PostHeaderIcon 5 Key Elements to the Value of a Backlink

Backlinks are an often-discussed, but rarely fully understood topic. Your site’s reputation and Page Rank depend very greatly on backlinks, so knowing what makes your backlink reputation for your site more important and have more value is the next logical step.

So, you might ask then what things affect how much a given backlink is worth towards your reputation, and what can you do to maximize your backlink value.

While there are many things that affect how much a backlink is worth to your website, many are unknown to the world that search engines, especially Google, take into account. Thankfully, we know the 5 main things that make up most of your backlink score.

Page Rank.

The page rank, or reputation, of the webpage that links to you giving you a backlink is the biggest factor. Page is ranked per page, not per website, and page rank is spread through outgoing links.

Anchor text.

This is the text showing as the link text, the underlined text you click on (not always underlined, but you get the point). This text can have a very large impact on your backlinks. Google expects to see varied link texts in a normal situation, and it has been said that Google will only count a certain number of backlinks with the same exact text. Optimally, you want your keywords are you aiming for on your website to be in your backlink text if you can help it.

Relevant sites.
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Especially with Google’s Jagger update, backlinks from relevant-themed websites is worth more than from unrelated websites. This means if you have a website about cars, backlinks from other car-type sites will give you more value than backlinks from a cooking website. This makes sense, as each backlink is a recommendation or a vote, and related recommendations have more authority or hold more importance.

Location.

The location of the backlink to your website also makes a difference. The farther towards the top of the page, the more the backlink is weighed.

Age.

The age of a backlink makes a difference. It may take up to 6 months to see the full effect of a backlink. This makes it a great reason to exchange backlinks with sites whose PR has not yet gotten to where it will, as you will get even greater advantage once they do reach that level.

So, the question of the day is what stuff can you help in reality.

Page Rank may or may not be an issue, as getting in a backlink while a website is newer will gain you a good advantage in the age category once they have grown to their potential. The main to remember here is to make sure they are a website that you would want to trade links with regardless of page rank.

Location you usually do not have much of a say in, and the age is out of your hands. So, the best concept is to concentrate on trading with websites whose content compliments your own, or is at least similar in theme for the best gain. If you can, try to get your target keywords into the anchor text if at all possible. Google definitely looks at the anchor text and takes this into consideration. Varied link text has been proven to give an added edge to a website and put it over the top into the lead.

PostHeaderIcon Choosing the Best Website Templates

Website templates are the best way to keep a consistent standard website that makes things uniform and visually appealing to website visitors. Website templates make the starting of a new website easy and they freshen up an old website not so mind numbing.

The first step getting one of these off and running is to look at your template options. There are many online companies that offer templates that can be downloaded and used for just about any website. The choices that are out there are endless. However, you must choose the template that will be right for you and your website.

There is the standard option: The basic website template that offers no bells and whistles for the viewer. These website templates are mainly just text and pictures. This type of website template is good for websites that are designed to be informative and down to business.

Another common type of website template is that of the flash template. These come in many shapes and forms with many different varieties. Many typically have some sort of movement or visual effect that catches the observer’s eye some with sound effects. Don’t forget whenever you buy a template to ask for the source files, so in case you want to make any changes on your template in future, it is will be easier for you.

However these standard website templates may not be enough for the casual website designer. If a top of the line no holds bar check me out website is what is desired than the desired website template is going to be something along the lines of a flash with animation or 3D effects.

If there is a specific style desired then there is a website template that has it. From flowers and bunnies to military themed ones you are sure to find the template that will best suit your websites needs. The cost to download one of these templates varies based on style and source of the download. The average cost for a website template being upwards of fifty U.S. dollars.

The cost of a website template is well worth the look that can be achieved when it is used. Website templates help create an image of professionalism that will make website viewers take that website seriously. The organization that is gained from the use of these consistent website templates will keep viewers coming back for more and will allow a business to grow.

PostHeaderIcon 8 Linking Strategies That Work

When it comes to linking strategies for your website you need to concentrate on one word. Backlinks! A backlink is defined as having your website address on another website. This creates a link pointing your visitor or a search engine back to your website. If you were in a game and were keeping score every backlink gives you a +1. An outoging link is the link of another website on yours pointing back to theirs. You would score this a -1.

If you were playing a game to win you would want the most pluses you could get. So it is with linking strategies. Here are some basic ways to get backlinks to your website.

1. You can buy a text link. Websites that get high amounts of traffic and are ranked high with the top search engines will let you pay them to put your website link on their site.

