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FEATURE

There are now such staggering technological advances emerging from the pipeline it seems churlish to deny we're at the start of an innovation J-curve. Kevin Johns breaks down the key developments and asks how they will attect the media, marketing and y^ advertising iandscape of tomorrow? y^:^^

Moore's Law, which describes a iong-term trend in the historyof computing hardware, decrees that everything doubles in performance every 18 months

multitude of potentially gafne• changing media innovations cur. rently reside in the world's laboratories, academic institutions and RûD departments. Some exist as emerging concepts - such as the 'semantic web' of data - others as hardware or software, quite probably filtering through after doing time in thefield as military applications. But aren't there always exciting gadgets and gizmos out there being experimented with? Well, yes. But what makes this particular point in time unique, is that when it comes to fundamentally shifting the media landscape - which in turn affects the rest of the marketing communications food chain - a simultaneous set of inter-reliant advancements are currently takingplace. Indeed, the combined whole of these may equate to far more than the sum of their individual parts. And the subsequent potential for changes to how media is consumed and communications targeted, makes for some mind-blowing times ahead. •

JUNE 26 2009 BANDT.COM.AU 19

THE SEMANTIC WEB
The Macquarie Dictionary defines semantic as "the systematicstudy of the meanings of words ..," Setthis against this reference, what the internet currently does and does not do, what a semantic web is, as weil as what it could potentially offer, should become clearer. The internet currently resembles a massive library with a retrieval system that allows your computer to fetch, view and pass-on any page you want. It uses html code as the language empowering machines to display each document.But the computers involved don't know the meaning of any of the words in those pages, they don't understand them. If you search 1 love Supergrass! for example, the computers involved in the one-miilion-plus hits that particular search generates don't know whether the related pages they hold correspond to the wife of a mobsterwho grassed on his mafia boss, a superior way to feed livestock, or aMySpace page about a band's album. Obviously, there are ways for the creator of a web page to make it clearer what that particular page is about - tagging of keywords, for instance. But if computers could understand the meaning of things you view and search, grasp what they were and how they might relate to each other via any possible data being made available online be it bands, brands, events,people, places, concepts, whatever - then the internet could potentially shift toward actively connecting people with relevant things across myriad platforms and allowing consumers to view correlations and summaries of things currently quite separate. Tim Berners Lee, the man who invented the world wide web, is at the forefront of a growing movement toward the semantic web of data. In an onlineinterview for Technology Review \ast year, he used the following scenario to help explain what it might mean to individuals: "The challenge of putting data on the web is that it will be about all kinds of things. "I might look at my financial data, then move it into my calendar view to see what I was doing when I wrote that cheque. Then maybe to better figure that out I will need to pull in somephotographs, from which I can go through to who was in that photo via my address book or through the organisational structure of that company. It's movement from one domain to another." So while today's internet is about documents, content and the accessing and sharing thereof, it may soon be about'things'and the semantic web of data allowing for a previously un-charted way of pulling once seemingly...