The Semantic Web is Meaning Less (at least to search engines…)
When recently launching my SemaWorx SEO and Internet Marketing Shop here in Leipzig, I had been carefully considering, where to put the focus of the work, in order to prevent ending up in the same pot with all the other more or less notable SEOs in the area.
So I initially thought it to be a great idea to deploy my existing experience of semantic data logic for search engine optimization. This has become increasingly popular lately with the rise of RDFa and adoption of commerce ontologies like Good Relations through major search engines.
As experience in this field is not easily replicable, the knowledge about and deployment of Semantic Web technology could have made for a great USP.
But after playing around with these fresh options for a while and much to my disappointment, I discovered that (at least a the time of this writing), most relevant search engines, including Google, do not actually parse the semantic markup, but rather string-search it with the rest of the respective page.
What may sound quite reasonable from an efficiency or productivity point of view, unfortunately also misses an important opportunity derived from the triple-nature of RDF data: To match and co-relate information across different domains, which could help filter a lot of false positives out of search engine results. This leads to strange feature restrictions, like the ability to recognize only one product per page, which makes semantic markup rather useless e.g. for catalogues or category overviews.
That said, apart from the early island solutions like Intel’s Mash Maker, by now not a lot of companies have successfully managed to use structural data of semantically rich webpages to co-relate it with content from other domains.
Nonetheless, I’ll dare to offer semantically enhanced SEO services, which we create for use with Google’s Universal Search or Yahoo!’s Monkey Business, as fully query-able semantic data endpoints, so not not only search robots, but any application willing to use and promote the outcomes will be able to use these in real time.
Sounds intersting ? Wanna give it a try ? Then you are very welcome to get in touch with us via the Semantic Search Engine Optimization site.
This time the public event includes an update by Ines Falkenhan on Family Affair: Balancing Family And Work for working parents living in the Leipzig area.
In case you are not from here or don’t know the Radisson, this map will assist you finding us. The facility exists right opposite from the well-known Augustusplatz.
Book Review: Never Eat Alone — with Keith Ferrazzi
Do you know, what it’s like to drive a real Ferrazzi ? Well, as far as this book is concerned (with a German Edition available as well), this Ferrazzi (model "Keith") clearly is driven by making both a connection and a difference.
Once you got used to sentences starting with expressions such as "networking super-hubs like me" , you find this book to be a suprisingly complete guide to enhancing your very own interpersonal skills — always one connection at a time. At the beginning Keith Ferrazzi convincingly explains, why he believes reaching out to other people and offering your help being together the most effective (if not the only) way towards a happy as well as successful life, constantly telling examples from his own experience. You learn how to define your personal goals and then identify the right people to help you complete it. Then one gets instructions on how to get into the right mindset, while avoiding common pitfalls. Afterwards, Keith Ferrazzi teaches you the trade of how to successfully making connections, from in-advance research on the people you would like to meet, over pre-warming "cold" phone calls and adding meaning to small talk by showing some vulnerability, to detailed advice on how to make sure, the people you once contacted won’t forget about you, while you still successfully survive the information flood caused by phone calls, appointments and contacts you gather. Then you proceed to the advanced concepts, containing guides to mastering typical business scenarios: You learn to systematically expand your network by e.g. finding "anchor tenants" out of other social groupings, getting most out of conferences by adding your own events and finally, well, not eating alone by inviting other people for dinner. Here it has to be said, that Keith Ferrazzi knows the art of pulling together the right people inside out and that his single chapter of tips on running successful dinner parties probably makes up for more substance than some entire magazines devoted to solely that topic.
Though some of the author’s advice may need some adjustment to your particular cultural environment, following his guidelines building your own brand by neither giving in to hubris, nor getting boring, will inevitably allow you to get along with other people in your own life much more joy- and successfully.
Want to give Ferrazzi’s practical approaches a try ? Take this video as an example:
Unfortunately the book-accompanying website has been replaced by the one of its reportedly even more renowned successor Who’s got your back ?. But it’s still worth a visit, especially for Keith Ferrazzi’s blog, containing a multitude of valuable networking tips (many of which "never eat alone" discusses in greater detail…), and its community section where you can connect to and exchange with many other people practicing Ferrazzi-style business networking.
