[lazyjones]

> Can anyone tell me what the semantic web does for me as a small-time publisher? Is it for search engines?

Yes, in practice it is mostly for bigger fish in the pond to easily identify and steal your content as needed.

For example, Google was using reviews from small competitors' sites in Google Shopping.

[abathur]

I think this is one of the big issues. The semantic information does make it easier for end users to find what they're looking for, but it also made denial of traffic possible.

In a lot of cases, the information was there to get eyeballs--so this is undesirable.

I guess if you don't really care about the eyeballs it can be "useful" for the big fish to pay most of the cost of serving the fraction of your server response that the end user was looking for...

[TeMPOraL]

So the root problem is actually that people care about the eyeballs. Nothing good comes from such incentive.

[abathur]

Maybe. Not sure what I think about that framing.

FWIW, I was picking "eyeballs" as something wider than just ad revenue. I think ads are the big share, but I'm sure there are people/orgs who want eyeballs for other reasons like ego/status, promote their company/brand/service/products, etc.

In some sense I think your framing is accurate, but I don't know about whether we'd be better off (have an informational ecosystem that is more net-positive?) without status chasers. Some share of them are inevitably gaming the system and diluting the ecosystem; others probably add net value in pursuit of eyeballs?

[TeMPOraL]

In context of semantic web, pursuit of the eyeballs is a problem because it makes the people owning/creating the data also want to be delivering that data directly to the users, and be the only ones allowing to do so. Semantic web works for the opposite goal - to allow the data to be automatically transmitted, processed and understood by software, and only perhaps eventually delivered in some form to end user.

As for building more net-positive information ecosystems, going for the eyeballs instead of actually caring to deliver good information isn't necessarily bad per se, just suboptimal. It's better for an eyeball-chasing site to publish some information, if otherwise that information wouldn't be published at all. But it's the eyeballs being your primary revenue source that will make you work hard to make the data as useless as possible outside your own publication - which leads to a very unhealthy information ecosystem.

[killface]

They don't even care about that. They care about their advertising revenue.