2. Forum marketing is a way to get a backlink. If the forum let’s you create a signature file you can hyperlink you website to a keyword phrase pointing back to your website. You can also list your website in your online profile and get a backlink that way,

3. Writing and submitting articles is a quick way to get alot of backlinks. Create a bio box at the end of each article with a linkfor your website . Then submit your article to as many directories as possible. Or even better yet use a software of article marketer to submit your articles for you.

These articles can be picked up by other directories, webmasters, or online newsletters and spread all over the internet giving your website a viral marketing benefit.

4. Place classified ads with popular directories like USFreeAds or AdlandPro. Upgrade to paid member and you can place unlimited ads with links pointing back to your website.

5. Blog and ping. In each blog post include a sort resource box with your website address. If you archive you posts this gives you backlinks for years to come.

6. Trade links with quality websites. We are not talking about reciprocal linking to directories with thousands of worthless links. A better strategy is to trade a link with a website that closely mirrors your site without being in direct competition to it. Also look to place their link on one of your pages that has the same page rank as the link they are giving you.

7. Post comments on other peoples blogs. Take the time to read the post before you make a comment. Don’t write something worthless like ” I like your blog.” Make your comments informative and relate to the blog post you just read. Then include yourwebsite address along with your name.

8. Internal linking can bring valuable backlinks to your home page. This would be when you put your website address in a hyperlinked keyword phrase and point it back to your home page. This is a great way to build keyword relavancy along with building up your backlinks.

These are a few linking strategies that work. There are many others. Just keep it simple and remember this simple formula.

PostHeaderIcon Why Having A Website Is Crucial To Business Succe

Source: Easy2usesites KZN

Interestingly there are many people who still doubt the significance of having a business website. “Our customers don’t use the Internet,” they often claim, oblivious to the fact that a website is not just to facilitate online sales. A website performs multifarious operations right from non-stop promotion, advertising, customer relations and public relations, e-commerce, information dissemination and social media awareness. Some of the primary functions of websites are briefly mentioned below.

Customer service

As a business you constantly need to interact and communicate with your customers and clients. Your customers and clients should be easily able to contact you or avail crucial information about your business on time, and you should be able to convey important messages and make announcements in a timely and efficient matter. A website facilitates two-way communication between your business and your customers and clients.

Through contact form or e-mail present on your website your customers and clients can get in touch with you with great speed without having to be put on hold upon making a phone call. Similarly, whenever there are important announcements or product launches you can publish the updates on your business website. Every message that can have an impact on business-customer relationship can be immediately published on your business website. There are no working hours when it comes to your website; your website is accessible to your customers and clients 24 hours a day and 365 days a year.

Public relations

This is somewhat similar to the point discussed above. Your customers and clients, and even journalists and analysts, can access your corporate literature at the convenience of a few mouse clicks. In case there is a misunderstanding or miscommunication you can immediately do the damage control through your business website. If some misinformation is being circulated regarding your company you can immediately clarify by publishing your side of the story on your website.

Many companies provide highly useful information on their corporate websites and this really boosts the public relations. For instance during the recent cyclone there were many business websites that actively published important phone numbers and contact information on their websites.

Leveraging existing, ongoing advertising

Your advertising effort should always be complemented with the presence of your website URL. You should make sure that the URL of your corporate website is prominently displayed whenever you publish an advertisement — whether to promote your business or to seek employees. People can go to your website for further information at their own convenience this way. The advertising space is limited but the space on your website is not. You can even encourage people to subscribe to your mailing list so that you can send updates to them now and then. If you are already publishing an electronic newsletter make sure that your website URL always appears in the newsletter.

Another great way of promoting your website URL is by printing it on your stationery. Your website link must be prominently displayed on your visiting cards, letterheads, brochures, mailers and folders; wherever they go they will have your website URL on them.

Making money

As mentioned above trillions of dollars are being spent on online transactions. Why not become a part of this massive economy? The greatest advantage of having a business website is that you can sell products and services all over the world from a tiny office in your basement. Doing business from a website is the quickest way of launching a new business and making money. Advanced and innovative websites created by Easy2usesites KZN makes sure that their clients reap great rewards by partnering with such a leading edge company.

Cost-effectiveness

Starting a new business these days is as simple as getting a website developed and then promoting it sufficiently. You don’t have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars opening an office and hiring people. Since most of the tasks are automated when you conduct business from your website there are hardly any operational costs.

