Marketers Have Given Up on Context, and Our National Discourse Is Suffering | Hacker News Reader

Marketers Have Given Up on Context, and Our National Discourse Is Suffering

battellemedia.com

10 pointsmemexy3 comments

Can search engines replace advertisement? Do we need to invent a way to compare options for consumers, or is it a dead end?

The semantic web was meant to be the substrate on which personal agents would serve people by doing the type of thing you described but it didn't happen

> The entertainment system was belting out the Beatles’ “We Can Work It Out” when the phone rang. When Pete answered, his phone turned the sound down by sending a message to all the other local devices that had a volume control. His sister, Lucy, was on the line from the doctor’s office: “Mom needs to see a specialist and then has to have a series of physical therapy sessions. Biweekly or something. I’m going to have my agent set up the appointments.” Pete immediately agreed to share the chauffeuring. At the doctor’s office, Lucy instructed her Semantic Web agent through her handheld Web browser. The agent promptly retrieved the information about Mom’s prescribed treatment within a 20-mile radius of her home and with a rating of excellent or very good on trusted rating services. It then began trying to find a match between available appointment times (supplied by the agents of individual providers through their Web sites) and Pete’s and Lucy’s busy schedules.

I think Alan Kay is right, the computer revolution hasn't happened yet. There is much potential that computer networks can unlock but we haven't done the work to unlock it.

https://twobithistory.org/2018/05/27/semantic-web.html

“For those of you who want a TL:DR summary, here it is: It’s time to get back to the work marketers used to be really good at: Deciding on the appropriate context in which to engage your audience. And it’s time to pull back from a habit most of you have fallen into: Letting the machines choose your audience for you. Thanks to new approaches which fuse at-scale ad targeting with high-quality editorial product, you can step into this renewed role without sacrificing the reach, precision, and targeting afforded by the likes of Facebook, Google, Twitter, and their kin.”

Reply on news.ycombinator.com