What could be the business model of a semantic web service? First of all, what could be a Semantic Web service? We could define it as a web service that broadcast his content using formatting technologies like RDF or OWL. The content is formatted in such a way that software agents can easily read it and could infer knowledge. The key principle of a semantic web service is his openness.

I was talking with one of the creator of the search engines used by Talk Digger yesterday. During our conversation he asked me:

Are you planning to share any revenues with the blog engines? Do you have a business model for Talk Digger?

His question was legitimate but the answer was short: no. No I do not have any business model for Talk Digger. Right now it is an experimentation; a personal little research project. I could share revenues, however I doubts they could interest anyone considering that it merely pay the hosting fees.

However, I already thought about it and the question is good: What could be a business model for a service such as Talk Digger. Even more: what could be a business model for a Semantic Web service; a service that broadcast his computations at large, without any fees (Talk Digger could become such a service… it is a wish, remember?).

I have no idea.

John Heilemann wrote in the New York Metro:

“Alan Murray wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal that called Google’s business model a new kind of feudalism: The peasants produce the content; Google makes the profits,”

It is right, and not just for Google. Search Engines gather and index web content from everywhere. They even cache entire web pages content and publish them without any kind of permissions (remember the “cache” feature on many search engines?). I remember that secret US military documents have already been indexed by Google (just a rumor or a fact? I don’t remember). I also know that Google index millions of books content without any kind of permissions.

So, the question remains: what could be the business model for Talk Digger? And if revenues are generated with such a model, should I share it with other search engines companies? Sure I should; they can ban the IP address of my crawler at anytime. However, is it at their advantage? Considering the picture I described of some current search engines, why I couldn’t scrap their web page for some results? If we think about it, their results pages are web document like any other web pages on the Internet. If they can scrap others’ web page, why I could not too?

At the end everything is about money. However, they told us that they democratize the Internet by making it searchable. I told them that I democratize it too by aggregating their results in a “novel” way.

What is the Internet? The democratization of World’s information or a money making cow? I hope no.

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