Content is king, an annoyingly loud, ostentatious, and over-bearing king. I’m hunting for a new car and I’m drowning in content: auto-makers’ websites, reviews, test reports, consumer opinions, and dealer listings. I’ve retrieved hundreds of pages in total, costing me countless hours of time. The amount of useful information I’ve extracted is minuscule by comparison. I care about a few precious details of safety, fuel economy, and the overall value. The rest is just noise.

What makes this car shopping so painful is that the content is not organized based on my interests. It’s organized by the publishers. Unfortunately, reading about cars is not the task at-hand. I simply want to find my dream vehicle (if I can call a safe, economical, and value-priced vehicle a dream.)

In my last post, I argued that we need to stop organizing content for people and start helping them consume content to get tasks done. Semantic data figures prominently in that. Today, semantics is a second-class citizen, subordinate to content. But in this new world of task-oriented information, semantics may challenge content as the king of our online attention.

(more…)