Customer-demand

These days every company worth its salt has a website. This means if you don’t have a website then your competitors definitely have one and your customers are aware of that. Your customers demand that you have a website so that they can access it whenever they need to obtain information, contact you or carry out a business transaction. They deem it highly objectionable if you are reachable only during the working hours and after that you are totally gone. Agreed, that you can’t be available all the time and this is a fact that your customers are aware of too but they want your website to be available at every hour. They consider a business extremely archaic and outdated if it does not have a website.

Tracking customer trends

It’s all about information these days; those who possess data wield the real might. Your website helps you gather critical customer data by running interactive applications on your website. Your customers can immediately give you feedback and this can help you carry out modifications, with alacrity. User forums on your website allow your customers make recommendations and interact with other customers and clients. By going through their posts and replies you can make out what difficulties your customers face and what changes they want in the products and services you are providing.

You can even conduct polls on your website and offer questionnaires to your visitors to obtain their direct feedback.

Leveraging the democratic nature

The Internet is highly democratic; it doesn’t matter whether you are a small business or a big business. Everybody gets a fighting chance on the Internet. A great thing about the Internet is that although money matters, it doesn’t matter much because eventually it is your website and your perseverance that opens the doors to success. Provided you are innovative and hard-working everybody can initiate a great venture on the Internet.

Projecting a favorable image

Having a business website can work wonders with your corporate image. You can gain lots of traction by having a good-looking and highly functional website. Your website layout and structure gives an indication of your attitude towards your visitors and consequently, your business. Using latest technologies and tools to create your website conveys to your target market that you are totally at ease with contemporary technologies and are ready to invest on your online visitors.

Remember that there could be thousands of people every day searching for websites similar to your website and all these websites are competing with you in terms of looks, layout, functionalities and content. Doing well in all these sphere can really boost your corporate image.

Expand your market

The world is a global village now and everybody can participate. Stop being confined to your local market and reach out to the global market. It is as simple as launching a website. To an online customer it doesn’t matter if you are sitting next door or in another country or on another continent; he or she can simply log onto your website and carry out business with you within a couple of minutes. You don’t even have to open a local office.

On the Internet there are no barriers. People running businesses online experience the true freedom. There is no bias, there is no discrimination and nobody can particularly create hurdles. By having a website, especially a website created by Easy2usesites KZN, you can be sure of being in the driving seat of your destiny.
(ArticlesBase ID #810406)

Source: articlesbase.com

PostHeaderIcon Microsoft Office Open XML Fails to Win ISO Vote

In the first few days of September, just as kids were beginning to head back to school, something rather remarkable happened: Microsoft lost its hegemony. In a vote by the various members of the ISO standards committee, managing only to come up 53% of the votes it needed to fast track the Office Open XML format for consideration as an ISO standard.

PostHeaderIcon House Passes Major Patent Reform

On Sept. 7, the US House of Representatives passed sweeping legislation to overhaul the US patent system by a vote of 220 to 175. The Patent Reform Act of 2007 (H.R. 1908), authored by Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., seeks to try to restore some balance to the patent system in the face of radical changes in information technology by introducing a number of changes increasingly sought by the software industry in particular:

PostHeaderIcon C++ and the RESTful Web

I have a confession to make. I’ve never had a formal class in C++ (though I’ve written quite a few). At no point did I ever get a professor spend several days trying to make me understand the significance of *,**,*void, &, ., -> or all those other rather strange glyphs that make reading C++ much like trying to understand the Chicago Manual of Style with 95% of the words removed.

PostHeaderIcon Killing Cash or Screwing the Customer

A few days ago, Bank of America announced that they were raising ATM fees to non-customers to $3 in about 70% of their ATMs. No doubt this is well within their rights, but because of its unique position, for BofA to raise their fees basically gives carte blanche to most banks to raise theirs an equal amount (or more).

PostHeaderIcon SynOA What? Syndicated Application Architectures Come of Age

In a recent interview with Rohit Khare, Director of CommerceNet Labs, Jon Udell may have been responsible for introducing a new meme into the noosphere that will be as important in its time as AJAX was in 2004.

PostHeaderIcon What is the Metaphorical Web? - A Statement of Purpose

I was asked, recently, why I settled on the name Metaporical Web for my site and blog. This is probably as good a statement of purpose as any I can think of, so if you are curious as to what exactly motivated me to name it this, please read on … (warning, this may take a while) …

I have, over the years, made frequent use of the term Metaphorical Web, a term which become more laden with significance and meaning as the web itself has evolved, for me if no one else. I am not a classically trained programmer - I had no courses in computing in college (when I was working on my Bachelors degree, ultimately in Physics), though I have been working with computers and computer programming since I was in my early teens, and have been a professional software developer and writer pretty much continuously for the last thirty years.

