As we enter more deeply into the recession (yes, we are already in one), IT spending patterns will change.  The New York Times recently ran an interesting article interviewing several high-level IT executives in large companies and how they expect to spend in the economic downturn.

I have some of my own thoughts to add to this discussion.

A few technology sectors that I think will flourish in an economic downturn include:

• Analytics, as it helps to optimize your business and squeeze more profit from your existing business and existing customers.
• Software as a Service (SaaS), and hosted solutions, because there is a much lower capital expenditure involved and fewer budgetary hurdles to leap.
• Collaboration and remote meeting products (like Telepresence), which reduce travel costs.
• Contracting and outsourcing, because it is much cheaper to outsource work than to hire an employee.
• Cloud and grid computing services, if they get their act together and come out with a comprehensive and easy-to-use package, could take a lot of money away from the Data Center sector.  The upfront costs are much lower and it's much easier to start small and then scale later, and it doesn't require staff to manage and maintain it--a great benefit when money is tight.

Areas that will suffer:

• Hardware and equipment manufacturers, including (maybe even especially) Apple.  Rarely does a computer or a cell phone get replaced because it simply breaks down and stops working.
• Microsoft--if you thought Vista upgrade sales were bad, just wait for the next release, which will come in the midst of a deep recession.  The lowered pace of new system sales won't help, either.  I think Microsoft has seen its peak and will only move lower from here.
• Online advertising, because many of the largest online advertisers are now barreling towards bankruptcy (like CountryWide Financial, Citibank, and home builders)
• Pure Web 2.0 plays like Twitter and Digg will either die out or be bought for pennies on the dollar compared to what they would have commanded a year ago.  Especially if they rely on ad revenue, or plan to.  Business plans and real revenue streams will be at a premium for the next three to five years.

I should add that the international market crash experienced Monday and Tuesday, and the subsequent bounce when Bernanke fed his crack to the crack fiend, has definitively disproven this "decoupling" theory--that an economic flu in America will not be contagious to the rest of the world.  We are still joined at the hip, and in fact the rest of the world may get beaten down much worse than we will be here.  Don't count on overseas spending to pick up slack for the slowdown State-side.  If you do, I only have one thing to say to you:  "Sold to YOU!"

Tried Pownce last night.  I like the idea of realtime broadcast messaging like Twitter and Pownce, but not the implementations.  Found it to be clunky, hard to use, and even harder to syndicate properly.  All I wanted to do was publish a realtime feed on the sidebar of my blog, and I have not found a way to do this yet without mucking around with Yahoo Pipes and digging around for ugly widgets.

Verdict?

Ok, time to man up, face the music, and see how I fared with my predictions for 2007 (from a little over a year ago).  It sucks because I was REALLY close on a few of them, a few slid into 2008 by only a couple of days.  Oh well, it is what it is... here we go.

