Web fosters prolific product reviewers:
“I’m rethinking things,” says the prolific 43-year-old Epinions.com free-lance writer. “I’ve written 664 reviews. It’s a book, and I didn’t really get paid for producing it. I should really be getting royalties for all that work.”
If product reviewers all had weblogs, and a weblog tool that had forms for posting information specifically for product reviews that syndicated review metadata, then you would have the same functionality as Epinions, in decentralized form.
The difference would be that traffic would go back to the reviewers’ site where they could control things like ad revenue.
Weblogs allow all the social advantages of a distributed system: control over individual identity, branding and revenue.
Pings to central servers and metadata enriched RSS syndication allow for all the technological advantages of a centralized system – real-time updated search and structured querying.
Isn’t this decentralizing of publishing and centralizing of aggregation, inevitable? There is now a clear revenue model for this type of system and doesn’t it look very much like the semantic web?