webly too

Every now and again I look up from what we’re working on and gaze in awe at some of the stuff that’s turning up in this ‘web 2.0’ evolution. Yes it’s a catchphrase, a handy bucket to lump innovative ideas for the media but the reality is there’s a lot of very clever stuff going on out there. The evolution of the semantic (knowledge) web is happening ever faster, fuelled by and fuelling Google as we all know – but they’re not the only ones out there.

Here are just a couple of the things I came across tonight (with grateful thanks to Tom Coates, a real web visionary, for the initial link that kicked me off):

• Riya – face and text recognition software for your online photos. It works on the principle of limited set recognition, which means that it can recognise people in your photos that you teach it to recognise, but not every photo on the web – yet.
• PeekABoom – an amazing concept by the main guy behind Captchas where you reveal a photo to a hidden human opponent and they have to guess what it is. Through this the goal is to improve image recognition – amazing concept, and fun!