• "RSS will gain mass acceptance".  I could say that syndication has gained mass acceptance, since people are now pretty much used to following friends on FaceBook and Twitter, but then I screwed myself and said RSS, which itself is still pretty geeky (that'll teach me to be specific when I make predictions :).  Fail.
• "Customized feed aggregators will become a vitally important tool for filtering and finding relevant information".  This one is iffy too.  I think this one is poised to catch on a little bit more in 2008 with the concept of Lifestreaming coming on hard, but the launch of tools such as Yahoo Pipes has made cutting and splicing feeds and building custom aggregators a pretty commonplace thing to do in the tech world.  I'll give myself a Pass on this one.
• "RSS and ATOM will continue to see more uses."  You can pretty much get a feed on anything at this point, including people, so I'll definitely give myself a Pass on this one.
• "'Realtime' will be the buzzword of the year".  Well, it kind of was, but not in the way I was expecting.  The explosion of micro-blogging tools like Twitter meant that syndication was used in a much more realtime way, but I had intended this prediction to be about making realtime data available from closed systems.  That didn't happen.  Fail.
• "Someone will develop a true meme-tracker", using semantic text analysis.  Nope, surprisingly this didn't happen either.  Fail.  (I now think that this will only happen via Semantic Web technology--which it will eventually.)
• "Identity theft will take on a new form: it will start to mean creating a false representation of someone else online."   Well, this didn't really happen.  The only instance I can really think of this happening is with Fake Steve Jobs, but he came right out and admitted he was fake.  I'm honestly pretty surprised this didn't happen with the presidential race, it would be super easy to use guerrilla Internet tactics and misrepresent somebody online.  Anyway, this didn't pan out (that I know of)--Fail.
• "Content producers will start to realize that people are getting used to consuming entertainment directly from the Internet"  I think I nailed this one.  Internet entertainment is a no-brainer.  Networks are starting to stream their shows from their Web sites, and Internet-only shows are popping up every day.  Pass.
• "MySpace will become un-cool".  While this definitely happened--FaceBook is now the place to be--I also said that I thought Orkut would take its place.  Well, that did NOT happen.  But it was a tanget to my larger prediction, so I'm going to give myself a Pass.
• "User data will be recognized as a priceless nugget of gold".  Well, the beginnings of this materialized in 2007, but I can't really say it got fully into the public psyche until Mr. Scoble had his little debacle with getting locked out of FaceBook for scraping his data out.  I missed this one literally by two days (it happened on January 2nd if I remember correctly), but I'll take my medicine.  Fail.
• "Offshore hosting will become a major source of revenue in countries currently known for their secrecy in banking."  This still intrigues me, but I have to admit it was a punt.  Fail.
• "AJAX will be fleshed out and new development models will emerge that make the division between browser and server more seamless."  While AJAX development toolkits have definitely continued to mature and become more sophisticated, the bit about being more seamless between browser and server didn't materialize.  I still have a grand scheme for this which I haven't seen touched on anywhere else, but for now it remains locked in my head (and on this blog).  Fail.
• "URI's will become a universally accepted identifier for everything."  Well this one was just dumb.  Not in concept, but in timeframe; it was way too amibitious.  It's what the Semantic  Web is all about (although I didn't realize it at the time); I now think that this won't happen for another 3 to 5 years.  Fail.
• "Downloading and streaming media will start to gain mass acceptance as a content delivery channel"  We've seen a lot of progress in this area with products such as Vudu, Apple TV, and NetFlix's streaming service.  I'd call it a good start.  Pass.
• "Running applications in the cloud will be more cost effective than building out a data center."  I don't think this will be true until Amazon finally launches it's SimpleDB service this year.  Other grid computing services are still running rough.  Fail.
• "The ability to run in the cloud will be one of the most important components of new projects".  I guess you need the capability first eh?  Fail.
• "Microsoft will continue to lose development platform market share."  I must admit that I am too lazy to go do another development platform popularity contest (it was a lot of work!), and so I have no idea if this is true or not.  My gut says it is, but I'm going to forgo grading myself on this one.
• "Apple will release an iPod with a touch-screen interface and I will buy it immediately."  Pass.  On both counts :)

Final score:  6 out of 16.  Only 40%.  Ouch.  This year I resolve to make fewer predictions.

One of the interesting debates from the Semantic Web meetup this month, which has stuck in my head ever since, is the argument over whether it's worth it to try to compile a master, global, schema--ontology--vocabulary--whatever you want to call it.

I could tell that the academic side of the crowd was again' it, but the business side of the crowd was 'fer it.

Guess which side will win?

The analogy that was given (sorry don't remember who said it) was that a pig farmer might use a different concept of "a time" than I might.  So 3PM Pig-Farming Time might equal 2PM Jason Time.  (If I got the analogy wrong I'm sure I'll be corrected, but it was something like that.)  Or, one that kept coming up as a real-world example was that a transaction has totally different meanings across industries.

I think that thinking along those lines is misguided.  You can't define everything in the world, but you can sure define a lot of it.  That's what businesses end up spending a lot of their time doing--defining their world.  I am intimately familiar with this, as it is one of the biggest problems that we struggled with at Latigent (now Cisco).  Company A will define "revenue" as one thing, Company B will define it as something else. 

This isn't an either/or proposition.

You can give them both definitions, they really don't care..  This is an instance where you really can have your cake and eat it too.  As long as both values are populated, they will take the one they need.

To me, this is one of the huge value-adds of the Semantic Web.  You can go out and see if somebody has already developed a schema for what you're trying to build, and if they have you don't have to write it yourself.  And your app will automatically inter-operate with theirs, in some areas.  It's really cool.

Every company out there should really be using available schemas as much as possible--get into the Semantic Web game early and often.  All you have to do is start adopting a standard schema, taking as much as possible from what's already publicly available.

Why NOT build a giant global schema?  Isn't that what the ontology-building stuff is all about anyway?  It's not like it all has to be from the same place.  If I come up with the best definition of a "location", because mine includes height above sea level and active quantum dimension, you're free to use that in your application for "location" and develop some new schema pieces for the custom stuff you're building.  Eventually the global schema will just kind of materialize out of the best (well, technically probably the most POPULAR) pieces of publicly-available schema out there anyway.