Yet this lack of formalism in my early years has had an interesting consequence upon the way that I approach programming. Most programmers today, at least those that have been collegiately trained, have had some exposure to object oriented programming, either in the form of C++ or increasingly in the form of Java over the course of their matriculation, and like many college students, they tend to take these structures for granted - this is the way that you program, because this is the way that you were taught to program. To question the fundamentals of what we mean by objects, by classes, even design patterns and the like is to embrace a certain heresy that generally does not sit well for many developers.

In recent years, a chasm has opened up in the programming community between those that worked with these concepts as given and those that came to programming later, when languages such as Python, Ruby, JavaScript, and the like were becoming more readily adopted, which in turn has also fragmented further given the number of XML practitioners out there. These new programmers recognized that while type, the set of properties and methods that acted on a given object, remained an important aspect of development, type did not necessarily have to be built into these new fangled objects, but could instead be assigned as a some more of a cloak over a bundle of raw data. Of such seemingly obscure things are schisms made.

The XML revolution that has taken place in the last decade has been hailed by many, derided by as many, and its significance even now is debated daily. XML emerged originally as a way of providing a more consistent way of describing the seemingly innocuous HTML format, though its creators (most of whom had come from the SGML side of things) understood one of the first rules of programming; if you have a generic method of describing a given object, then it is worth looking at this language for describing other objects. Given XML’s bias as a declarative language - a language that provided a formal declaration of either a state or a process (what the model is supposed to be) rather than giving an intentional expression of the actions that the language should take (what the model is supposed to do) - it soon became evident that you could use XML as an abstraction language, one that could readily be used to create a metaphorical abstraction of a process that by itself functioned in much the same way that a score of music does.

A score is not a performance. It is a description of the states that a given piece of music should take over time. It does not tell a musician, except in the very broadest sense, how to move a bow across a string while holding that string down at a fret in order to produce a tone on a violin or cello. These are assumed abstractions; the score indicates only what notes or pauses should be played at what point in the score, and it defines this at all points in time. The score is an abstraction of the music being produced, not the music itself.

This declaration, this abstraction, of the musical harmonies (or cacophonies) of the resulting performance is a metaphor for the music, a model of that music. The specific implementations may vary in subtle and profound ways - a high school orchestra’s implementation will likely be rougher than that of professional symphonic players, for instance - but in the main, the music so produced by either group should be roughly recognizable as being the same piece. This is both the strength and weakness of both metaphor and declarative programming.

In the late 1990s, as HTML became more widely accepted, there was a movement afoot to encode two other domains of human endeavor using similar tools. The first, the creation of a standard for encoding mathematics, was proposed both because of its general utility and because mathematical encoding generally assumes clearly defined predicates of symbolic manipulation, and as such, the belief that math could be converted into a new notation. This effort very quickly collided with one of those wonderful hidden complications that often spell the deepening of knowledge - the fact that there were in fact two forms of mathematical coding, the first encoding notation, the second encoding concept, and the two were not necessarily completely in accord. Our assumptions about the metaphors, the models being used, broke down here, and the result of that was a richer understanding that mathematical notation itself was not completely devoid of semantic interconnections. Thus, if you look closely at MathML you realize that you are in fact examining two fairly distinct languages where such a distinction was initially far from obvious.

The second effort, HyTime, was intended as a way of encoding musical scores, which, like mathematics, seemed to have a fairly discretely defined symbolic set and which, consequently, should have been easy to turn into some formal SGML standard. However, just as with mathematics, the realization began to be made by the participants that the formal notation developed over the last several centuries was considerably more sophisticated and subtle than it appeared on the surface. Perhaps it was because HyTime was being articulated by people who dealt with documents on a daily basis but the effort soon began to intersect such boundaries as the articulation of semantics, the importance of transformation mechanisms and the nature of definition.

In other words, in order to develop HyTime, the developers working in this domain had to define models for relationship mapping (which would in time morph into the Resource Description Framework, or RDF), tools for articulating these concepts in a semantically neutral technology (XML) and mechanisms for addressing this information in a set-wise manner (XPath, and the languages that is spawned). Like panning for gold, the working groups had to mix together the mathematics, the music, and the words and then had to shake vigorously in order to cause that which was common to all three to fall out of this matrix.

