XBRL, Journalism, Lawyering, Business, Charlie Hoffman, and the Semanitc Web

Charlie Hoffman just made the most enlightening post I’ve read in a long time. It’s no accident that the best journalism is the most direct: subject, verb, object. Similarly, clarity is essential to good lawyering and to the most successful business.

I’m not sure, but wonder if perhaps part of the challenge facing the “Semantic Web” is its name. When people think of the Web, they naturally think of Web pages, given the popularity of the Web interface over the past 15 years. But the Semantic Web is more of a return to the basic function of the Internet — to connect people, not pages. (See http://cloudinc.org.) The Semantic Web seems to concern people and who they are and what they do — much more than the metaphor of “visiting” Web pages, a metaphor that has infected our culture and distracted a great deal of attention away from content and onto the media itself. Perhaps this is inevitable with the development of any new technology, but recognizing such a phenomena could help the benefits of more connected data overcome popular cultural metaphors.

However, this is merely an aside — perhaps trivial relative to Charlie’s observations, which could be key to economic growth, public welfare, and so many worthy goals of so many people around the world.