Heh, boy I can't even imagine what this is going to do to the business intelligence space eventually.  Totally demolish and rebuild it, is my guess.

Well, today was interesting.  We saw the markets open locked limit-down, as the futures markets predicted.  To head off a straight-up crash, the Fed rode in with a 75 basis point cut.  This made the pump monkeys happy because they do not understand how credit works and how it is related to the stock markets, and the markets ended down only slightly. 

Think about that for a second.  The Fed made a massive, record rate cut, and the S&P 500 STILL closed down from the previous day.  I'll bet they're trying to spin this as a buying opportunity on CNBC.

The cut makes no difference, and I'm pretty sure Bernanke knows it.  The Fed will probably cut interest rates all the way down to zero (or near it), and it will still make no difference.  There is no one who actually WANTS the money right now, and so cutting the Fed Fund rate has no effect on inflation or anything else for that matter, except for the fragile psyches of the CNBC crowd.

There is still fraud and deception in our banking system that needs to be flushed out--companies playing games with off-balance sheet level 3 assets, banks still giving out mortgages without the proper money structure, and talk of bailing out the people and companies who impaled themselves on unwise investments.  Until these shenanigans are cut out of the system, it will remain impossible to properly price the risk of an investment.  Until it's possible to properly price the risk of an investment the commercial credit markets will remain locked up, and the Fed rate will be pretty much irrelevant.

A big bubble has been blown by fraudulent investment practices including sub-prime lending and asinine credit ratings.  It must pop before growth can begin again, and the longer these games are played the bigger the "pop" is going to be.  The filth must be purged.  Hopefully this whole exercise will help restore some honesty and common sense to our financial system in the end.

Futures indicate that the markets may OPEN lock-limit down tomorrow (Tuesday).  The marking-to-market of many previously off-balance sheet holdings begins tomorrow.  The indexes have violated some key technical support levels in the past week, and there's nothing holding them up from below for a while.  We seem to be watching a market crash.  Hope you're not in stocks.

(The photo above is actually of nano-wire explosions, but I thought it was pretty cool looking, and bears an uncanny resemblance to the U.S. economy right now.)

Let's hope the government does the right thing and forces these banks that mispriced risk to take it in the pants, instead of delivering the spanking to taxpayers and the Dollar.  These banks need to be forced to sell more shares to raise funds, if they can--their investors will suffer from share dilution and being invested in a crappy business, but better them than me--*I* didn't invest in them.

It’s fascinating to me to follow the comments on my recent posts about the semantic Web, because I can kind of watch people retracing the same mental steps I took before I really understood it.

Rex Marzke left a really good comment to my last post, and one that kind of pinpoints the same spot I got stuck at.  And I think all the semantic Web guys out there need to pay attention to this, because you REALLY don’t give this aspect enough love:

"IMHO, it's important to note that the World Wide Web can never be 'replaced' by the 'Semantic Web', because the Web is more than just "data, information, and knowledge" (Tim Berners-Lee vision). The Web is also about functions: no amount of semanticism (?) will accomplish the use cases of "renew my driver's license", "comment on this blog"; or "chat with friends" (however, I feel the similar use cases of "retrieve the expiration date of my direver's license from the Department of Motor Vehicles"; "get the latest blog entries from Jason Kolb"; and "show my chat history with Jason Kolb" are achieveable with Semantic Web).

You’re speaking my language Rex.  This was my frustration for a long time too.  I saw these guys talking about marking up data, and the programmer part of me would push back saying “but hey, wait… you’re not making it any easier to CREATE and UPDATE data—to write an application around it—this needs to tie into a programming model of some kind to be useful”. 

The key is that the foundation of the semantic Web is that objects are identified by URI’s.  I will probably catch flack from the purists for talking about it this way, but if you really think about it as an object at the URI, and not just some data describing an object, you can start using it in application development .  The semantic Web crowd really only talks about reading data from those objects.  What I haven’t really heard anyone talking about much… well, at all that I can remember… is that you can also expose object services from those URI’s, which means you can build a service-oriented architecture around it.  My applications can not only look at data on your server, but I can also use the objects living in memory there because you can tell me where their services are.  All you have to do is add an annotation which says (“To renew your driver’s license just use this service, located right here.  Here’s the WSDL file so you can figure out how to use it”)  That’s all it really needs to do, but that’s the big part I was missing.