I think that it is easy to impute both too much significance to XML and too little, sometimes at the same time. As a document encoding format it is barely adequate (which it should, nearly by definition, be) to it’s purpose. It has been used as the basis for building messaging services and object descriptions and even the internal guts of imperative programs, and in some cases (many cases, I would contend) it has generally proven inefficient, expensive to parse and serialize, conceptually difficult to work with, and fragile to the demands of developers. Moreover, it breaks every paradigm that nearly every programmer working more than a few years has learned, inverting the object-oriented model that was so fundamental to Stroustrup, et al., and forcing the redevelopment and deployment of both new tools and new methodologies for handling this information.

It’s my belief that this effort did not occur simply as an empty academic exercise. One of the earmarks of software development in the late 1990s was the fact that the cost of writing software was rising faster than the attendant cost savings from using the software once it was developed. This was not always obvious, of course; in part because there were many case studies where such software was developed in time, under budget, and well suited to task. Yet these case studies often tended to mask the fact that what was being completed were closed system jobs - those software projects that in general controlled all aspects of the environment, that had clearly articulated boundaries and communication protocols, and that usually involved applications that largely ran within the domain of a single processor space (or between two highly coupled processors).

The ones that failed, either by running over budget or by collapsing from over-complexity, were the ones that fell more into being open systems that needed to work in heterogeneous environments, and typically employed highly distributed networks of nodes rather than clearly defined client/server relationship or strongly articulated hierarchies. Now, some software developers (especially those that were clearly seeking to develop “end-to-end” solutions) attempted to make the argument that the best way to not fail in that domain was simply not to go there, to stay within the well defined proprietary worlds established by the tools (to the extent that, for many developers, the outer domain simply ceased to exist).

The problem with this approach, however, is one that is common in teaching, especially at the university level. You can continue to treat the edge cases as being anomalous for quite some time and be able to function quite efficiently, but especially as the domain itself continues to evolve, the anomalies become more and more frequent, and the closed domain software has increasing trouble solving the needs of the customers.

This is what I believe has happened with the Internet, which is the ultimate heterogeneous environment. The original version of the web, that of a connected radio transmitter/receiver model where each node had both capabilities, very quickly collapsed into hub and spoke models in which the preponderance of state remained within the hub, and the “clients” at the other end of the spoke were basically the software equivalent of dumb terminals. However, due to competition largely between Microsoft and Netscape, the clients continued to gain intelligence (and consequently the ability to manage more state) until Netscape collapsed, at which point Microsoft shifted gears towards developing technology that would map more closely to the client-server paradigm which was intrinsic to the low latency, largely encapsulated applications which they had specialized in earlier.

This was I believe the original mandate for SOAP and WSDL, which, because it involved communication going over port 80 (used by HTTP) bypassed many of the headaches that the company had encountered a few years before in attempting to get Distributed COM (DCOM) integrated into the majority of servers that were not running Windows software. However, the model involved was still fundamentally client-server, with the assumption that the server continued to handle the lion’s share of state management.

Yet the metaphor that worked well for low latency networks doesn’t work especially well for high latency ones, which the Internet, even with considerable improvements in performance, still is in comparison to the nanosecond clock cycles of in-processor computing. Moreover, the Internet is still a remarkably heterogeneous environment, and as such the protocols that seem to work best are the ones that are associated with the twin metaphors of publishing and search rather than the closed-system client/server transactions more typical when Windows (and networking) first arose.

In the view of some (even many), this move away from a server-component orientation is a step back, but over the last few years in particular I’ve come to question that wisdom. All metaphors are ultimately leaky - there are places where the analogy between processes breaks down and you have to readily admit that the web is no more a publishing office than it is an ATM. However, I’d contend as well that certain metaphors are coercive on the web; the system was built in such a way that they are more successful in capturing critical aspects of the process than other metaphors.

The web was built around the notion of high latency, low-bandwidth computing within a heterogeneous environment. It is fundamentally unreliable — indeed, this was in fact a deliberate design decision at the TCP/IP level because of the recognition that it was better to build redundancy into the system than to optimize it for high performance.

It is for this reason that RSS feeds have continued to dominate as data transport mechanisms even when SOAP and WSDL were being splashed across the front page of every tech magazine worldwide - syndication is a strong metaphor on the web, one that works consistently with the publishing model embedded in HTTP. It’s highly indicative that nearly eight years after SOAP/WSDL based web services were first introduced, they remain largely viable only within the immediate confines of department-to-department implementations, behind closed firewalls over homogenous system implementations. The metaphor doesn’t scale.

