1) Animation over live-action interviews, like the HP commercials:

or the work of Tim Wu, a Tisch student who’s apparently widely regarded as one of the best animators in our year (if anyone knows him and wants to plug my doc to him, feel free).

2) I’m thinking of using a library metaphor to illustrate the Semantic Web, which would mean filming some sequences in a library. Basically, I would explain why the web is different from a traditional library (no card catalog! Or, if you want to think of it another way, as many card catalogs as there are web users, since everyone creates their own indexes and organizational schemes). The books in the library would represent webpages, that are linked together with pieces of string or ribbons or something. Then I’d explain that the Semantic Web is not about linking the books, but linking the pieces of information inside the books (see the cool effect of picking up text off a piece of paper in Tim Wu’s video). I need to come up with a good visual way to explain that the Semantic Web is also about making all that information computer-understandable, not just people-understandable, and that once that happens, computers will be able to do lots of reasoning and inferencing with the information. Any thoughts?

• I got an interview with Tim Berners-Lee. (For those of you who don’t know, TBL is the visionary who single-handedly created the World Wide Web, wrote HTML and the first Web browser, and then came up with the idea of the Semantic Web. Besides being royalty everywhere – he was knighted by the Queen – he’s more or less a god at ISWC.) I’ve read one of his books and know a lot about him, and was so nervous that I couldn’t get my camera into my tripod for practically a minute. My interview was not as good as it could have been (my mind essentially went blank) but I’d gotten up at 5:30 that morning to prepare, so at least I was able to read the questions I’d prepared. Just having his name associated with my documentary will raise it enormously in the eyes of anyone else I’d want to interview.
• Made a lot of very useful contacts. (I guessI stood out there as one of the only women and certainly the only journalist who was there.) The Semantic Web guys I’ve gotten to know in New York turned out to be pretty great contacts and somehow I managed to meet all the top people at the conference. I’m making plans for interviews with a few more people.
• I wrote a couple blog entries (at www.kateray.net) that pertained to things at the conference and started getting a lot of hits (and a fair number of Twitter followers, for some reason). Even though that blog isn’t directly related to this doc, it’s in the same subject area, and building up my digital persona/reputation in that field is a big part of getting the interviews I need for this film as well as building a good base of people who will be interested in seeing it as soon as it’s released.
• I had also had three other interviews with:
• John Hebeler – not a big name, but the guy who’s explained the Semantic Web better than anyone I’ve met so far.
• Frank van Harmelen – kind of a big deal in the Semantic Web community and also wonderfully expressive/angry about things like ontologies.
• David Karger and Abraham Bernstein, organizers of the conference who are also each quite well known for their work. They gave me tons of great philosophy about the Semantic Web and also have a very funny dynamic (I interviewed them together) that I was so happy to catch on tape.
• A little bit of B-roll (my favorite is of TBL playing with the Flip camera he’s obsessed with), some shots of the people I interviewed giving talks, and a really great panel discussion about the Semantic Web and ontologies where Frank and David got into a pretty heated fight in front of a large roomful of people.

I’ve slept about 10 hours in the past week and have barely had time to think about anything that’s happened. I’m really really excited about this film right now.

Jon Russell talked to me about how Hunch works: it collects huge amounts of data about you and then helps you make decisions based on what other people who are like you found to be best. Though it covers everything from “What should I be for Halloween?” to “Am I really in love?” Jon said that right now it works best for something like helping you choose a good camera for your needs or the right restaurant to go to. In that sense, it’s just like Yelp or Amazon reviews, except that instead of combing through a lot of people’s comments, an algorithm aggregates and personalizes all the data for you and you just have to trust its decisions. But it’s still user-generated data that’s collected through a pretty simplistic multiple-choice test format. We also talked a little about the Semantic Web: Russell isn’t a fan, because he doesn’t think computers are capable of creating meaningful connections between information all by themselves and he thinks the Semantic Web devotees are somewhat out of touch with the people who use the web and what they want.

John Hebeler, who was a surprisingly enthusiastic and articulate speaker for a technology guy (I’m planning to interview him), talked about why the Semantic Web is absolutely essential for all of us. His point was that we can’t organize all our information by ourselves, and we need a flexible knowledge structure underlying all of that information that can meaningfully represent what it’s about and how it’s related to everything else. While he doesn’t believe that some “killer app” is going to suddenly make the Semantic Web popular (a lot of people I’ve talked to do) he thinks that companies will inevitably begin to use it to organize their information. He called  Semantic Web technology the “secret sauce” of a lot of big companies, because they’re developing it quietly now in hopes that it will help them pull ahead of all their competition in the future.

So what do these two Jo(h)ns have to do with each other? John Hebeler put the problem best at the beginning of his talk: “Our ability to create information far exceeds our ability to manage it.” The combination of computers and the web has made it easy for all of us to generate and even publish thousands and thousands of documents all the time (Hebeler made us guess how many files were on his MacBook; it was over a million) but without a system to organize and filter it, it’s basically useless. If we can’t find the piece of information we’re looking for, it might as well not exist. This is the problem that the Semantic Web people are trying to solve by making computers smart enough to understand the information and filter it themselves. But this is also the problem that websites like Hunch/Digg/Google are trying to solve by relying on a more organic, statistical approach: the best information, the best links between information, and the best answers to questions will probably be reinforced because they’ll become so popular, so things will more or less organize themselves. The way humans interact with information will itself become the filter for it.