Once your objects can point to services that can be used to manipulate them, you can do all the cool stuff that Rex was talking about.  Your friend can expose a service so that you can shoot him a message, and you can do the same.  I can send your blog post a message that “here, I want to post this comment.”  And your blog post can even know WHO is sending the comment, and decide whether or not it wants to let it post based on if they know you or not.  (Tim Berners-Lee is doing this today on his blog--thanks for the heads-up, Kingsley :) 

For some reason from all the things I’ve read about the semantic Web, it came off as sounding as some way to try to build a better Google.  That’s not it.  Well, it can be, but I don’t really care too much about that.  Google works just fine for what I use it for, I’ll probably use it forever to find out what the world thinks about a topic.  I like it.  But my *applications*, they could sure use a global database.  It kind of turns the entire Net into one giant distributed application platform—pretty cool stuff.

I am not sure why this capability is not talked about more, except for the fact that a killer application has not come out with yet to make people say “wow, how is it doing that?” and which makes you bother to look into it.

Just spotted a post from Richard McManus where recommends a report which uses the term "Web 4.0".  Are you kidding me?  However good and/or interesting the ideas might be there, I have only one thing to say about that phrase:

I think what we're seeing is pure laziness and unoriginality in naming and branding at this point.

I got an interesting comment from Edwin Stauthamer on my last post about my little epiphany about the semantic Web: 

When I saw the title of your post I thought I finally found a post that could explain what the semantic web is.  Instead of that I read a post about how you found out the fact that the semantic web consists of some technologies and insights you already used and know about for years.

I think this comment is interesting for a few reasons:  It’s pretty obvious that Edwin has heard of the semantic Web, but has very little practical idea about what it is, and also that he’s not aware of what it DOES.  Does is the most interesting part to me, because the “is” is just a means to an end.  I also think that Edwin's view is typical of a lot of people's, definitely very similar to mine up until recently.

So I’m going to take a crack at this.  I know that my definition probably won’t match what you’ll see if you look it up in Wikipedia, but I’ll give you my impression of the core ideas—in probably an unusually object-oriented way, because that’s how my brain works.  Going from simplest to most complex, here's how I view the functionality of the Semantic Web:

• Identifying data objects using URI’s.  This is one of the core tenets of the semantic Web, if not THE core tenant.  It enables everything else.
• Showing objects as they need to be shown.  This means that when you request an object’s data, you get its data.  When you request a visual representation, you get a visual representation.  Same object, usable for different purposes.  (Technical enabler:  content accept HTTP headers)
• The ability to either use property types defined by other people for your objects, or to make up your own brand-new ones if you prefer.  The properties that you use from other places are capable of interoperating with other data on the Web even if the rest of your object doesn’t match.  (Technical enabler:  RDF)
• The ability to define some pretty complex classes with some pretty specific structures. (Technical enabler:  OWL)
• The ability to expose object methods.  This one gets lost in the shuffle, but essentially what it means is that you can set the property of an object so that it points to a Web service endpoint of some type which is functionally equivalent to a method for the object method in a traditional object oriented programming language.  (Techinical enabler:  RDF, RDFS, OWL, SAWSDL and SA-REST)
• The ability to create associations between objects, even to the point that something (probably software) reading the data can see that data associated with one URI is really the same as data associated with another URI (for example, the entity which is referred to by <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Tim_Berners-Lee> is the same as <http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/card#i>).  It also means that an object property can derive its value from data associated with another URI.  (Technical enabler:  HTTP)
• The ability to crawl through the node structure (data graph) to find data, discern information, and infer facts to understand what it all means (Technical enabler:  all of the above, plus query language and inference engines)

This is a gross oversimplification of things, and I probably butchered the terminology, but it’s what would have made me say “aha” when I saw it a month back.  This really doesn’t touch on how any of this is actually used (use cases), because there are just so many different ways that it would make your head spin.  The way to actually use all of these components could easily fill a book (and they have!)  I tend to think of it as distributed object-oriented programming on steroids, with a distributed database and a cherry on top.

Hope that answers your question a little better Edwin.

I admit it… I thought I got the semantic Web before, but I didn’t really.  I really got it just recently.

People have noticed that I haven’t blogged much (well, really not at all) for the past week. That's partly because I’ve been under some pretty tight deadlines at work lately, but also because I’ve also been feverishly working to fully grasp the semantic Web—not an easy task, for me at least.

Now that I’ve emerged on the other side of that process, the semantic Web seems like a pretty uncomplicated concept.  But boy, let me tell you, trying to wrap my brain around it was quite a challenge. I always knew what it was about from a high level—RDF, triples, vocabularies and all of that. I could just never mentally translate those ideas into solutions for the problems I was working on. And it’s interesting, because I can plainly see the vision now and, more importantly, how it fits into real-world problems.  I also see why it has been utterly failing at gaining any kind of traction outside of academia.

