morphing to take place, but in reading Google’s blog, they said:
“In addition to our ideas for search, we’re also excited about the possibilities for Freebase, Metaweb’s free and open database of over 12 million things, including movies, books, TV shows, celebrities, locations, companies and more. Google and Metaweb plan to maintain Freebase as a free and open database for the world. Better yet, we plan to contribute to and further develop Freebase and would be delighted if other web companies use and contribute to the data. We believe that by improving Freebase, it will be a tremendous resource to make the web richer for everyone. And to the extent the web becomes a better place, this is good for webmasters and good for users.”
and I suspect that if anyone can, it would be Google who would manage to wrangle participation from folks, especially those interested in ranking on that search engine 
Sue Bell and the Theme Zoom Team
