Technology solutions which support microformats should already play well with this new development. And, more generally, those publishers and content providers who have been taking care over maintaining their metadata will be in pole position to unlock the new Google search options and snippets features which can be enabled by using RDFa.

Similarly Wolfram Alpha and the forthcoming Google Squares both depend heavily on metadata – and the most effective way of supplying this metadata will be through using RDFa.

I think the brand issue is a really important part of the bigger question of trust and provenance in the semantic web. And although content providers can (and should) use this mechanism to add brand context to their metadata, there is no guarantee that this information will be used by Google, Wolfram or anyone else for that matter.

On the semantic web central control disappears; each application gets to choose exactly which pieces of data are processed and displayed to the end user. Unless brand context is recognised as important it will fall by the wayside.

Richard.

Interesting post – and definitely another important challenge for the publishing industry in the battle between paid for/free disclosure of content.

Is there a tech solution that will allow the content providers to play the RDFa game to their advantage? Couldn’t publishers use this opportunity to add brand context to their search results, ensure the users are aware of the quality of the resource, the authors status, the timing of the publication etc?

The range of filters in Google’s ‘Search Options’ is too limited to fulfil the needs of specialist audiences (see this Google post introducing the feature: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/more-search-options-and-other-updates.html), but gives us a powerful user-interface suite of pre-learned interface behaviours to include in our own sites: continuity in the search and discovery experience will make our resources easier to user, and therefore more desirable.

I’m not up to speed yet with the development requirement and costs in this area, but it seems that this is an inevitable new ‘doorway’ into content, and publishers have an opportunity to use this to their advantage by creating a supportive, quality, branded experience here.

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

Louise