Naaman relegated Berners-Lee’s vision of a cooperative Web where people and machines get along in digitized, organized artificial intelligence harmony via tags (told ya, this is some heady, quantum stuff) to a pipe dream. Naaman reminds Berners-Lee that people, in general, especially collectively, just ain’t that bright.

The Semantic Web, you see, relies in large part on people tagging their online media in a rather standardized, academic, high-minded, meaningful, and structured way. And Naaman thinks that’s too much to ask:

There is no way that we can engage the masses in annotating media with “semantic” labels. At best, we can get the people to annotate content (such as Flickr images or YouTube videos) with short text descriptions or tags.  

Hmmm, yes, very Aristotelian. I like it. Sounds like Naaman’s actually observed the primates in question. (Down the block from me, one of these primates spray-painted his name on the road with stencil. It’s not a complicated name, a four-letter smacker, spelled J-A-K-C, apparently.)

Naaman modified his original use of the word "dead," as it was intended more as a conversation-starter, opting for something closer to unachievable.

Certainly, Berners-Lee has wowed the world in the past. It wouldn’t be surprising if he heard rhetoric like this before his historic launch of an HTML page. So what does ol’ TBL have to say about it? Let’s check his blog.

He says "blogging is great" … um, at least he thought so last November.  

W’s AOL Search Records?

Slate continues the Web’s latest fascination, mining the inner sanctum of AOLers, by relating the search history of User 16006693, or as we like to call him, “W.”

Showing an inordinate fascination with free Oakridge Boys downloads and jokes about Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, but not George Bush, dagnab it, W. seeks to discover the whereabouts of Iraq and Lebanon, information about “shee-ites,” and property in Crawford, Texas that isn’t next to Cindy Sheehan.

Our personal favorite searches are for “how to run country when not really inerested” and how to resist the temptation of searching for disrobed rice. We assume the lower-case “r” is intentional.

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, User 16006693 doesn’t exist. We think.

AOL Users Want to Be Free, Punk Rock Edition

The Wall Street Journal quantified the leaked AOL data to reveal that over 17 million separate searches (out of 20 million) involved the search for something “free.” Free was followed by “new,” “lyrics,” “county,” “school,” “city,” “home,” “state,” “pictures,” “music,” “sale,” “high,” “map,” “center,” and a three letter word that starts in “s” and ends with “x.”

But it may not be the demographic you’re thinking in regards to that last word (stereotyper!). AOL searches for Pamela Anderson were second to searches for Fall Out Boy suicidal punk rocker Peter Wentz, pictures of whom sans vetements surfaced on the Internet in March.

Speaking Of Attractive Primates

Orangutans serving time in Dutch zoos are looking for jungle love any which way but loose (please hold the applause for weaving in two obscure references in one sentence). Our second favorite apes, next to a certain hysterical baboon with blushing posterior, are soon to have an online dating site to aid them in propagating their species.

Poles Show Approval of Microsoft’s LSD Use

A band of Polish security researchers, known as LSD, have been given free reign to try and send Windows Vista on a bad trip. The four hackers were recently put on Microsoft’s payroll to simulate attacks against the operating system. The move is part of the Redmond, Washington-based company’s initiative to improve its security image.

Aliens Prefer Firefox?

When geek-marketing, anything X-Files can only help. Mozilla recently abused 45,000 square feet of oat crops in Oregon to produce a Firefox logo crop circle. The publicity stunt (it worked, by the way) was in celebration of a milestone 200 million downloads of Microsoft’s largest Web browser competitor.

Well, that’s the official version. But as always, you should trust no one.

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