the reflexions insider

In the ever-shifting landscape of internet titans, the Microsoft/Yahoo! power struggle is looking more like a teenage soap opera, albeit one with billions of dollars and control of the #2 internet search position in play. But what’s more, the side effects of the struggle are starting to point to a power play for dominance of the burgeoning world of the semantic web.

Besides the posturing and very public nature of both companies’ actions, what’s most interesting — and sometimes most telling — are the investments, partnerships, and acquisitions that have been unfolding since the saga began.

One of the more recent moves was Microsoft’s acquisition of the semantic search firm Powerset, itself coming on the heels of Yahoo!’s recent announcement of its open search platform, providing some support for semantic data to third party developers.

The Powerset acquisition is more than bet-hedging against losing out on its bid for Yahoo!. What Microsoft has started to understand is that the next killer app of the web will be found in the nascent semantic technologies and standards that are only starting to take shape.

Companies large and small are starting to invest big money in semantic web research and development. But if Microsoft can spend big money buying their way [...]

Image via Wikipedia

When you’re in the business of working with technology — in our case at Reflexions Data, building web applications — it’s easy to forget about your roots.

The culture of web development is rooted in a unique blend of other more forbidable cultural legacies: those of digital art, interface design, software development, and information architecture.

The web as an experimental intersection of art and technology was best represented in its early years by publications like Wired Magazine and Mondo 2000. Editorials by technologists like Stewart Brand, Bruce Sterling, Kevin Kelly, and Nicholas Negroponte appeared alongside expositions on cyberpunk, digital art, and virtual reality. Experimental digital artists jostled with computer scientists, techno-utopians, and post-humanists in their attempts to express the shifting landscape of the late 20th century. These trends seemed so fundamental as to provoke Wired magazine in 1998 to predict a 20-year “long boom” that would result in worldwide “hyperwealth” and a new egalitarian golden age of cultural and technological achievement (only two years later Wired’s outlook would be somewhat less optimistic, the magazine itself having been sold off to Condé [...]