I’ve been worried that reporting on these two worlds (the Semantic tech one and the media/start-up one) is like comparing apples to oranges. But I think this fundamental problem – how to filter/organize the huge amounts of information we’re creating – is the common link between them. I’m thinking that that’s how I can frame my film: make people recognize how big a problem this is, explain to them the solution offered by the guy who started the web, then introduce them to start-up people with alternative approaches, and then…come to some non-conclusive conclusion.

Do you think that will work? Will it be compelling?

And, visually, what’s the best way to illustrate/scare people about how much information there is out there and how much of it is out of our control? I don’t want to just flash a bunch of statistics, even if I could figure out a cool way to use animation.

• certain kinds of spiderwebs would be okay, but not ones organized around a center
• neural networks (I know someone who works at a lab that I think I could get access to)
• the pattern of streets/roads, either on maps or from a plane
• ant farms?

Any other ideas?

• server farms – Server farms are essentially huge warehouses full of computers networked together. They’re where all of your online information is stored (like this blog or your Gmail). I’ve read about them but can’t find any good videos of them online, so I think this would be a really great visual to have.
• illustrating metaphors – I plan to illustrate people’s descriptive metaphors/figures of speech with shots of whatever they’re talking about. If they describe a computer monitor as a “window into the web,” I insert a short shot of a window. This could be funny, if I’m clever enough about it, but mostly it will just break up the interview shots. Last night, Kirsten expanded upon this idea by suggesting that I go with the theme of “web” or “network” or “system” and try to film things that represent the central concepts I’m talking about, but have nothing to do with computers. She mentioned bee hives or getting on top of a tall building in the city and filming the street, I was also thinking of shooting the ground at night from a plane (I’ll have a few opportunities for this). Neural networks are also a very relevant image.
• wi-fi/Internet signs – I’ve already started walking around the city taking shots of cafe signs advertising wi-fi. If I can collect hundreds of these over the course of the year, I think it would look pretty cool to show them in quick succession as a transition or something, and it would also emphasize the penetration of the Internet into all of our lives. I’ve also taken some shots of people using the Internet (on their laptops or mobile devices) and might try put these shots together in the same way.
• when filming interviews – here’s what I’m planning on including when filming an interview: wide-angle establishing shots of the people’s offices, detail shots (especially of their gadgets – and I’d like to emphasize whether they use a PC or a Mac), and a shot from above of each person typing on their keyboard or using their mouse (I like hands and figure that this is usually what my interviewees are doing with them all day).
• computer screens – this is something I’d really like feedback on. A lot of people have told me that it’s boring to film computer screens (why use a two-dimensional medium to represent something else that’s two-dimensional?) but on the other hand, think about how frequently you’re looking over a friend’s shoulder to watch what s/he is doing on the computer. I think it could be interesting to follow someone’s activity on the web, if this is where they spend all their time, and even their interaction with the computer is very character-illuminating. Of course, I’d keep shots like this to a minimum, but I don’t think they’d be bad to include. One other idea I had was to film myself working on this documentary every now and then stitch these shots together (of scripting, blogging, editing on FinalCut, etc) to make a self-referential outro. But I’m not sure about that idea.

As I get more interviews, hopefully more visuals will follow naturally.

Here it is, as I turned it in the other day:

Logline: I intend to explore the visions of the technologists who are building the future World Wide Web, as well as its current impact on our social behavior, through the debate over the Semantic Web.

All of us use the World Wide Web today, but few of us think about what it is or how it came to be. What’s important to remember is that the web didn’t happen spontaneously. It was essentially the creation of just one man, Tim Berners-Lee, who dreamed of “unveiling entirely new ways to see our world” by establishing a global, non-centralized web of information made up of a potentially infinite number of links and connections. “In an extreme view,” he wrote in his book Weaving the Web, “the world can be seen as only connections, nothing else.” It was this vision that caused the birth of the web. Likewise, the technologists today who are reinventing the web of the future are rarely inspired by profit alone – many of them maintain staunch ideological systems and worldviews that become explicit in the websites, services and applications they build. “People are good and trustworthy and generally just concerned with getting through the day,” Craig Newmark said in an interview with WIRED, expressing an attitude that explains the lack of controls and infrastructure his enormously successful website craigslist.org.

The way I will explore this idea is through the debate over the future model of the web. While Tim Berners-Lee and many others see the future of the web as the “Semantic Web” (a “web of data” that’s made for computers – not just humans – to interpret and understand), others dismiss the idea as poorly-conceived or less relevant than other ways of filtering information on the web, such as crowdsourcing. In their opinions on the Semantic Web and more generally on the future of the web, I think these technologists and entrepreneurs will say a lot about their personal worldviews and the way those worldviews relate to their technology.

My documentary will follow the basic structure of first introducing the Semantic Web from the point of view of those who believe in it and then complicating the idea by bringing criticism, doubts, and alternative visions. I’ll include some background on the birth of the web and evidence of how much it has changed our social behavior, so that people recognize the relevancy of this topic. I’ll try to cover a good range of interview subjects, though in my search I’m primarily looking for the people who are the best characters or who can explain their philosophies the most passionately. However, the protagonist of my documentary is not any one person; it is the web itself. Through the film, I hope the audience will come to know the nature of the web: its anatomy, idiosyncrasies, strengths, weaknesses, and, by the end, its potentials for the future.