Checkout Re-Visited: Step 6 — when the deal is done; The ORDER SUCCESSFUL Page
If one would really want to add use to this page (thereby exeeding its functionality beyond the one of a simple check mark…) probably adding some of the following features could do the job:
Display a copy of the order just taken.
Tell the customer what the next steps towards the fulfillment of the order are going to be and and how long these are being assumed to take. Let the customer know when he will be going to hear from you for the next times.
If possible provide a clickable URL to a page where your customer can query the processing status of his order and allow him to make final adjustments there (this will save you money in the end).
Provide your customer with a simple way to keep track of his order. Allow for printing out all of this information. Peace of mind is a really important issue here and not to be underestimated.
Facilitate later reference as well as re-orders by including appropriate links and materials with a downloadable version, as well as sending a copy of all information on this page to the customer’s e-mail account.
That’s it, an overview of possible outcomes to be created by developments currently underway on the web. Those of you accustomed to catching up with the latest developments on the web, will likely have heard of one or the other approach, though what in my eyes has been missing by far is a combined usage scenario for for all of these ideas.
My intent has been to show both potential and side-effects coming with some of the latest developments that are growing from nowhere today, but may soon have serious impact on how we live our lives online.
You hopefully enjoyed the trip alongside the cutting edge of what is already possible today, let’s see which of these ideas are going to successfully make it to ease life on the worlds online markets and which one we will possibly not appreciate being offered us with our own online purchases within the next years.
Checkout Re-Visited: Step 5 — check it out before you check-out: the Review-and-Confirm Page
Probably the only page you really will not want to dispose from checkout at all. It offers an overview of all the products you chose, collects the billing and shipping details you provided and displays them alongside with the vendor’s business terms just before you finally place the order.
It’s a bit like putting everything in your basket onto the cashier’s conveyor while potentially realizing you missed something that wasn’t on you shopping list or that you must have left your wallet on the desk at home.
Online however, the review page also is the most reliable way to compare prices and shipping options. Usually you will love to save or print this, since as a customer this is your only chance to really document (and therefore prove afterwards) at which conditions the deal has originally been made, without having to rely on the seller’s order confirmation e-mail (if there should be any).
Unfortunately most webpages of this kind are not made to be printed or even saved at all — you will know this if you ever tried. When printing, the screen layout will likely be scattered across multiple half-printed pages, often missing out on the actual order data. And saving (if possible at all, without unexpectedly quitting the order process) will potentially leave you up with an HTML-file accompanied by a mess of images and other media files, often in separate folders. Not exactly an efficient way to keep records.
In a time when (as in Germany for instance) electronic signatures are required by law for digital invoicing and peer-confirmations are being sent and saved from every blog post or chat you make:
How can it be so hard to just grab the data of the electronic contract you are about to close and subscribe to its follow ups, in order to archive them, just as if they were a blog-feed or podcast ?
There already are public standards like ebXML, RDF, SSE et al. to do exactly this kind of work. But none of them have been implemented yet to ease average Joe’s or even SME-employed users’ everyday processes. By the time of writing this article, successful implementations of these technologies are only known from big corporations like Boeing, Microsoft, SAP, Vodafone or Volkswagen/Audi. Nevertheless, with them the approach is praised as creating huge gains in fields like knowledge management and procurement efficiency.
As the implementation is – technically spoken – supposed to be hardly a miracle, divulgence of these approaches probably may increase with the growing availability of appropriate coding kits and documentation for developers that are looking to implement these concepts.
And of course, as more shopping outlets start thinking more seriously about new ways to make online purchasing a more pleasant experience for their customers.
SemaWorker is the complementary weblog to the SemaWorx project, dealing with the capabilities of Semantic Web XML technology to solve everyday challenges. The work is mainly taking place in Leipzig, Germany.
I'm Bardo Nelgen and in charge of the SemaWorx project management. [ e-mail me ]
, you find this book to be a suprisingly complete guide to 