With the introduction of XMLHttpRequest (ironically by Microsoft), the gateway existed for enabling more sophisticated communication between client and server. When Mozilla Firefox implemented in 2003, however, it opened up a breach in the dam of browser dominance (and either a deliberate or an ill-informed decision to let Internet Explorer wither on the vine), and other companies (most notably Google) came pouring in.

Beyond the immediate effects of cementing the role of DOM-based processing on the client (making that client considerably more malleable than most traditional desktop applications), it also served to push JavaScript to the forefront as theclient language, in turn finally providing in user-controlled software what had only been available to the browser developers initially - a way to turn a client application into a full-featured communication node on the Internet. That piece in turn has revolutionized the web by making it possible for the client to fully manage its own relevant state - indeed, with the advent of built-in databases and database access APIs (such as Google Gears), the next logical move in this process is happening, in which the clients are able to maintain full autonomy independent of a remote server, including the ability to complete and validate data to a certain degree before transmitting it outside of the bounds of a single session.

This brings me to the Metaphorical Web. Tim Berners-Lee first introduced the notion of the Semantic Web in the mid-1990s, spawned ironically by the experience with HyTime and MathML. While there are several concepts that lurk within the umbra of semantics, in general, the role of semantics is to provide mechanisms for the classification of content. Classification is critical in this respect, because until system nodes can effectively (and efficiently) classify content transmitted to them on their own, they must rely upon human classifiers to do the job for them. Object-oriented programming was built around the need to provide a classification scheme upon data-blocks to provide them with a certain inherent intelligence about their own environment, but such intelligence is a proxy - some human programmer somewhere had to write that classification mechanism into the DNA of the object itself.

Metaphors are the precursor to Semantics. To determine what an object is, you have to have a map - a standard of comparison - in order to determine what the object is not. REST based publishing systems and Open Search mechanisms are important not because they simplify the interfaces that humans use but because they provide a semantically neutral mechanism for interactions between nodes in the network. Whether I am publishing a blog, a stock bid, a weather report, or a block of music, the REST model treats all of these things in the same way. Because each of those objects is different, however, what lies behind that REST model must be able to determine both the semantics of the transmitted model and the intent of the transmission (though this latter can usually be determined by the destination of the data being sent).

This abstraction of transmission goes hand-in-hand with the abstraction of data access; provide a data abstraction layer, such as XQuery, between your semantically neutral inbound requests and your data store, and you have a system that is basically transparent - the hardware becomes commoditized. Build a semantically neutral front-end (such as XForms) within your client, and you furthermore have a similar abstraction between your inbound data and your presentation layer. This is one of the reasons that I manage both XForms.org and will soon manage XQuery.org as part of the Metaphorical Web network - I believe that both technologies will become far more important in the next few years as more people understand the benefits inherent in such technologies.

A couple final notes here - First, I believe ultimately that both JSON and E4X will have a significant long term role to play in this as well; JSON solves one of the more immediate problems that DOM-centric XML has - it is considerably lighter-weight as a messaging protocol, and can hold other content (including XML). Similarly, ECMAScript for XML (E4X) provides a way to do many key XML-oriented operations using a lighterweight structure, and it can help buttress the limitations that JSON has (most notably as a document carrier). These will be covered fairly extensively within the mandate of the Metaphorical Web.

The second note - classification, taxonomy, and the abstraction of intentional programming are all key aspects of the Semantic Web. My personal feeling about the Semantic Web is that it is a necessary, perhaps vital technology, that makes it possible to build web systems that are able to go from semantically neutral transmission mechanisms to the realization of intent and classification. However, for this to happen, the Semantic Web is going to need to start communicating more effectively with the rest of the web. I suspect that technologies such as RDFa will play a huge part in that, as will the incorporation of pipelined systems (such as the W3C’s XProc) that will make it possible to orchestrate filters for layered annotation (or decomposition) of metadata from contextual searches.

This particular vision of the web may not please all players. While it will undoubtedly spawn its own markets, the RESTful web won’t sell any more server boxes, operating systems, or “end-to-end” turnkey solutions, nor will it employ armies of contract temp programmers on massive projects that go nowhere. Much of this vision is coming from the open source and open standards communities that recognize that the boutique era of software has been ending for some time as we’re literally drowning in reasonably good software that’s no longer economically worth it to hawk as products. It’s SOA taken out of the box and stripped of its fancy wrappings, and it is ultimately only following the natural grain of the web itself. That seems as good a reason to want to promote it as any.