Industrialization is transforming our information economy, destroying old business models and creating new opportunities. The impact it will have on new media will make Web 2.0 seem tame in comparison. To understand this transformation and leverage it effectively, you need to parse the myths from reality.

Back in May 2009, I argued that industrialization is the most transformative force on the Internet. Human tasks are rapidly being displaced by machines. Factories of advanced technologies are being constructed to automate the manufacture of information and content. Predictably, there is much hand-wringing and righteous indignation expressed about this economic sea change. (more…)

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.

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The Web suffers a fundamental problem. Search is a symptom of it. Surfing is a symptom of it. Even the website itself is a symptom of it. The problem is that content is organized for you, in advance. Pre-packaged content is like ordering off the menu at a restaurant. Sometimes it’s convenient, sometimes it’s just what you want, but many times, it’s a difficult choice to make. The Web wants to become made-to-order.

Search certainly helps. If I want to order off the menu, it’s great to have access to lots of restaurants and lots of menus. User-generated content is great, too, if you like to cook. But I don’t want to access content or create content, I want to consume it to get stuff done.

No one retrieves content for the sake of retrieving content; they have a deeper purpose in mind. “I need to create a report for my boss.” “I need to plan a trip for my family.” “I want to be entertained.” We’re task-oriented. All the intervening steps amount to the bill, tax, and gratuity. And since most tasks require us to visit many different sites, the overall cost is extraordinary.

A made-to-order Web would spare us these costs. If you’re ordering a specific task, much of the legwork can be delegated to machines. Computers are becoming increasingly adept at analytical tasks. They can break down content into bite-size pieces for our consumption. They are also capable of synthetic tasks, building the content back up into new forms. These types of analysis and synthesis tasks enable made-to-order.

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