My little self-education process started when Kingsley Idehen invited me to a semantic Web get-together at MIT. We had emailed each other a few times before as a result of him finding my blog, and some posts I wrote about a year back about what is now being called data portability and distributed social networks. Since I’m now living in the Boston area, he invited me to MIT to meet in person and to get a sense of what the semantic Web ideas are truly about. The meeting was interesting, but I still came away unimpressed.

I kept in contact with Kingsley, peppering him with rapid-fire questions about semantic Web technology, technical details, and how it applies to my real-world problems, and he patiently answered all of my questions.  Thanks for the tutoring there man, appreciate it ;)  I thought I was pretty forward-thinking for writing about things like data portability and distributed social networks a year or two before they became hot stuff, but I now have to tip my hat to Kingsley and a few select members of the Semantic Web crowd and admit that they had this problem figured out back when I was still in college.

Now that I understand it, I realize that the semantic Web is some very, very cool stuff. It includes many of the ideas that I’ve been writing about for a long time without fully realizing that they were encapsulated by semantic Web ideas. Many of the things that I’ve been wanting to do for a while—data portability, being able to use objects distributed across the Web, global object identifiers, distributing software across networks, and using converged online identities—are achievable by the semantic Web, and pretty much all of the details have already been worked out. It was an epiphany for me when I realized this, and I have to say I’m extremely happy about it because I had been thinking that all of this was a new trail that had to be blazed. Turns out, all the heavy lifting has already been done, it’s just never really been used much.

I think the biggest problem the semantic Web is facing is the fact that most of the people who understand it come primarily from academia. Academia, to me, is plagued with a disease that I myself have suffered from my entire life—that is, the urge to build something just because it’s cool technologically, not because it’s useful in the real world. While something I built might impress the hell out of other computer geeks, and I’d be extremely proud of it, other people would look at it with mild interest and then quickly move on to something else, because they couldn’t see the value in it. I’d have to say that I owe a lot to the experience of building Latigent and to my former business partner Chris Crosby for helping me overcome that handicap. Having to build something with resale value in order to pay the bills this month has a way of grounding you in reality.  Having somebody else depending on you to build something of resale value, and remind you of that constantly, helps even more :)   I’d highly recommend every geek who thinks he’s hot stuff work closely with a sales-oriented person for a period of time if you really have a desire to make any money.

Besides suffering from being sold by people who don't really understand the real-world problems that it could fix, the semantic Web is plagued by a layer of jargon and terms that takes a significant investment of time to work through. While I understand that it’s important to clearly define what you’re talking about, people who are pushing the semantic Web are generally not very good at dumbing it down enough so that it’s easily palatable. It took me a good week of pretty focused research and having somebody there to bounce questions off of before I really got it--and I like to think that I'm a pretty technical guy. Now that I get it, I’m sure that there’s a better way to package these concepts so that more people understand how they relate to the problems they’re facing. The straightforward concepts that underlie the idea of the semantic Web are so obfuscated by the terminology and the W3C standards that come up when you google them that the mental barrier to entry is just way too high right now. The fact is, people will not adopt semantic Web ideas until semantic Web ideas are the ones that get returned when they search for a solution to their problem. In order to get to that point a radical change in the way these concepts are sold is needed.  That, and people like Kingsley, Danny Ayers, Tim Berners-Lee and others who are out there tirelessly promoting it as a real-world solution to real-world problems.

Kingsley has started calling the semantic Web the Linked Data Web, which is definitely a good step towards packing the idea in a more attractive way. I would personally prefer something more closely related to living, breathing objects (not literally, but in the sense that they can actually do things besides just being queried for data). I think that the semantic Web crowd is a little too focused on the data output side of things—all of the excitement seems to be around querying data, finding data, building a better Google, etc. That’s cool and all, but it seems to me that the real killer application for these ideas is allowing nodes on the Internet to find and then actually communicate with each other.  That key point almost seems lost in the shuffle to me. What is called the semantic Web today, with a nice healthy injection of service-oriented architecture, is going to be a revolution in computing. That's the bit that excites me—enabling an Internet where any node can communicate and interact with any other node on the network.

I'm looking forward to continuing to learn more about the details that have been painstakingly worked out over the years on the semantic Web, and at some point actually getting an opportunity to put them into practice.  I now have no doubt that the next earth-shattering applications, the revolutions in the way we use computers and the Internet, are going to spring from this movement, and I'm pretty excited about that.  All it needs is a little sex appeal and it'll catch on like wildfire.