ValuesVoter.com - Web 3.0 and the Future of Publishing

Liberals and conservatives disagree on many things, but one thing we can all agree on: the Internet is changing everything!

If you have heard about the "Semantic Web", which some call "Web 3.0", you know that a whole new wave of changes are upon us.  Today websites serve up web pages without understanding or organizing the meaning of the information.  The Semantic Web harnesses technology to get to the meaning of information.  OK we have to admit...we are not experts on this subject (yet).  All of this "RDF" and "triples" stuff is pretty new, but we are excited to see that Drupal is on the cutting edge.

It may be easier for you to see some of the concepts, and our site ValuesVoter.com is a good place to start, because here we have used several fairly new technologies and methods of organizing information.  First a little introduction...

The world of publishing is changing.  The biggest change of the last millenium was in 1440 when Johannes Gutenburg invented the printing press.  Since that time, most of the world's knowledge has been categorized in packages averaging maybe 250 pages (more or less depending on the subject matter) which we call books.  If something was communicating in printed form, you better be able to write about it for 200 pages or more or you probably won't get "published."  Magazines and newspapers certainly changed things in the last century, at least in part, but the real changes came with the personal computer and the Internet.

Today, text communication is getting shorter and shorter.  Articles became blog posts, and now we have tweets (Twitter).  Yet we still have trouble organizing and getting the information we need and want.  That is what the Semantic Web is about.

In its first iteration, ValuesVoter.com is not a completely "Web 3.0" site, but it does showcase some of the latest technologies and trends.  First, we are not asking bloggers and writers to come to the site and type in their text (or copy-paste from somewhere).  Instead, we are using or asking them to provide a RSS feed of their existing blog or content elsewhere on the web.  Content "feeds" into ValuesVoter.com, and yes we also have RSS feeds, so it feeds out as well.  In a way, information flows into and out of the site each day, all in an automated fashion.

RSS is nothing new, so let's move on to something a bit more interesting- automated tagging and topic hubs.  Using a service from Thomas Reuters called Open Calais (which is integrated with Drupal), all content on ValuesVoter.com is sent to the Open Calais servers, where it is read by some (magic?) computers and tagged with the relevant tags.  That is right- what used to take human content editors hours to do now can be done in milliseconds by computer software. 

With all of the content on the site tagged, some cool things can start to happen.  First, content can be organized around tags.  Then we can do something that the New York Post pioneered on their site (e.g., NY Times pioneered the concept of "topic hubs" in web publishing) and Phase II Technology developed for Drupal - create Topic Hubs based on the most popular tags.  Check out the Topic Hubs on ValuesVoter.com.  They are still a work in progress, but these can be created fairly easily using Drupal now compared to the team of editors and web developers it would have taken just a few months ago. 

Wow!  Well, we are just getting started with what is possible here.   In our next phase with ValuesVoter.com we will add capabilities for our site users to not just be casual readers (an audience) but engage as active participants (a community).  "User-generated content" is not just a trend- it is now an expectation of many when they visit a website, particularly younger generations who have grown up with the YouTube-Flickr-MySpace-Facebook-Wikipedia-Twitter experience on-line.  Non-profits in particular need to engage their constituents on-line and make them participants in the mission of the organization.

If you are part of the "tweet" generation you are probably skimming by now...here is a quick recap of some of the key points of this case study:

• The Internet is still evolving.  The Semantic Web will significantly change how we think about and use the web.
• We have to get better at organizing content on our websites in ways that are useful and engaging
• Drupal integrates with several useful technologies to enable this, including RSS feeds and automated tagging with Open Calais
• Drupal modules can simplify once complicated tasks, such as creating Topic Hubs on your website
• Many people- particularly the younger generations- now expect websites to allow them to participate

To create ValuesVoter.com even a year ago would have been much more difficult and expensive.  Even today, building this site from scratch would probably take 10x as long, and probably 5x as long with the next-best CMS (whatever that might be).  Drupal 6 continues to push the envelope, save time and money, and demonstrates new ways of doing things beyond what we thought was possible.

ValuesVoter.com probably did not change your mind politically one way or another...but maybe this case study has helped someone who was on the fence to...you guessed it...vote Drupal!