beroepwijs

Recording of my talk at the American Philosophical Association Central Division meeting. 

The central aim of the talk is to articulate ways in which the age of the semantic web (or Web 3.0) puts us in a collectively worse epistemic position, and how this could undermine our democracy. I will argue that this supports an internet landscape that adheres to the principles of what has come to be known as net neutrality. 


Web 3.0 And The New Epistemic Threat To Democracy

Susan Halford at the CSO Digital Social Ontology Symposium

The Challenge of Digital Ontology

Just when you thought you might get the hang of the SEO thing, the industry blogs tell you there's something new to pay attention to. Now you need to determine how the Hummingbird algo and "natural language" search affect your SEO progress.

AuthorityLabs hosts Melissa Fach and Michelle Stinson Ross discuss what all this means to you and your business with industry leaders Eric Van Buskirk and Jeff Coyle.

Excerpt from the Recap on http://authoritylabs.com/blog/keywords-semantic-search-hummingbird-authoritylive-recap-video-podcast/

Melissa Fach: Explain machine learning and why this is important for business owners.

Eric Van Buskirk weighs in first by explaining that it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the business repercussions of Artificial Intelligence. As Google crawls the web and creates databases of information, they analyze that data.  From that analysis they are able to detect patterns and discern meaning and connections to other content. The programs written as search algorithms are now using the pattern recognition to sort data and results for users without direct input of human programmers.

Jeff jumps in to expand on Google’s use of data. He hints that using labels (we can assume here Schema markup) helps the machines to sort and rank your pages appropriately. Along with this, the machine learning systems are also using pattern recognition and user behavior to determine the quality and usefulness of site content. The importance is shifting from gaming a particular algorithm to creating pages and content with high user satisfaction. For business owners, the importance is now focused on the user experience. Did you provide the depth of information that the site visitor was looking for? Did you focus on just using search terms on the page, or did you create an experience that helps a potential customer make an informed decision about your product? Google’s machine learning system is going to be able to determine what is high quality, thorough information verses thin content created to bait traffic without any real goal beyond the visit.

You can watch this Hangout on YouTube - https://youtu.be/2KWI43QmTL0

Learn more about how AuthorityLabs can help you track the success of your SEO campaigns - authoritylabs.com/tour/

Web 3.0 And The New Epistemic Threat To Democracy

Andrew Cullison