I think 2010 is going to be a good year for the semantic web — now better known as the linked data movement — especially as marketers become increasingly aware of its potential in their mission for online branding and relationship building.
It certainly seems that January will be off to a good start. Media Bistro is holding their next Web 3.0 Conference in Santa Clara on January 26-27, and a good number of the sessions are focused on the intersection of the data web with advertising and marketing. I’ve been invited to co-present with Krista Thomas (VP Marketing at Thomson Reuters, The Calais Initiative) on the topic Web of Data: Semantic Web in Marketing.
It’s been about 8 months since my presentation on data web marketing at last summer’s Semantic Technology Conference, and I’m looking forward to sharing many of the new developments that have happened in this space since then.
Other speakers at the event will include semantic advertising pioneers Amiad Solomon of Peer 39 and Brooke Aker of Expert System, as well as top folks from Google, Yahoo!, and Bing.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, MIT will be running its annual Independent Activities Period (IAP) during the month of January. The most exciting event to me for this IAP will be the Linked Data Product Development Lab that will be kicked off by Sir Tim Berners-Lee himself. Co-organized by my good friend K. Krasnow Waterman, the event will bring together 50 engineers and entrepreneurs from the extended MIT community for a 1-week intensive race to design and build a killer app based on linked data. It should be fascinating to see what emerges from that bootcamp — and I’d bet that one or more of those killer apps will be in the marketing domain.
