The soormentic wheeb

One of my least crappy classes is about the internet. Whoo, look at that! The intarweb! I’m gonna gigabyte myself an HTML of Google!

As stupid as such a class might sound, it has introduced me to another aspect of the “metadata everywhere” boom that actually started around 1996 but no one cared until MP3s needed tags and Spotlight put resource forks to good use again. I consider myself a pretty well-informed individual, but things like RDF, FOAF, Dublin Core, etc. still have me pretty confused. I’m trying to understand what good the semantic web is, and the best explanation I’ve found so far is, courtesy of an AC on Slashdot in a post entitled The semantic web, in a nutshell:

1. People like to masturbate.
2. Some people like to look at pictures of naked girls while masturbating.
3. Some people like to think about graph theory while masturbating.

The semantic web is the unfortunate result of #3.

In other words, I have no idea. Take a look at the best-looking RDF browser I’ve been able to find, Welkin. Now you see what the AC was talking about. The semantic web means about as much to me as the soormentic wheeb. Pretty much the only writings I’ve managed to find about it pooh-pooh it as a bunch of nonsense. Clearly these meta-utopia eggheads are in need of a good info-ninja attack.

But far be it for me to ignore another web trend standard. I’ve thus used the FOAF-a-Matic to create my PersonalProfileDocument. I have no idea what good this will do me, but here’s hoping.

If you have no idea what I’m babbling on about and just need something to laugh at, remember that you can do anything at Zombo.com. Anything at all.